Chapter 3
Three
The procession of soldiers jerks to a halt. They pivot to face their audience.
The guards on either side of the sorcerer yank him around, clamping him in place as his feet tangle beneath him.
As long as they’re alive, nothing’s been discovered that can remove or shut away the magic of the riven. The authorities drug the sorcerers into a stupor from the moment they catch them so they don’t have the wits to focus their power.
With an unclouded mind, the man in the sack and chains could murder every living being in this courtyard in a matter of seconds. Men and women like him have murdered thousands in the past in their attempts to evade capture… or simply because it served their mad purposes.
Sorcerers like us didn’t ask for our magic. We’re not limited to a single gift. The power flows through our broken souls if we answer the call, more than any mortal could know what to do with.
More than any mortal can indulge in and keep their right mind.
All magic requires sacrifice, after all. For every act that prisoner carried out with his, his power took its payment.
If you want health, someone else must fall ill. If you want to prosper, others will go without.
And you don’t get to choose who suffers the penalty.
There’s nothing I want enough to ignore the consequences of giving my magic free rein. I’ve already lost enough to it.
As long as I resist, I can hope that I never get to the point where I don’t even care who I hurt, as this man must have.
The soldiers drag the sorcerer onto the platform. They position him just in front of the dangling noose, his bare feet on the trap door. His head droops within the sack.
It’s a little mad that the king and his royal clerics parade the riven in front of a vulnerable crowd. I’d imagine they make very certain their prisoner is totally addled before marching them out.
They feel the risk of people fearing that the feral sorcerers are rampaging unchecked is worse. And no doubt they enjoy showing off their power, that they brought this monster under control.
Every riven sorcerer captured throughout Silana is brought to the capital for their public execution, under the eyes of the royal family.
A brighter glow expands across the balcony at the top of the temple’s central wall, high above its arched doorway. All the voices in the courtyard fall totally silent.
In the yellowish conjured light, I make out the majestic figures of King Konram and Queen Ishild, flanked by their two living children, Princess Klaudia and Prince Jacos, and two of the highest-ranking clerics.
The royal family is all dressed in the deep purple associated with Creaden, the godlen of leadership and justice who blesses the royal line.
Both of the teenaged royals stand with elegance equal to their parents, their dark brown hair that matches their father’s gathered beneath their more modest crowns.
Years younger than me, and they’ve already accepted their duty in presiding over these killings.
The eerie lighting brings out the king’s sharp features—his prominent nose and jutting chin. His commanding baritone courses over us.
“My people. You have come to witness the end of one of the riven. I have nothing but sorrow in my heart for the harm he carried out, but immense gratitude that we can subdue the danger before any more lives are lost and livelihoods destroyed.”
A cheer rises up from the swarm of spectators. My voice stays locked in my throat.
King Konram waits until the clamor has fallen away to continue speaking.
“It has been nearly two years since we last put down such a villain. I believe this indicates that their numbers are dwindling—fewer souls born riven, fewer remaining among us. I have hope that I will see the day when we no longer need to fear their presence at all.”
The audience outright roars their approval.
I adjust my hands against the gritty stone walls, but the ache that’s spreading through the muscles in my shoulders isn’t quite as uncomfortable as the one expanding in my chest.
One of the clerics steps forward, the light illuminating her multi-colored robe. She rests her hands on the wall at the edge of the balcony.
Her voice rings out clear as crystal. “Five centuries ago, our realms turned on our All-Giver and the Great God’s godlen.
The riven souls among us are part of the penance we pay.
With each abomination we cut down, we prove our devotion to the One who made us.
May the All-Giver see and return to smile on us once again. ”
A more muted cheer lifts to meet that plea. No one, noble or lowborn, likes to think about the disgrace that left our realms abandoned by the omnipotent divinity who once guided us.
The cleric draws back beside her companions. The king makes a small motion, and one of the soldiers next to the prisoner pulls the sack from the sorcerer’s head.
The face he exposes looks sallow and doughy with the effects of the stupefying drug. Straggly black hair droops across the man’s forehead and cheeks.
If “man” is even quite the right word. From this distance in the hazy light, it’s difficult to judge his age, but I’m not sure the hunched figure at the noose is even out of his teens. He could be as young as Princess Klaudia.
As the soldiers fit the loop of rope around the sorcerer’s neck and tighten it, my throat constricts as if a noose of my own presses against it. My stomach churns.
But I don’t let myself look away.
This is my most likely future. This man—or boy—has a soul just like mine.
I’ve escaped punishment for my crimes while he stands up there. The least I can do is bear witness.
The soldiers retreat. The sorcerer’s shoulders sag as if he can barely hold himself up.
