Chapter 1
A Big, Bright, Brand-New Beginning
Brioni
Brioni was thrilled—she was alive, she was outside, and she was free.
Well, the rune cuff around her wrist suggested a little differently, but everybody had some kind of bounds they were confined within, it just so happened that Brioni’s were more tangible than most: fixed in place by magic and sort of painful if tested, she knew, because she had tried, just the once, just to see.
But she’d never been allowed to venture through an entire city before, so who cared that she couldn’t prance through the bordering dark and scary forest? She certainly wasn’t going to complain.
Nope, not Brioni! She would never complain, which would of course turn out to be a problem, and frankly had already been for quite some time, but readers and heroines alike shouldn’t allow that foreshadowy evidence to detract from the fact Brioni was indeed thrilled because she had all of Heck to traverse.
She snorted out a giggle as she checked the map the postmaster had drawn her.
Heck. She was standing in the middle—or just west of the middle—of Heck: a very cute name for a very cute city.
Some might consider it a little spooky, not least of all on account of the demons, but to know the truth of the place, one only need look closer to the charming black clay teacups on the tables outside Brew’d Awakening, or the cuddly stuffed toys sewn from paisley scraps for sale in the mercer’s window, or the twisting vines of white flowers that ran up the lantern poles all along its streets.
Sure, most of the tea blends were exceptionally bitter, the puppy-shaped toys all had fangs, and the flowers caused nasty rashes if bumped into, but compared to the stories she’d been told all her life about Achreos Barrens, Heck was downright delightful.
Brioni had just completed her last delivery and evening was coming—or so she guessed because the moon was now hiding behind the cupolas of the tallest buildings instead of shimmering directly overhead—but she was a little turned around.
The map, while wonderful, wasn’t perfect.
Brioni knew that all perfection ever really did was get in the way of good enough and done, which were far more important, so she squinted at the done-good-enough map and did her darnedest to manifest the way back to the post.
She’d just dropped off a package at the weaving house down the road and then said a quick hello to Camdran and Valgoth in the violet gardens along the way, so Quill and Parchment should have been just ahead, yet there was no hanging sign shaped like an open book or the faint smell of ink in the air.
“You don’t happen to know the way back home, do you, buddy?”
The qapian at her side only lowed—her qapian, as she’d taken to thinking of him after only a few days, and then more recently as simply Stephan—but he wasn’t great with directions, not at all like the drayks, though it didn’t really matter since neither could speak.
Stephan was really only good at pulling a cart in exactly the direction she asked and listening to her prattle on without interrupting, so Brioni made another attempt at deciphering Alamar’s squiggly streets and scribbled place names as she gnawed on her lip.
“You doing all right there, little human?”
Brioni blinked up from the map to be met with waistcoat buttons.
They belonged to Elder Balgenath, she knew, because she’d delivered those buttons only two days prior and got caught up in a fascinating chat about the benefits of cast iron pipes over elm wood.
Admittedly she was a fair bit more interested in the magic required to sustain Heck’s plumbing, but she had nodded and grinned through his lengthy depiction of pouring molds anyway because that was the polite and proper thing to do.
Politeness and properness were extraordinarily important, of course, even if they were also exhausting.
She tipped her head the rest of the way up and grinned at the bright blue demon’s creased face.
“Yes, sir!” she answered much too quickly but then gave away the truth by furrowing her brow.
“Er, I mean, mostly all right. It’s been a wonderful day: I got to try a yivie tart for the first time, and I saw inside the Scholar’s Hall when I passed by—did you know the interior walls are made of purple glass?
Well, yeah, you probably did know that, huh?
But now it’s getting late, and I’m not exactly sure how to get back to Heck Post because the shop that’s supposed to be right there…
isn’t.” She held the map up and grinned toothily while pointing as if the elderly demon didn’t know exactly where everything in Heck was located.
“Well, now, you just need to go two doors down and take the alley on the left to get yourself to the right district.” He pointed with his tail to a dark spot between two lantern-lit doorways. “Keep your eye on the weathervane, and you’ll find the post in no time.”
A quick glance at the map confirmed that would work—the alley just wasn’t marked. “A shortcut?”
He winked at her with an all-black eye. “Only the locals use it.” And then he tottered off with his cane up the street.
Brioni grinned ear to ear as she watched him go.
Of course, everyone in Heck was a local—they didn’t have visitors and few of them ever left—and maybe this would help make her one too.
Gods knew she was trying, but demons were just incredible, and she wasn’t sure she could ever measure up.
For Illustra’s sake, they had tails, and how wonderful would it be to have a spare arm?
Or all that height? Just about everybody was a full head and a half taller, and they had horns to top themselves off: spiraling, curling, swooping, pointy-ing.
Not that Brioni wanted to be covered in pointy things, but she did admire the ridges and spikes some demons were adorned with.
She admired the builds of the leanest and most muscular ones too.
Maybe a little too much. Alamar had said so once when she caught her staring, anyway.
Brioni had done her best to laugh that off, especially since in comparison she felt like an egg-laden drayk: short, round, and sweaty, though the sweat part was mostly due to hefting packages on and off the delivery cart and walking around all day, oftentimes in the wrong direction.
No, fitting in wasn’t going to be easy, but she could at least be friendly and useful, since, well, she didn’t really have a choice.
Brioni led Stephan the qapian down the alley, pitch dark and just wide enough for the beast of burden and his cart to pass through.
Even he had horns—two sets—though his skin was a leathery gray and deeply wrinkled, and he wasn’t terribly discerning about where he pooped.
She had much better manners at least. In fact, Brioni’s pleases and thank yous were some of her best qualities, the postmaster had at least praised her for that, and she’d rather be called polite than “wicked” and “spurious.”
She snorted again, this time without the giggle, but immediately put on a smile when she emerged from the alley.
The Crescent District was awash in every color of light, lanterns hung from the eaves of each tightly packed building along the wide and curving road than ran through its middle.
She waved at a pair of demon children who were shooting marbles in a little garden space in front of the locksmith’s shop, and only one of them scowled back.
One out of two’s not bad, she thought, and it’s much better than my first day out when I made that toddler cry!
She’d made tentative acquaintances with Nedreen by folding up some excess package wrapping into a flower and offering it in trade for a smile.
The little pink demon was a whole lot cuter when she wasn’t sobbing and screaming about the “white-eyed monster.”
The name-calling had been a little funny, not least of all because Brioni’s eyes were green, not white, but most demons didn’t really see it that way.
She thought at first her coppery curls would help her blend in with all the other color in the demons’ world, but her skin was vastly different.
Heck’s citizens were every color of the rainbow, but she was simply pale, maybe rose-tinged if someone was being generous, but only on a hot day, and without a sun, she wasn’t sure Heck ever really got all that warm.
It wasn’t that she minded being different, but she was just one of six humans in all of Heck, and sometimes that made things thorny, like when she needed to hide.
Stephan provided good cover, though, so when she saw a small contingency of guards heading into The Fallen Priest, she slowed her steps, ducked her head, and took qapian-sized strides to stay out of sight.
She would have preferred to covertly ogle the guards instead, but Drolmoth was with them.
She’d made the mistake of attracting the purple demon’s attention in the infirmary when she first woke in Heck after all that horribleness with the slavers.
It seemed like a good idea at the time—she was scared and lonely, and he was big and friendly—but then she’d overheard something awful, and she reverted to being just as lonely and twice as scared.
Brioni was stealthy enough to sneak by unnoticed even with the massive qapian, probably because the guards had ale on their minds, and soon enough she was home. Or, she was back where she’d started the day.