FIFTEEN #2
Aly nodded. “They’re not like normal scars.
They’re grey and—and cold.” She snapped her mouth shut, expecting Calum to ask how she knew so much about them, but he was staring at her with a look of horror on his face, the colour draining from his cheeks.
Her throat constricted, the image of him seeing her scars and making that face flashing into her mind unbidden.
“It’s dangerous, and sometimes people die in the process.
When that happens, most crime lords just have their bodies weighed down and thrown in the canal. ”
“What about the others?” Calum asked. “The other missing people, I mean.”
“Nothing so far.” Like as not, they were dead, but if she told Calum she suspected a new salching market, she might have to explain how she knew so much about how such markets operated.
“I’ll keep asking around, but I’ve never heard of them, and no one’s admitted knowing them to me.
” There were plenty of good reasons for that, of course, starting with the part where no one liked Grant, and by extension no one liked or trusted his deputy.
She flicked a glance at Calum. If he learnt she was the Wulver’s deputy, the Wolf pup spoken of in hushed whispers in the underworld, he wouldn’t trust her, either.
The thought made her feel strangely hollow.
Their relationship was purely transactional, she knew that, but the prospect of dropping in his esteem made her stomach feel cold with dread.
“Do you have anything else?” Calum asked.
Aly shook her head. “No, that’s it.”
“Okay,” Calum said. “I’ll let you know if the tracking spell leads me anywhere.” He turned and left her, his kilt swaying with his gait as he walked away.
The watch in Calum’s hand was well-made, but ordinary enough.
If Aly was right, and Flora had held onto it out of sentiment, it was a strong anchor for a tracking spell.
Calum folded his fingers over the watch, closing his eyes as he sent a thread of power into the timepiece, probing for the spark that connected it to Flora.
Nothing.
Perhaps he was out of practice. Tracking spells were awkward, using an object as a proxy for the person being tracked rather than acting directly upon something the caster could see or touch.
And they weren’t done in Mossburgh. Working magic on proxies wasn’t forbidden, but it wasn’t taught, and it wasn’t done, not since The Calamity.
He was sure there were folk trained outside Eskalan who could do proxy magic, but it was so taboo they’d be unlikely to work for a stranger, if he or Aly even managed to find them in the first place.
If he didn’t manage it, he had no one he could ask for help.
But he’d tracked a missing child from nothing but a scrap of fabric before, so he could do this. He knew he could.
He covered the watch with his other hand, feeling the grooves and ridges of the case digging into his palm.
He called to mind everything he could think of about Flora: the grey stone boarding house where she lived, her friendship with Margaret, his reasonable knowledge of sewing and his scant understanding of tailoring.
His stomach twisted as he recalled the last detail: Aly’s insistence that Flora was a salch.
He fed his own memories of despair into the spell. He’d never been in a position to salch, but he knew the anguish of not knowing where the next meal was coming from, of knowing that living another day was contingent on undergoing pain and suffering to get there.
Salchs were held in widespread contempt, but Calum had always felt more sympathy for them, knowing that although they were in the mortal world, their own security was as precarious as Calum’s had been in Faerie.
And it wasn’t a coincidence that the wealthy who took advantage of their desperation were overlooked, but the scars carried the risk of discovery forever.
He pulled the scars themselves into the spell, weaving them in alongside the sentiment of the silver watch itself.
The hair rose on the back of Calum’s neck as he recalled the way Aly had described the scars. Grey and cold.
Iron scars.
The ticking of the watch echoed in his ears, louder than the beat of a drum.
He knew those scars, knew them from the way Aly had described them.
Caoimhe had one, a gash on her shoulder blade that ached in humid weather, the skin around it wrinkled and mottled like a bloated corpse risen from a loch.
He set the watch down with a heavy thud, running a hand through his hair as his breath shuddered in and out.
Of course salchs were fae. Not fully fae—no one with the power and knowledge of Faerie would be reduced to selling their own life force to survive—but with fae ancestry, the sort of people who had no idea their great-great-great-grandmother was a hag or their grandfather’s grandfather was a gean-canach.
The more he thought about it, the more it clicked into place in his mind.
Only demi-fae could be salchs. Fae magic was wilder and more innate than mortal magic; any human could learn to, for instance, heat iron for smithing, but only a bean sìth had the shriek that foretold death.
And while the mortal world obeyed certain basic laws, like the consistent passage of time, time moved differently in different parts of Faerie, and the fae all simply accepted that time in Gleannbhròn moved more quickly than in the capital.
Only fae magic could affect another person’s mind, as with a glamour; there was no human way to change one’s appearance with magic.
And, most importantly, human magic came from within, while the fae drew power from outside the body, often from their land.
That meant only demi-fae both had the human reserve of power within themselves that was necessary for salching, and also the fae ability to transfer that power—in this case, to someone else.
Calum reached for the watch on the table, then hesitated, his long fingers outstretched.
Part of him had known, since Aly first described the scars, that Flora was fae, and maybe that was why the spell hadn’t worked—because deep down, he didn’t want to find a fae, not even a demi-fae who likely had no idea as to her heritage.
He’d spent a decade hiding from them; the last thing he wanted to do was attract their attention.
He picked up his keys and crossed to the front door, thumping down the forestair and unlocking the door to the storage room below.
With a whisper of will, he lit the tallow candles in their sconces on the walls.
His boots were loud on the flagstone floor as he crossed to a small wooden chest on a shelf at the back of the room.
Inside was a silver necklace with a labradorite pendant, the stone infused with all the colours of the sea.
He’d burned the clothes he’d been wearing when he escaped Caoimhe.
He’d kept the weapons, and over time they’d become his, no longer Caoimhe’s.
The necklace, though, was still fundamentally hers, a bauble with which she’d adorned her human pet for the benefit of the other fae.
He’d never been able to bring himself to sell it, or chuck it off the side of a ferry, for that reason—because it belonged to a fae, and one didn’t discard a fae’s belongings lightly.
Now he curled his fingers around the cool stone and thought of Caoimhe: of her casual cruelty and her hidden kindness, of the sharp planes of her face and her eyes like chips of ice, of the fondness in her voice when she called him my mortal boy and the snap like a whip when he was simply boy.
He felt a tug behind his navel, jerking sharply to his left. To the north, where there was a crossing in the forest that led into Gleannbhròn.
He put the necklace back in the chest and returned upstairs, picking up the watch and trying the tracking spell again. If he could track Caoimhe, a dimension away, he could track Flora, who was likely still in the city.
But there was nothing.