Up on the balcony, the royal family and the clerics tap their foreheads and torsos in the three-fingered gesture of the divinities.
Then someone yanks the lever.
The trap door pops open, and the prisoner plummets. His body jerks as the noose catches his fall.
Even drugged into oblivion, a hanged person’s limbs still shudder and spasm. The sorcerer’s feet kick involuntarily before going slack.
He sways on the end of the rope, more like a broken doll than a human being now.
Did the first impact snap his neck? Or is his brain still fizzing beneath the drugs as the rope cuts off his breath?
This is the tenth execution of a riven I’ve watched, and I can never tell.
After a minute, the crowd begins to stir. One soldier checks the body and nods to confirm that the sorcerer is dead. The others ease back to allow curious citizens to approach the platform.
Some of the spectators clamber right onto the boards to prod the corpse, as if they need to feel with their own hands that the monster is vanquished. I see one woman spit on the slumped, purpled head.
Bile burns in the back of my mouth. I’ve witnessed enough.
I hop down from my perch and slip away through the throng. Keeping my hood drawn low over my hair, I pad through the thickest shadows away from the city core.
A thick, mossy stone wall marks the border between the neighborhoods of the have-much and the have-less in the most concrete way possible. The crumbling structure was once the outer wall of the city, when Florian was just establishing itself as an urban center.
Once enough peasants had gathered and constructed homes in the lands beyond the original wall, the royal family of times past saw fit to erect a new, taller wall to fully encompass the city’s growth.
No one’s maintained the old wall in centuries other than to ensure no blocks fall right off onto the head of a passing noble.
The many gates through the original wall have had their doors removed, and citizens traveling through are no longer officially monitored. But one or two of the Crown’s Watch are almost always hanging around near them, happy to badger anyone they deem suspicious-looking.
To avoid any potential hassle, I prefer to simply go over the top. In plenty of places, a well-situated shed or shrubbery makes for an easy scramble across the stones.
A few streets beyond the wall, I reach the building that contains a cloth-making business and my home, as much as I can call the place where I sleep that.
The three floors where workers weave, dye, and store reams of linen and wool lie silent for the night. I clamber up the rusting ladder at the back, meant as an escape route in case of fire, and spring from there to the lip at the top of the third story.
A brief scoot to the side, and I’m at the shuttered attic window that’s just large enough for me to squeeze my scrawny frame through.
The sprawling attic is cluttered, but I know it well enough to navigate the stacks of boxes and abandoned furniture by only the faint streaks of moonlight that seep around the shutters.
I’ve helped myself to enough of the factory’s discards to create a mattress of heaped wool that’s decently comfortable, with a linen sheet and a patchy wool blanket.
A few emptied boxes turned on their side serve as a series of shelves. I wriggle out of my tunic, trading it and my breeches for a nightshirt, and fold them to set next to my meager assortment of clothes.
I consider the remaining dumplings, but my stomach balks, so I set them onto a different shelf next to my stash of nuts and dried berries. They’ll make a perfectly good breakfast.
My gaze slides through the dimness across the hills of boxes still full of their original contents. The books I’ve retrieved from those boxes stand in uneven stacks on the floor in between.
Sometime before the cloth-makers took over the building, it must have housed a scholarly business. A business that didn’t bother taking much with it when the owners left.
Either they or the new residents simply shoved loads of books and barely bound papers up here to forget about. In my explorations over the years, I’ve found everything from historical records to philosophic texts to fanciful invented tales.
Stumbling on this bounty is one of the few bits of good luck I can point to in my life. The books keep me company about as well as the people I watch over do.
And every bit of information I can stuff into my head, every additional understanding I can absorb, puts me one more step ahead of ever needing to use my magic. Of making others pay for my power. Of going mad with it like the riven always do.
Of ending up on a wooden platform with a noose around my neck.
The image of the execution fills my mind, and my body tenses.
On a normal night, I might light a small candle in a sheltered spot where the glow won’t carry to the window and read a few more chapters of my latest tome, but I’m not in the mood to feed my imagination any more than my stomach right now.
Today I’ve seen two deaths more than I ever want to in a day. As different as the circumstances were, both memories gnaw at my gut.
I stretch my arms, set my favorite knife by the corner of the makeshift mattress, and wriggle under the covers of my bed. I’m not sure how easily I’ll get to sleep, but I should at least try.
I’ve got to be out of here before the workers show up in the morning.
The day’s events swim through my mind, as jumbled as the attic around me. Fresh threads of uneasiness wind through my nerves despite my best efforts to relax.
I’m about to push upright and see if a little reading will dull the lingering tension after all when a feminine voice speaks, as loud and clear as if it’s coming from right beside my ear.
“This is where you live?”