Chapter 1 Nes
Nes
You are irreplaceable.
That was what Nes Deivana had been told. It was meant as a compliment. A lure to make her feel special, to make her feel like she had a home in this Goddess-forsaken city.
But she knew better. Nes might not always know what she was, but she did know what she wasn’t. And that was irreplaceable. She intended to prove it. It had taken months, but, at last, she’d done it.
Marnie Sorphel didn’t look like much, but to Nes, the timid, wide-eyed girl meant everything.
Nes strolled through the Valley, the main market in the Ditch, with one hand tight around Marnie’s wrist and the other against the silver flask at her hip. Despite the hour, the oil lamps lining the street lit the way for shoppers, criminals, guards, and wanderers alike.
The Ditch was one of six city sectors in Gadore.
Though it had the same ocean-blue rooftops as other sectors, the Ditch gave the impression of an overflowing mouth.
Ramshackle hovels, beams dark with the wood of the Foxvin Forest and splattered with the blood of forgotten fights, were squeezed between the once white buildings like food stuck between teeth.
Beside her, Marnie gawked at the tables lining the market. But Nes knew it wasn’t the vendors selling crystals on gold chains, thumb-sized bottles of tonics, and ornate pocket watches who caught Marnie’s eye.
Scattered among the tables of typical wares were the vendors selling far more fantastical goods. Things imbued with magic.
To their right, a man showed his customer how a silver thread, finer than a single strand of hair, would not break no matter how hard he yanked on the ends.
On a table to their left, a crate full of snakes—snakes that had been fed a steady diet of diluted magic—hissed and coiled and slithered over one another, flickering in and out of visibility.
And, laid out on a table ahead, a woman sold rows of extra fingers, claiming they would seamlessly attach to a person’s hand in place of any they’d lost.
“What pretty young girls,” the woman called out. “I sell pearls that’ll weave into your ears, too. Make you look like the rich folk up in the Ring.”
Nes gritted her teeth. Just because her face spoke of innocence didn’t mean her heart answered in turn.
She grabbed the edge of Marnie’s hood and yanked it down over the girl’s face. Turning to the vendor, she spat, “Keep your junk and your assumptions to yourself.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed to slits. “No need to be rude, girly.”
Nes tilted her hip so the flask sitting there caught the light enough for the woman to see the snarling dog etched on the metal. “Careful,” she hissed. “Or Phineas might find a reason to remove more than your table from this street.”
Jaw tight with unspoken rage, the woman lowered her head and stepped away. Nes lifted her chin. She’d learned years ago never to walk the Ditch with her head down.
But Marnie—it was best if Marnie kept her head down.
As part of a large family, Marnie was desperate to earn a few extra gadots. And if there was one thing you didn’t show in the Ditch, it was desperation. Pure luck had allowed Nes to find Marnie before some other rapacious soul.
“This way,” Nes said, ushering Marnie far from the conniving vendors. The sooner she got the girl to Phineas, the sooner she could be free of this place.
As always, the smell of death, decay, and fornication lingered like overcooked stew.
But there was something else. A scent that did not belong.
Winter had snuck under Gadore’s door last week, curling up like an unwelcome cat.
Yet it was a spring breeze—the budding of new blooms coupled with the promise of warmth—that drowned out the usual Ditch smells.
Nes dug her feet into the dirt and craned her neck, searching for the source of the pleasant spring scent. But it was Marnie who found it first.
“Oh no.”
The words fell from the girl’s mouth as if she hadn’t meant to let them out. Barely a few feet away, cupped in a limp hand, was the magic.
Pure magic.
Bright green, with hundreds of tiny threads twisting together like moss, it could have only come from one place. The forest beyond the city wall, torn straight off the bark of a tree.
Nes’s heart stumbled at the face of the dead.
The boy was young. No more than fifteen.
In death, only the whites of his eyes were visible.
A waterfall of dried blood ran from the boy’s lips, covering his chin and neck.
The dark of the new moon allowed Nes to just barely make out the soft green glow of pure magic inside the boy’s mouth.
The dead boy’s shirt had been torn open, revealing what looked like claw marks marring the skin over where his heart had beat. The boy had made them himself, a last desperate attempt to get the magic out. But once magic took hold of your heart, there was no hope.
The residents of the Ditch could dabble with the stars, but the magic never let them forget they were playing with fire. For pure magic killed. Every time.
