Chapter 2
No wonder he had so many internal pockets. It made sense that mages would want to keep their compositions on their person, and they would need some way to organize them and quickly access the right ones.
Zackary sucked in a pained breath as he retrieved one of the compositions in his two least injured fingers.
He shook it out enough to get a glimpse of the words written on the parchment.
I quickly averted my face, making it obvious I wasn’t trying to spy on the writing.
He didn’t seem to notice either way, though.
“Yes, this one to start with,” he muttered, only to pause and look at me. “Which one of us is worse off?” I opened my mouth to say it was definitely him, but he had already continued speaking. “Never mind that. You saved me.”
Lifting the coiled rectangle of parchment to his mouth, he gripped it between his teeth and pulled, ripping it in half. He let the halves drift to the ground, flicking his few working fingers in my direction.
The pain lifted instantly, shock waves of relief rolling through me. The dizziness ebbed along with it, so I peered at my arm. Surely he hadn’t healed me?
The jagged wood still remained in place, untouched. But now that the pain was gone, I could absorb that it was bleeding only sluggishly, the wood plugging the hole it had created. It was the pain, not blood loss, that had pushed me near collapse.
I looked up in time to see Zakary tear a second roll of parchment, this time flicking his fingers at himself. The lines on his face instantly eased and his shoulders relaxed.
“That is a great deal better.” He grinned at me, and despite everything, I grinned back. Sudden relief from intense pain was a heady feeling.
“You’re a mage,” I said somewhat foolishly, and he nodded.
“I am.” He crouched back down to scoop up the remaining rolls of parchment, his movements still clumsy and awkward. “So there’s no need to report me to the Grays for illicit reading.”
He shot me a smile, but I didn’t smile back.
As a mageborn, he had been born with the bloodline to control power, so he had never been at risk from the gray-robed mages of the seekers.
The discipline that hunted down anyone learning to read illegally was only a threat to unsealed commonborn—the ones who might accidentally blow ourselves up if we ever tried to write, taking a whole chunk of the city with us.
Zakary had never been forbidden access to the written word as I had always been.
My eyes lingered hungrily on the parchment in his hands. I had worked hard for five years to win the right to access words, and yet that dream was still as far away as ever.
He looked painstakingly through the parchments that remained whole, finally choosing one and lifting it to his teeth to tear it. As I watched, fascinated, his limp arm straightened, and he flexed the fingers of the opposite hand, his grip on the remaining parchments shifting and strengthening.
“You healed yourself?” I gasped at him as he swung both arms, testing them.
He nodded, but his expression was apologetic.
“I’m sorry I can’t do the same for you. My injuries were more immediately debilitating, but they were just clean breaks.
Whereas your situation is more complicated.
” He grimaced. “I’d have to start by pulling that wood out for one, and that might cause a lot of bleeding.
If I messed up the healing…” He sighed. “I should have taken more healing classes.”
I shook my head. I had no doubt the compositions he’d already used were incredibly valuable. He must have written them himself, perhaps in his days at the Royal Academy.
I eyed him again. He wasn’t wearing a white trainee’s robe, which meant he had to be older than I’d first imagined. Now that my mind wasn’t clouded by pain, I had so many questions. What was he doing in this part of the city?
The answer to that question was obvious, though.
He had to be a weak mage from one of the minor families.
The type who was just strong enough to pass the Academy and avoid having his power sealed, but who wasn’t strong enough to be accepted to a mage discipline.
Mages like that sometimes chose to make a living by either tutoring commonborn—reading aloud the words we couldn’t read ourselves—or selling compositions to those commonborn rich enough to buy them.
The compositions I’d retrieved for him hadn’t been secured shut and color-coded, though, so presumably he sold to sealed commonborn only.
The loss of three healing compositions represented a significant loss of income. How difficult had they been for him to make? He’d probably prostrated himself for a day or more to compose the one for breaks.
And he’d used the first of his compositions on me. I smiled at him, softened. But a fresh thought jolted through me, making me stiffen. I’d nearly forgotten it was my birthday.
“You’ve taken the pain away, which is the main thing,” I said hurriedly. “Now I have the strength to get home.”
“Home?” He stepped toward me, looking alarmed. “You have a piece of wood sticking out of your arm! You can’t just go home.”
I laughed. “If I don’t go home my mother will kill me, and then any healing compositions used on me will have been wasted.”
“Your own mother isn’t going to kill you for getting a necessary healing.” He regarded me suspiciously, as if he suspected some ulterior motive.
“You haven’t met my mother.” I grinned and shook my head.
“She’s probably already furious that I’m late, and she’d be even more furious if I went to a healing clinic without consulting her first. She used to be a healing assistant before she joined my father’s business, and she’s always taken care of our illnesses and injuries.
