Chapter 25 Vari Merkt
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Vari Merkt
If Saffron never saw another boat again for as long as she lived, it would be too soon.
Seasickness was too meager a word for what was happening to her insides.
She’d been fine on the riverboat sailing up to Port Ouran all those weeks ago, but crossing Assassin’s Bay in a small catamaran was another matter entirely.
She’d retched over the edge for the better part of an hour, dry-heaving when her stomach had finally emptied, and even now, her feet firmly planted on dry land, her head was dizzy and her legs were made of mist.
Mersina rose up beyond the port like a lump of glittering coal.
Built mostly from mahogany and basalt, the most notable part of the architecture was what it lacked: spires and obelisks and purple domes.
There was no religion here, no Saints or Augurs or old gods.
It was a city-state, technically, though state was perhaps an overly generous description.
The northern harbor was crammed with ships of all heights and hues—gleaming white, night black, bloodred, rusted brown, and the precise deep blue of the Sleepless Sea.
Mersina was where most pirates docked after their raidings and smugglings, refueling magic wells in raucous pleasurehouses, tying themselves to whipping posts in the streets to turn their new magic into liquid gold, stuffing their bank vaults with all the treasure they could not risk sinking.
Saffron wore her scarlet cloak instead of her shabby black one, believing it would be better to masquerade as predator rather than prey, determined not to mark herself as an easy victim.
But while the border control officials in Aredan had been skittish at the sight of her, few in Assassin’s Bay seemed remotely interested.
The cobbled ground swaying and canting beneath her, Saffron gripped her wand tighter and set off toward the heart of the city.
She’d memorized the route to the wand market—the Vari Merkt—back in Aredan, not wanting to mark herself as a tourist. The moment she got lost in a place like Mersina—a vicious labyrinth of black stone and blacker hearts—was the moment she became vulnerable.
The very walls of the city smelled metallic, bloodied, and the cracks between buildings seemed malevolent, as though they would greatly enjoy devouring their victims whole.
Every body that passed hers, every cloak that skimmed her own, made her tighten.
She witnessed no fewer than fourteen pickpocketings and two murders.
It was deeply frightening and oddly invigorating.
Half an hour later, despite a few wrong turns, Saffron found the Vari Merkt.
Rather than sprawling around a leafy central plaza, like Vallin’s Cherrymarket, the Vari Merkt clung to the shadows like a vampiric fog.
There were countless black markets in Mersina—it was rarer to find a legitimate one—but it was the Vari Merkt Saffron wanted, because it had a reputation for flogging untested and possibly cursed wands to criminals who’d been blacklisted by the International Guild of Wandmakers.
The only way to identify it was by a crimson line of cobbles painted down the center of the street in the shape of a wand.
Saffron’s heart leapt when she saw the distinctive red stripe, swiftly followed by a pitted feeling in her stomach as a cruel-glared man without a cloak eyed her up like a piece of meat. She hurried farther down the street, away from his ravenous stare.
The market stalls were a hodgepodge of low folding tables and spread blankets, the most elaborate of which benefited from pale, ragged canvas tents and awnings overhead.
Every table and blanket was covered with wands.
Some in boxes, some loose. Some so ragged and rotten that they surely could not be functional, some so ancient and unusual that they should be tucked away safely in a museum.
Excitement swept through Saffron. If she was going to find a wild weaverwick wand anywhere, it was here.
The difficulty, however, was going to be spotting one in the first place.
As the author of From Sacred to Sacrosanct had written, it was almost impossible to discern what sort of wick a wand possessed.
A skilled wandmaker might be able to identify it from sight or feel, but these vendors were not skilled wandmakers.
They were crooks and criminals who relied on the steady belt-feed of contraband from pirates and pickpockets, and they didn’t care for the class or creed of a wand beyond what they might be able to sell it for.
Strolling toward the first stall on the street, Saffron smiled at the vendor before quickly regretting her decision. The man immediately sat up straighter, narrowing his heavily hooded eyes and drawing a knife from his belt in warning.
Saffron didn’t know a word of Mersinan beyond the name of the wand market, so she switched to the common tongue, hoping the vendor was familiar.
“Weaverwick?” she asked, sweeping a hand over his small display of wands, most of which were splintered and shabby, perhaps not even wands at all but rather small branches snapped from trees and half-heartedly varnished.