Nes did not shy from the body. She couldn’t stop the evil of the world, but she could stare it down. To her surprise, Marnie did not look away, either. Maybe the girl was stronger than she thought.
“For magic’s end,” Nes whispered. The phrase was both a curse and a prayer. For her, the prayer always won out.
Marnie stepped closer to the corpse, her mouth hollow. In one hand, the boy still held the green threads of the pure magic, and in the other, the pulping, bloody mass that was once his tongue. Marnie bent down, a hand reaching for the magic.
“Don’t touch it.” Nes grabbed Marnie and yanked her upright. “Do you want to die? If the guards find you with that, you’ll be drowned as the Witch for sure.”
There had been three Witch drownings this week alone. An unusually high number, even for a country as paranoid about the Witch as Orlonea. Neither Nes nor Marnie could give the King’s Guard reason to suspect them.
Marnie gnawed on her chapped bottom lip. “But shouldn’t we—”
“No,” Nes said. “Leave him.”
The boy wasn’t magic’s first victim. Nor would he be its last.
Nes pulled open the door to the gambling den, the tambourines on the inside rattling.
On the surface, the Siren’s Hair was like any other gambling den scattered throughout the Ditch.
The green felt atop each table was stained with splotches and dark rings from pissed-away drinks, while the legs on the stools clustered around the tables were scuffed and scraped. The Siren’s Hair had seen better days.
But that was the point. As the only legal business Phineas Wraw had his name on, it wouldn’t do well for the lowly Ditch den to be gleaming with signs of her boss’s true wealth.
“It is only a matter of time,” Phineas once told her, “before suspicion becomes certainty.”
For the better part of two years, the Siren’s Hair—specifically the tiny room she shared with Suri on the second floor—had been her home. A shitty, sew-your-pockets-shut home, but home nevertheless.
Suri had made the place more like home than anything else—despite all of Nes’s efforts to avoid her. A runaway bride from Brevna, Suri had somehow found a place in Nes’s life, and, much to her own surprise, Nes liked her in it.
But that wouldn’t matter for long. Once Nes freed her father, they’d have to flee, and she wouldn’t be able to return to Gadore. She had to stay focused on what mattered. This was it. Marnie was her last job.
She pulled Marnie into the den’s kitchen. The space was a cacophony of sound. Spoons clattered at different pitches against the insides of pots. Knives hit cutting boards in various rhythms.
There were two doors in the kitchen. The first led out back to the dumpstreet.
A long, thin space that stretched across the backs of every Ditch business.
Appropriately named, as it was a place people tended to dump their trash—and sometimes bodies—until the plows came at midnight to sweep it all away.
The second door led to a fully stocked pantry. But it was what waited inside the pantry that made her palms sweat.
She threw open the pantry door and, skirting bags of onions and potatoes, found the third door. The one that concealed a staircase down.
“Ready?” she asked Marnie.
The girl shook beneath her cloak, her knees and elbows no more than tree branches shuddering against a strong wind. “He’ll pay me a hundred gadots a week?”
“As long as you do as Phineas asks.”
Marnie swallowed. “Then yes.”
Pulling her flask from her belt, Nes took a short swig before descending the hidden steps. The light from the lanterns lining the stairs bloomed bright and vibrant against the dirt-carved walls. At the bottom of the steps, they pushed through another door.
The space laid out before them was wide and cavernous.
Unlike the kitchen above, the brawlhouse was nearly empty.
The cleaners had mopped up the blood from the previous night’s fights, and the bartender had finished taking stock of the liquor.
Only a few men stood in the center of the room.
And in the center of the group stood Minot—Phineas’s second.
Keeping clear of the other men, she eyed Minot. Why Phineas had chosen this scrawny boy of barely sixteen to be his second, she would never understand.
Nes knew each and every one of the men lining up in front of Minot, all of them brawlers she’d found and brought here. Not one hassled Minot, their heads bowed as they stepped forward to accept a silver flask. A flask identical to the one currently at her hip.
She knew what waited inside each flask. Magic. Not the pure stuff scraped off tree bark like that in the hand of the dead boy outside the Valley, but diluted magic.
When mixed with seawater, magic became tame enough to ingest. To consume pure magic was to condemn yourself to death. But consuming diluted magic could give you a unique magical advantage. And the people of the Ditch yearned for any sort of advantage.