Plus, it’s my birthday today.” A small swell of the earlier missing pride hit me unexpectedly.
“I’m eighteen today, and she’s planned a special meal. ”
“It’s your birthday!” Zakary sounded more shocked than the occasion warranted. “And you were on your way to your own party?” He shook his head. “But you stopped to help me anyway. My gratitude has doubled. Thank you. And happy birthday.”
Maybe I was still a little out of my mind from the pain relief because I leaned forward and said conversationally, “I thought you might be the Shrouded Mage.”
“The Shrouded Ma…” Zakary blinked. “Oh! You mean the Shrouded Killer.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes, but only barely. So the mages had a different name for him. The Reds had used their law enforcement compositions to prove the killer was a mage, but of course the mageborn wouldn’t want to acknowledge that fact every time they referred to the criminal.
Zakary blinked at me several more times as he absorbed my meaning. “You thought I was an infamous killer who stalks the lower city for his victims, and you therefore ran toward me.”
“I was going to run away,” I said, “but then I heard the sounds of a struggle. I was running toward the victim, not the killer.”
“A meaningless distinction if they were locked in a struggle at the time,” he said dryly, but he looked impressed.
My insides warmed, my chest tightening in response to the warmth of admiration in his eyes.
“Thankfully for both of us, they were just ordinary thieves,” I said, aware that the Shrouded Mage wouldn’t have been run off so easily.
Zakary grimaced. “I might have had a better chance against one mage than three commonborn, actually. I didn’t think I would be so easily overcome, but I’m not used to fighting so many at once.
They kept me too busy to retrieve a composition in the first few seconds, and then…
” He gestured toward the arm that had been broken.
I shook my head, unconvinced. “If the Shrouded Mage was an easy target, law enforcement wouldn’t still be hunting him after all this time.
” I sighed, hating the thought of the menace who was casting a shadow over the lower city.
“If you ask me, you were extremely fortunate.” I cast an eye over him, trying to picture him without the dirt and blood.
“You’re a good fit for the kind of victims he targets. ”
Zakary’s eyes lit up. “You think so?”
I stared at him. Did he have a death wish? He’d been too quick to heal himself for that to make any sense.
I wanted to linger and question him further. I’d never had a conversation this long with a mage before. But I could feel a clock ticking in my head. My guests would have already arrived. I took a step backward toward the mouth of the alley.
“Those three definitely weren’t the Shrouded Killer,” Zakary continued. “The law enforcement mages have already established that he works alone. These ones were just copycats.”
Once again his speech patterns marked him as a mage.
Among the commonborn, we just called law enforcement the Reds, not bothering with their official title.
His words kept broadcasting that he was out of his element, so it was no wonder he’d gotten into trouble—wandering the streets of the lower city without a single clue.
But his conclusion interested me. “What do you mean by copycats?” I could afford to linger for another minute or two.
Zakary’s mouth twisted. “They wouldn’t be the first, unfortunately.
Once the actions of a repeat criminal become known, some people see a terrible sort of opportunity.
They think that if they make their crime match the shrouded killings closely enough, then law enforcement will assume it was the Shrouded Killer and not come after them. ”
My mouth fell open, anger filling me. “But that’s awful!”
He gave a wry smile. “Yes. But I’m guessing people who are willing to kill don’t have a lot of scruples.”
I screwed up my nose, but I couldn’t deny his logic. “It’s a good thing I came along when I did.”
I edged another step backward.
“You’ll at least let me walk you to your home?” He looked perturbed. “What if my pain composition doesn’t last long enough, and you end up collapsing partway there? You were injured saving me, and I can’t just walk away without being sure you’re going to be all right.”
I couldn’t help another flood of warmth at his genuine concern, but I couldn’t arrive home not only injured, but with a mage in tow. My family were going to be shocked enough, but they would be furious if they grasped the full extent of my reckless actions.
“That’s all right,” I said hurriedly. “It isn’t far.”
I took yet another step toward the freedom of the street.
“Wait!” Zakary leaped forward and grasped at my sleeve. “I can’t just let you walk off with a piece of wood sticking out of your arm!”
I pulled away instinctively, and my already damaged shirt tore further, sending a small item tumbling to the ground. I gasped and lunged for it, but my injured arm hampered my movements, and Zakary got there first.
The apologies on his lips died as he took in what he held in his hands. He looked up at me slowly, and I took another step back. But I couldn’t actually flee. Not while he was still holding the folded and sealed parchment.
Leaping forward, Zakary clamped an iron hand around my good forearm, pulling it forward so he could examine my wrist. It was conspicuously clear of the intricate pattern of dark skin pigmentation that would have marked me as sealed.
I wasn’t sealed, and we both knew it. And that made the letter in his hand a serious crime. The sides of the alley caved in on me, extinguishing the last ember of hope I had been clinging to so desperately.