Chapter 2
A Serpentine Sprawl
A t first glance, the antiques shop blends perfectly into the ashen street on the wrong side of the river.
The display cases haven’t been changed in a decade, dressed in moth-eaten purple velvet, the windows themselves clouded with age.
The lettering above the shop door is faded, but still faintly visible if I squint.
A.A. Benedict and Sons
Of course it means nothing. It’s just a front for what the Collector really trades in.
I lower my eyes to the door, turning the brass doorknob to step into the shop beyond.
After closing the door quietly, I walk across the polished floorboards and breathe in the scent of the antiques.
Dust, wine and the faintest hint of cloves.
Not a single item has shifted in all the years I’ve lived at this shop.
Any bewildered potential customers who wander in are swiftly sent on their way with the promise of an appointment that never materialises.
A creak sounds from behind the counter and I glance up, finding Dolly standing watching me.
She’s worn the same outfit for as long as I can remember: an emerald green gown and draped over her shoulders a silk dressing robe with a peacock emblazoned on the back.
Her eyes are outlined in kohl, her skin leathery from a frittered youth spent on expeditions in the sunny south of Theine, our neighbouring territory, with little care for creams or parasols.
‘Took your time,’ she says, crossing her arms. ‘Run into trouble?’
‘I know the rules, Dol.’ I wink at her, sliding around the side of the counter to embrace her old, bony frame.
For a beat, I remember that this might be the last time I see her in a while, and my heart constricts.
But I can’t show it. I swallow, moving away from her, forcing down the sudden stab of emotion. ‘He in a good mood?’
‘Is he ever.’ She snorts, rifling through the counter drawers.
After a moment she plucks out a box of matches and an old-fashioned cigarette holder.
If anyone raised me in this place, it was her.
She made sure I had clean clothes, a steady diet of books to read and knew how to use an illusion to cheat at cards.
It was my uncle who taught me the rest. How to be silent, to never show fear.
How to steal from someone without them ever suspecting what they’ve lost. How to think on my feet, faster than the nick of a blade and how to sift through the ordinary and find the details that would allow me to blend.
He taught me how to defend myself, how to handle a weapon.
Mostly, he taught me how to be his hunter.
‘You should quit,’ I call over my shoulder as she takes a long drag on the cherry-scented cigarette. ‘Those things will kill you.’
She cackles, taking another long drag. ‘Darling, in this place, I’m already dead.’
I move further down the corridor, away from the dusty antiques and Dolly with her twenty-a-day habit.
The back of the shop is a labyrinth, old storerooms and offices, cluttered and coated in cobwebs.
Most of them are locked, left to stew in a fitful slumber.
It’s only my uncle’s office that is well used, and it sits right at the back of the ground floor, opposite the vault.
Sealed with a thick metal door, the vault holds no light, no window and no furniture.
Only a cold stone floor, whitewashed walls and my collected memories of childhood terror.
The room I was shut in, powerless and alone every time I failed my uncle, the Collector.
That feeling, of not knowing when I would be released, of being trapped, alone, with no control, still haunts me.
Knocking three times on his office door, I wait for the Collector’s summons.
When I hear his creaking voice, I enter, schooling my features to not show how much I despise him.
It’s not the biggest room in his antiques shop, nor is it the most comfortable.
There are no windows, so it’s always dim, lit by a desk lamp illuminating the harsh planes of his features and two wall sconces throwing out pools of light and shadow.
The only furniture is my uncle’s desk, his chair behind it and two cracked leather armchairs facing him.
But what draws the eye is the map.
Spread across the entire wall to my left is a bird’s-eye view of the serpentine sprawl of our city, Dinas Tar. It glows gold, the outline of the river, of the buildings and streets all drawn in stark ebony lines. And in each of the streets and buildings are small marks that move .
Marks like the one I was assigned to collect today.
People the Collector follows, gleaning details about their lives that he uses to blackmail or sell for a price.
And in the outline of my uncle’s antique shop, hovering near the back of the building, is a tiny black mark that appeared on his map sixteen years ago, when he extracted the blood from the pale blue vein in my inner elbow.
That tiny black mark is me . Everywhere I go in this city, the mark follows, making him aware of every movement I make.
