A TRADE IS A TRADE
Esme shrugged Magic’s touch away. “The queen said so,” she said.
“But you’d never follow her orders. Let us stay! Spite her! Wouldn’t that be more fun?”
Yes… but no. “All good things come to an end, old friend,” she said. “There are other worlds for you to ruin.”
“We’ll trade you something! What would you wish? We… your human! We can find a way to make her immortal, maybe!”
“Pass.” Esme had once brought up the subject of immortality to Mina and it had gotten shot down immediately.
“Then the kingling! We can make him slave to your will!”
“I’m fine.”
“The Song! We will tell you all about him!”
This suggestion gave Esme pause. She passed a look to said Song and he blanched. He rushed forward with anxious wildfire eyes.
Esme twisted her mouth. “Nope. Sorry, but you have to go.”
“The Void! We will tell you where it is if you give us just… just one. One pit, please. We’ll even stay in one area! Can’t you spare us just a few buildings?”
There went Esme’s rioting heart again, begging her to make this deal and escape. Magic sniffed out her desire and laid itself around her neck like one of the heavy necklaces she used to wear back home. Its cold was almost that of the washed silver, too. She leaned into that familiar freeze.
Magic collected itself, coiling its coercion around her ankles. The Void was practically swirling to life right at her feet. All she needed to do was make a deal…
“Indeed. Just a deal with us for a few buildings and a pit, and you can have what you’ve missed most. Make it now, Bast.” Magic wrapped around her wrist, settled on her brow, an invisible mockery of her ceremonial metals. “Before you forget another face.”
Esme flinched. As cruel as it was, Magic was right.
“Esme, are you sure it’s worth it?” the Song asked. His smoke turned over on itself restlessly on his neck and cheek.
Esme tried to find her common sense but realized she didn’t have any. She had a collection of faces that used to belong to her siblings, now with noses a touch too far to the left and too-thin top lips and eyes the wrong shade.
She didn’t have time for sense. She was losing her family.
“Here’s the deal,” Esme said to Magic. “I will leave you a pit in West Amaris, and the house directly next to it. You can have one hundred feet around the area, and that is it. You will not draw people closer; you will not try to spread. You will not travel to another city. You will stay in your area. In return, I want the exact locations of the Void’s pieces, down to the street name and building number. ”
“That would not be equal,” Magic said, slithering around her shoulders. “For just a few hundred feet… we shall tell you the world the pieces reside in.”
Esme scoffed. “I’m not that stupid. One hundred and fifty feet. I want countries and cities.”
“One hundred and seventy-five, and we will even include a hint.”
“Will this hint be useful?”
Magic turned over on itself, contemplating. “Fine.”
Esme touched her chin and thought through the trade again. She couldn’t leave a single hole for Magic to weasel through.
“You will be confined to the Den in West Amaris, the fighting pit beside the property, and one hundred and seventy feet from the property in every direction. You will have all the chaos you need there. You will only have free rein within that section of the city, and cannot leave, even if the Den closes and reopens in another area. Directly after agreeing to this deal, you will give me the worlds, countries, and cities where the pieces of this world’s Void are located, and a helpful hint.
That is the extent of our agreement,” Esme said.
Magic threw its arms around her waist in a giddy embrace. “You have always been a favorite!” it giggled. “We only ask that, should this ‘Den’ close, we be allowed to renegotiate a new location for us to exist.”
Esme shrugged. Not the worst amendment. “Fine. Do we have a deal?”
“Of course we do, Favorite!”
Magic vaulted into the sky and a smoky shower fell over her, like fireworks but worse.
Ojalla, she hoped she didn’t just get herself in trouble.
“Your precious Void has been split in two. One half exists in Hark-wald, in Waldovia, the other in this very city. And your hint lies at the top of the castle,” Magic crooned.
It condensed into an invisible liquid at their feet, then slithered away like a serpent ocean.
Lower and lower bobbed its tide until Esme took a crisp breath of boring, Magicless air.
“Well, that was easy,” the Song said, crossing his arms, face twisted in befuddlement.
He was right—that was easy. Then again, without these pits, Magic would starve on this world. Fine. Maybe the agreement would keep the slippery creature in the city, but a drop of Magic was better than a waterfall. It knew that, too.
“Last time I made a deal with that cretin,” the Song added, “I was icing my knees for days.”