He simply shook his head, scratching at his patchy ginger whiskers. Either he spoke none of the common tongue, or he had no weaverwick wands to speak of.
Many of the subsequent stalls went the same way: hostility, language confusion, terse head shakes.
Some greedy, searching looks, as though examining her person for pouches of coin that might be stolen.
One recognized the embroidered moon phases on her cloak and began spitting at her like an alleycat.
Eventually, she stopped asking questions and instead relied upon that most ancient of magics: intuition.
One stall was a little fancier than the others.
The legs of its table had decoratively carved spindles, and the wands were arranged neatly in identical boxes stamped with a mourncrow logo.
A pretty, dark-skinned mage stood behind them in a blood-orange Wielder’s cloak, with coarse, close-cropped black hair and a dagger tattooed along each cheek in white ink.
There were a surprising number of higher-value pieces on offer, several of which had ascenite handles—an expensive rarity—and a handful studded with Irisian jewels.
The other vendors shot the orange-cloaked stallholder vitriolic looks, and Saffron wondered how the mage kept them from ganging up, slaughtering her, and stealing her superior wares.
Perhaps the daggers on her cheekbones signaled that she too was a member of some lethal criminal organization.
Shivering slightly in the shade beneath the cream canvas parasol, Saffron locked her gaze onto a silver birch wand engraved with something that looked remarkably like a wolf.
A fallowwolf, perhaps?
Or just the sigil of some long-forgotten house?
Saff reached out a hand to touch the wand, then hovered over it, looking up at the vendor. “May I?”
The vendor nodded once, her dark gaze sharp enough to cut glass. Saffron found her energy to be rather arousing in ways she did not care to examine.
She picked up the pale wand, expecting—or at least hoping—to feel something. A frisson, a flutter when it met her palm. Some sign that her body recognized the wick, that the magic in her well was innately responding to it.
Nothing.
Perhaps she could go through the motions of casting a tempavicissan spell—to see whether the wand would feel the way Lorissa’s had in the moments before those fateful words were uttered. Charged, expectant, alive.
No, that would be a fool’s errand. She could not attempt to cast Timeweaving magic on one of the world’s most dangerous streets.
The dagger-cheeked mage studied her like a curio in a shop window.
“How much?” Saffron muttered, deciding to take a punt on the wolf engraving.
“Vinta skeni.”
Twenty ascens.
Bartering in Mersina was a complex art. Pitch too low as to be insulting and you’d be swiftly killed for the insult.
Pitch too high and it would be assumed you were a patron of enormous wealth, and that you should be followed into an alley, robbed, and killed.
There was just a little too much killing involved in the process for Saffron’s personal tastes.
Good thing she liked to gamble.
“Desiz?” Sixteen.
The Wielder’s expression hardened. “Na.”
Saffron had been insulting with her counteroffer. She backtracked hastily.
“Fine, fine. Vinta skeni.”
The vendor held out her palm, which had a jagged purple scar bisecting it. Saffron rummaged in her coin purse and counted out twenty ascens, dropping them into the Wielder’s hand and stuffing the wand box into her innermost cloak pocket.
Saff tucked her chin to her chest and scurried back in the direction of the port.
The black buildings towered oppressively overhead, and the overlapping sounds rankled at her nerves.
A tin bowl rattling with coins, a piercing shriek of anguish, worn-down boots thumping unevenly over cobblestones.
There was the distinctive smoky, metallic scent of spell aftermath, underpinned with something like rotten flowers.
A few streets over, she ducked into a narrow alleyway, determined to test her new purchase. Blood thumping against her temples, she withdrew the small golden hourglass and the wolf-carved wand, both warm from the heat of her body. She closed her eyes and summoned the razor-sharp intention to—
Footsteps landed all around her like a sudden rain.
Her eyes flew open.
She was surrounded by half a dozen mages in blood-orange cloaks, all of whom had familiar twin daggers tattooed along their cheekbones.
They’d leapt from the rooftops into the alley.
And now they were closing in like a pack of hounds.
“Sen praegelos,” Saffron hissed, trying to freeze time so she might flee, but the wolf-engraved wand sat in her hand instead of her own, and all at once it became perilously clear that the piece of wood was a fraud.
There was no wick at all, let alone a weaver, and the magic never materialized.
Time kept rolling.
Six blades found her body. She was so shocked she felt none of them.
All went black.