When I was four, I signed a contract with the Collector. I stepped over the cold floorboards in stockinged feet to his office and he took out the smallest needle with a vial connected to it. ‘Sharp scratch.’
I winced as he extracted the blood from my vein.
Then he poured it in a tiny inkpot, drew a pen from a drawer in his desk and slid a piece of paper across to me.
It was filled with words I didn’t understand, long words in flourishes, that seemed to shimmer and dance.
‘Sign this contract and you will work for me, Sophia, and in turn, I will always protect you.’
I did as I was bid, only thinking of forming my letters correctly, spelling out my name: Sophia .
And when I was finished, the shimmering words and the blood and the paper all wove together in a mesmerising whirl of glitter, disappearing for a moment.
Then suddenly, they reappeared around my wrist as something else entirely.
I gasped with delight, running my fingertips over the silver river of a bracelet around my left wrist, the magpie in me thrilled at the way it caught the scant light in my uncle’s office, how it fit my delicate bones so perfectly. How this pretty thing was all mine.
Then he told me he could follow me anywhere now, that I was safe.
He was family, my mother’s brother, the closest thing to roots I had.
That night is my earliest memory; nothing exists before the cold under my stockinged feet, the sharp scratch of that needle, the warm delight as the bracelet shimmered on my wrist.
Sixteen years ago, and that bracelet has tied me to the Collector ever since. When I came to understand what I had signed as a child, the contract I had agreed to with my uncle that night, I tried to find a way to break it.
But it was already far too late.
‘Sophia, my dear,’ my uncle says, bringing me back to the present as he leans back in his chair. ‘Come, come. Take a seat. You have it?’
I slide into the armchair across from him, the leather crackling and reshaping around my thighs as I eye the man who raised me as his own.
His reading spectacles perch on his nose, almost obscuring his eyes, which I know to be green, just like mine.
Not the hazel some claim to be green, but a true, jewel colour.
Apparently, I got them from my mother, although I cannot remember her, or my father. ‘I have it, Uncle.’
I slip my fingers into my pocket, drawing out the small vial of blood, smaller than my thumb that I extracted from a mark before stopping in at the Pickled Gargoyle, and place it with a quiet clink on his desk.
He angles it to the light from his desk lamp, scrutinising it carefully before placing it back on the smooth wood. ‘Any trouble?’
‘None. I know what I’m doing,’ I say stiffly. ‘If that’s all …’
‘Wait.’
My blood stills as he closes his fist around the vial of blood, the only light in the room seeming to dance around it for a moment.
Then he exhales, placing the vial back on the desk, now empty of blood.
I know if I turn around, scrutinise the map, I’ll find the mark I followed earlier today on it.
Another person the Collector is interested in, or wants something from.
He rubs at his temples, looking to the map, his gaze lost in the frenzied motion of all the marks collected over the years. Some by me, some by others he employs. ‘I’m sending Dolly on an assignment. She leaves in a few minutes.’
My gaze snaps to his. ‘You haven’t sent Dolly on assignment in years. She can’t, she’s not—’
‘But you’ve already brought me a mark today, Sophia,’ he says with deceptive softness. ‘Surely, you’re tired. Surely you need another drink in one of those bars you’ve grown so fond of lately … perhaps the Pickled Gargoyle?’
He blinks once, features unreadable, but I hear the threat laced beneath his words.
He knows where I went today, after I collected his mark.
He was watching me on his map. Cold dread trickles through me, pooling in my middle.
What if he knows why? What if … what if he knows why I’ve been visiting the kind of bars that scholars frequent, why I’ve been attending public lectures on magic at the Serpentine library?
All I know is what he taught me. He’s a ruthless observer, a strategist, and if I sense a threat, he means me to.
That cold dread hardens, turning to ice …
What if he somehow knows I’m about to leave, that I’ve found a way out?
‘Dolly is eighty years old,’ I say carefully, keeping my tone even as my hands slip together in my lap. ‘You can’t send her on an assignment. Send someone else, one of the others.’
He shrugs in that callous way of his, waving me away. ‘No one else available. And as you seem in such a rush to leave—’