Chapter 31

  Days Remaining - 10

  Time didn’t pass; it poured, a sheet of water off a cliff.

  Pain made a shallow bowl of him, and every minute filled it—slow, amber-thick, sticky as sap. He lay there and held the bowl because there wasn’t anything else to do.

  The healers’ salves had done what they could: cooled the fever at the edges, kept rot from getting a foothold. But the real work fell to his essence. The wound carried too much woven power, too many tangled threads for ordinary hands to tease apart; the attack had been layered, complicated, the sort of damage that laughs at simple healing spells. And he couldn’t risk better practitioners, not up close, because if they leaned in with their senses, they’d feel it at once: the essence signature he wore didn’t belong to the face he wore. The math of him wouldn’t add up.

  So he took the rest himself: knitting hairline fractures, cooling bruises from purple to yellow, keeping the borrowed skin stitched tight over a skull that wasn’t his. Every tug on the mask cost him. Every hour he paid again.

  He could drop it. He could let the disguise fall, flood himself with power, and set the bones straight in a single blaze. It would be as easy as dunking into a hot bath and standing up new.

  He lay there, unmoving, eyes pinned to the gray ceiling, counting the hairline cracks as if numbers could hold him together. Calira’s warm hand pressed to his ribs, and her essence flowed into him in a steady pour. For a few heartbeats the ache loosened: bones seemed to knit, bruises bled from black to yellow, breath came easier. It didn’t last. Not nearly long enough. When she lifted her hand the relief snapped back like a rubber band. He met her gaze. She was exhausted—shadows under her eyes, a tremor in the wrist she tried to hide. It was chewing on her too, he could tell.

  Night outside was loud with living. Lights danced on slate roofs; laughter spilled up the hill from the lower wards. The festival was over, so the city was alive once more, markets still open, restaurants sweating steam into the alleys, streets jammed with people who believed the dark was kinder when shared. Music carried thinly through the glass, a drumbeat trying to find his pulse.

  River pushed his palms to the mattress and tried to stand. The room slid. Calira caught his elbow, small and firm at once, and guided him toward the window. Cold air met him at the casement and brushed his face clean, sharp enough to make his eyes water. He leaned into it, into the night noise and the sting, and let himself be held there a moment longer.

  “Let’s go down there, we don’t have time to waste. And there are some things we need.”

  A scoff escaped before she managed to hide her dismay “You're weaker than a Tier One mage right now. What if something happens?”

  “Nothing is going to happen, we’re just a pair of nobles exploring the town.” His voice seemed sure even if he wasn’t.

  “Fine.” The words carried finality as Calira readied herself, the fat gray-haired man before him a constant reminder of their mission.

  To stand any chance, they needed three pieces of magical gear: one to detect, one for enhancing, and finally an essence concealment item.

  The night worked as a distraction while they moved among Norvil’s crowds. Lanterns swung; music frayed at the corners of streets; laughter tried its best. The problem was their shadow. The guard insisted on trailing them—“protection,” he called it. To River it felt like being babysat. With him glued to their backs, they couldn’t sniff out what they really wanted.

  His mind brushed Calira’s. The link had brightened again the longer they stayed together, a steady wire humming between them. “Any ideas on how to get rid of him?”

  “Maybe,” she answered, “but none of them are any good.” The edge of uncertainty in her tone was strange on her, far from the usual iron she wore.

  “If you think it’ll work, just do it.”

  Calira’s pace quickened. She veered toward a street vendor’s stall stacked with silk, ribbons, and bolts of fine cloth. She lifted a finger toward the cart and murmured, almost polite, “Sorry.” A pinprick spark hopped from her fingertip. For a breath nothing happened, then the tinder-dry wood caught, and fabric went with it.

  Flame climbed color like a ladder.

  Screams ballooned as heat shoved outward. People lurched and shoved to get free of the blaze, knocking over baskets and sloshing ale across the cobbles. The guard hesitated, duty tugging him toward the fire, toward the panicking crowd.

  Calira’s hand found River’s. She yanked him forward, cutting through the surge, weaving past flailing elbows and dropped bundles, letting the chaos fold itself up behind them.