Esme snorted. “It had you kneeling?” She bit her nail as she tried to figure out where exactly those Void pieces were.
Waldovia was a surprise, but here in the city? A whole half a Void and she couldn’t feel it? How? Well, that was for her to investigate after tonight. For now, she had something, at least. After nearly century, she finally had something.
Esme swallowed down her happy tears. She’d shed them another time.
“This is where I give you the option of going home,” she said. “I only invited you out to see if you could help fill these holes. But since I’ve figured out how to do it on my own, there’s no use keeping you up so late.”
“So, you were going to use me and then throw me back in the dungeon?” the Song said, tucking his large hands into his pockets.
“You make it sound so evil,” Esme said, and winked at him. His smoke curled by his cheeks. “But this will take a long time. I’ll likely be out until sunrise. Don’t you want sleep?”
“I am very old and half god. I don’t need sleep.” He scratched the back of his neck. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think he liked her.
“Fine, but don’t complain to me when you’re groggy tomorrow,” she said.
The Song lit up like a midnight fire.
They filled eight of the nine remaining pits just like that.
The one just behind Kiren and Karin’s Den was accidentally left untouched.
She’d already excluded it from her maps to be cleaned up because of their earlier deal, but this new agreement had just made it all the sweeter.
She’d have to revisit her mice friends at some point to warn them of their new business partner.
It took hours to fill the pits, so many that the sun peeked over the city wall by the time they’d got to the fancy one in North Amaris that Esme had died in. She’d been tired when she caused her fifth mini-earthquake. By the ninth, she threw herself into her messy crater and caught her breath.
“Song’s flaming balls,” she groaned, leaning back on her hands with her butt flat in the dirt.
“My flaming what?” said the Song, crossing his arms across his massive chest.
She cackled. “Nothing. I haven’t been this tired in ages. I’m getting old.”
Instead of making her apologize for using his anatomy as a turn of phrase, he simply sat down on the ground beside her, leaning back too. “How old are you?”
“I turned one hundred and thirty last year,” Esme said, remembering what she could of the weeklong “party” that had ended with her pricking herself on one of Daphna’s arrows and almost getting buried in a desert.
But, once again, the nap had been orgasmic.
“So how long have you been here, then?” he asked.
“About…” Esme swallowed down the quiver in her voice.
“A century or so.” More than a whole human lifetime.
She’d missed a lifetime back home. Kiwe and Denai were grown up now.
Did they even remember her? Probably not.
Her favorite people in the whole world, and they wouldn’t remember her.
Did Sek and Themis have children? How much of their precious lives had she missed?
Were… Ojalla on fire, were they even still alive? What had she missed, wasting away here?
A ray of heat brushed her cheek. The Song caught her tear with a finger of warmth. “I take it you aren’t here because you want to be,” he said.
Despite the inches between them, Esme felt his comforting heat like they were skin to skin.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you where Wraiths come from?
” she asked. “Seventy snakes fucked each other to death, and boom! I was born.” She rolled her eyes, wiping a tear away with her wrist. “Pit of vipers. How fucking dumb is that? He took me from my home.”
“Took you…?” The Song’s voice sounded distant, but Esme was too busy reliving the worst night of her life.
“Came right out of the Void while I was there and—”
And grabbed her by her arms and twisted until her bone had popped out.
And then he’d forced her to the ground and…
and he’d put his boot on her back, and she’d cried so hard she’d thought someone would hear her, but no one had come.
No one had fucking come. Omniel had stolen her away in the middle of the night and no one had heard her scream for help. No one knew where she’d gone.
She’d never had the chance to say goodbye to anyone. The last time she’d seen her siblings, she’d been so sad that she could barely even speak, and that had been their last memory of her before Omniel had dragged her by her broken arm through the Void.
She couldn’t fight back then. She’d never had to. Her shadows were for explosions of dazzling blackness on holidays and assisting the hurt when they struggled to hobble into her temple for sanctuary. They only ever knew how to help.
And that night, scratching against the obsidian floor as Omniel dragged her away, her shadows had tried in vain to fight for her, to push and claw and punch. But they just weren’t made for that. Bast wasn’t made for that.
This was why she didn’t think of it. Esme couldn’t think about that night or else it would take her apart.
“Your name isn’t Esme,” the Song said. It wasn’t a question.
“It is now.” Because Esme was made for this.