CHAPTER SEVEN
Full Moon Tour
Liv
I don’t know what I was expecting when I approached the massive gates to the Towers this morning. Maybe I thought they’d turn me away, or ask for some identification, or maybe tell me that women weren’t allowed to tour the Towers unaccompanied.
Instead, the bored-looking woman in a mustard-yellow dress just counted my coins, then handed me a ticket. It was drawn on thick, rich parchment, but the edges were tattered, and I got the feeling I was not the first person to hold this ticket.
“Come back at dusk,” she said. “Tour’ll start right here.”
I opened my mouth to ask her what I might expect to see, but she glanced over my shoulder and waved at the family behind me. So I closed my stupid mouth and stepped out of the way.
Still, I stared through the gate until one of the guards asked in a rather nasty way if he could help me with something. I shook my head, then started the slow walk back to the inn.
No one in this whole damn city seems to know anything about the Towers, and the gods know I’ve asked anyone who stands still long enough.
A few regulars told me it’s some kind of prison for magical creatures, and that the one black, ruined tower in the middle was destroyed when an old god broke free of the chains that held it to that tower.
I rolled my eyes at that and refilled their mugs without further comment.
Others told me it’s a school, although opinions are divided on whether it’s a regular school for rich bastards or something different, something dark and magical.
I want to laugh at that too, to snort and spit like most of the customers at the inn whenever someone brings up magic.
Humans don’t have magic, and everyone knows that.
We’re better off, too. Dragons live in the mountains, transforming into human shapes, luring maidens to their death.
And elves wage horrible wars with their magic, at least according to the stories, swallowing entire armies and trapping them beneath the earth.
I never believed those stories, not even as a child. Dragons and elves belonged to a different world, a place where fathers didn’t leave their families and crops didn’t die of blight on the vine right before harvest. There was no room for magic in my world.
I glance down at the ticket in my hands. My fingers are raw and cracked from all the dishes I’ve scrubbed, and my dress already sports some fine new stains. My hands look old and ugly holding this ticket, with my thumb blocking the stylized moon as it hovers over a row of stately, elegant towers.
The ticket trembles in my hands. I shake my head, shove the damn thing into my pocket, wipe my eyes, and keep walking.
I wish I could still laugh at the idea of magic.
But if magic isn’t real, if humans truly can’t access it, then why did they take Pytr?
“I know, it sounds crazy,” Pytr whispered as we lay together in the loft of my mother’s barn, the part that we’d walled off with blankets and made into our home. “But look at this.”
He opened his hand to show me five thick golden coins. I gasped in the dim light of our lantern.
“They said there’s good money to be made learning how to use magic in the Towers of Silver City,” Pytr whispered. “They said I’d come back with more coins than I can carry.”
He still sounded like he didn’t quite believe them, the tall men in their white robes who had sent a runner from the town up the road to ask for Pytr. I blinked, then rubbed my eyes, half afraid the coins would vanish into thin air, like gifts from elves.
Everything that he said felt wrong, wrong in some deep, horrible way, but I couldn’t find the words to explain what I was feeling. It was like cutting open a pepper and finding slimy black mold inside.
But the coins. Pytr passed them to me. They were cold, and hard, and heavy in my hands.
“But,” I whispered. “Magic—”
My voice cracked. It was insane. They might as well tell him they want someone who can turn into a cat, or fly, or sing the deer down from the hills.
“Pytr, what do you think they really want from you?” I finally whispered. “What if they’re slave traders, or—”
His face changed then, in a strange way. He stared at the floor for a long time before turning back to me.
“It’s real,” he whispered. “I can’t explain it. Hells, I don’t understand any of it. But, Liv, I felt it. I felt magic. The silver chain he had— I—”
He paused, ran his hand over his face. When he turned back to me, something inside me broke.
Because I knew he was leaving.
“I made it burn,” he whispered in a ragged voice. “No matches. No spark. I just— I touched it. And it burned.”
That’s when the tears came. I wrapped my arms around him, and my heart broke as the only man I have ever loved held me against his chest. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t care about magic, that magic and chains and tall men in white robes could all go pound sand until the world ends in ash and flame, that the only magic I have ever wanted is the magic I feel when I’m with him.
But I saw that look on his face.
Pytr wanted this. He wanted this in the same way he wanted to be my husband, the same way he wanted to buy the abandoned farm next to my mother’s plot. Or, hells, maybe he wanted this even more. Because how could I compete with actual magic, something straight out of a storybook?
And my heart broke because I loved this idiot too much to keep him from following this damned dream.