  River could feel it: the guard was no longer “protecting” them. Once the blaze was a street away, only a column of dark smoke showed where it raged. Their shadow had peeled away to deal with it—or to hunt from a distance. Either way, he wasn’t at their heels. River filed a note in the back of his mind: repay the vendor. Somehow. Someday.

  Their pace eased. River’s body, still chewed thin by the fight, struggled to keep up even with Calira tugging him forward. He hated feeling like this, like weight someone else had to carry. Useless. A drag. He knew most of that was in his head, but knowing and believing it were two different beasts.

  He knew where they needed to go. The main street. Once, stepping onto it had meant risking being hunted, scorned, or beaten by the guards. Now, wearing this face, he would be welcomed with a smile. Irony, it turned out, is a cruel mistress.

  The broad thoroughfare, and its chain of golden lanterns, hadn’t changed. Only the eyes on him had. Those eyes no longer tracked him with fear or disgust; they filled instead with reverence, with a greedy kind of admiration. A woman known for her cruelty was treated as worthy, desirable, the right sort of danger to court. An orphan fighting to stay alive? Too dirty to risk the reputation of fine establishments. Too real to let inside. He couldn’t let his mask crack, emotion a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  For a second, his eyes caught the tailor’s shop that had belonged to Lud’s brother, and his heart sank. The kindness the man had shown him lingered; so did the memory of his brother’s death. One day he would find him and say thank you. Today was not that day.

  Each step carried them closer to the heart of the main street, the center of opulence. Here, the most expensive stores glittered, the rarest items waited behind glass, and the richest nobles drifted from window to window. River had become one of them, or at least he pretended to be.

  He pointed to a corner store where golden columns and white marble intertwined, carved into ornate but counterfeit runes and glyphs. “This one.” Above the door, the sign read: HISTORICAL ARTIFACTS OF A BYGONE AGE.

  The letters looked etched by essence itself, shifting when the moonlight touched them, as if the sign breathed.

  Attendants opened the doors the instant they approached, all velvet smiles and practiced bows, ready to receive clients who smelled like coin. River was ready to spend money that wasn’t his, one of the few joys of being Beatrix. Inside, glass cases ran the length of the showroom, each lit from beneath so the relics seemed to float. At every station a different attendant waited, hands folded just so. River didn’t recognize any of the patrons drifting between displays, each hunting their own miracles with a careful, hungry focus.

  Even behind the heavy glass doors, street noise only muffled; River still caught the edge of a scream. A knot of people barreled past, boots drumming the cobbles—“Water mages—out of the way!”

  A young man materialized at River’s side, his calm, polished voice shaking him from his thoughts. “Hello. Is there anything specific you’re looking for today?” The cadence rang in the quiet, but River didn’t answer; his senses were too full—old metals humming, wards thrumming faintly, the tang of oiled wood and cold glass. For a heartbeat he just stood there, taking it in.

  Calira answered instead. “Yes. We’re looking for a few things.”

  The clerk’s expression sharpened; for a moment, hunger took his face—commission-scent. “First,” she continued, “anything, anything, related to the Primordials. Then amplification artifacts. A shard cradle.” She let the words hang, watched him blink. “And lastly, a spatial storage item.”

  Silence clicked once between them. Then the young man inclined his head, all composure again, and gestured deeper into the showroom as if opening a curtain on a rarer, more dangerous room.

  Large sofas lined the back wall, a low table standing guard beside them. The attendant’s words echoed before River could fully take in where he was: the inner sanctum of one of Norvil’s most prestigious houses of trade.

  “My name is Adam, and I’ll be assisting you today. If you’d care to sit and relax, I’ll bring the items one by one. In the meantime, may I offer anything to drink or eat while you wait?”

  The lines sounded practiced as they left his mouth.

  “No. I think we’re good.” As soon as the words reached Adam’s ears, he slipped behind the curtain again, noiseless. Only River and Calira remained in the dim room. Incense smoldered on the table; a thick, dark carpet swallowed footsteps; the walls were drowned in garish, many-colored tapestries. Far from elegant, River noted, expensive without taste. But elegance wasn’t what he’d come for.

  Minutes stretched thin. They waited in silence, listening to the quiet thrum of warding wards stitched into the wood. River wasn’t sure how much time passed before Adam returned, this time balancing a metal tray whose contents chimed faintly when he set it down.

  River’s gaze went hunting.

  Laid out under the lamplight sat a necklace—no, a fan of necklaces—each pendant etched with different wards, the kind used for affinity enhancement, one for every school he recognized and a few he didn’t. Beside them rested a ring, gold chased with pale blue enamel, intricate lines folding over one another like waves. The shard cradle occupied the center: A spider made of worked silver with spring-loaded prongs, sized for fragments, not stones, lay before them.

  And then there were four pieces he couldn’t name at all. Some of them seemed to hum, trying to speak to him, while the others seemed like nothing more than trinkets with no purpose.

  He kept his face still, but his pulse ticked up a beat. Breath went uneven, shallow at first, then catching as his mind sharpened and hungered for what might be on the tray.

  Adam began his patter, apparently missing their reactions. The necklaces, affinity enhancers, and the shard cradle were exactly what River expected; the wards around them hummed with a tidy, familiar logic. Then the attendant tapped the gold-and-sky ring.

  “This is a spatial ring, very rare. The craft has been lost, but a few survive. It can hold up to one hundred kilograms of supplies, allowing—”

  River had already stopped listening. He knew spatial storage. He’d had one once, Lud’s, until Philip and chaos and loss swallowed it.

  “We’ll take it,” he said, cutting through Adam’s sentence.

  Delight brightened the attendant’s face; he set the ring aside with careful fingers.

  “Actually,” Calira added, “show us the Primordial pieces. We’ll be taking everything else.”

  For a moment Adam’s mouth hung open, words fumbling on the threshold. “Y-yes, Sir”

  He indicated two small crystal marbles, no bigger than pebbles. “These are said to identify Primordials. The story goes the Primordials carried them and made each newborn touch one, if it glowed purple, the child was destined to be one. If it turned black, they were a mere mage.”

  Not real, River thought. The essence radiating from them was too new, too even to be Primordial. Still, he needed to be sure.

  He reached and pressed each marble between finger and thumb. Nothing. The white inside barely trembled, barely shifted, even when he curled essence around it like breath on glass.

  “Don’t need these.”

  Adam nodded, set them back, and moved to a dull metal square. At a glance it was nothing, but when he lifted it the thing sang, a faint toothache of a tone along River’s jaw. “This one is said to scream when it contacts a Primordial.”

  The moment Adam passed it to him, the square shrieked, clean and brutal, a hot knife through butter, straight into his ear. Only he heard it; no one else reacted, even as his reflexes took over. River dropped it and clapped his hands to his head, fear spiking, half-convinced his eardrums had just torn. Calira’s hands caught River, fingers trembling, and her sharp worried eyes told him everything he needed: He was pushing it, overdoing it.

  Adam stared at him in confusion, uncertainty dragging at the edges of his voice. “Are you… all right?”

  The words barely reached River before Calira cut in, smooth and immediate. “He’s fine. Beatrix has tinnitus, makes her ears hypersensitive. Sharp sounds can cause excruciating pain.” The explanation didn’t land with the weight she wanted, but it would have to do.

  “Okay.” The single syllable hung between them, uncertain, but no one chased it.

  River straightened, forced the mask back over his features. “We’ll take that,” he said, nodding at the screaming square. While he struggled to keep his emotions smooth. “And forget the last piece—we won’t be needing it.”

  Relief and calculation slid across Adam’s face in the same breath as he tallied what that meant for his commission. The fear bled out; the salesman returned.

  “How much?” River asked.

  Adam didn’t blink. He’d been holding the number ready. “Ten thousand five hundred”

  A lifetime and then some for anyone not tied to a crest. Most people would never even see that much coin in one room. River didn’t hesitate; it wasn’t his money. “Deal.”

  They clasped hands. Adam’s grip was soft but eager. “A bank guarantee will suffice, yes?”

  River nodded. He drew a folded slip from the borrowed bag, uncapped the pen, and wrote the amount with a steady hand. The numerals looked obscene on paper (10,500) but he signed Beatrix’s name with a flourish that felt practiced and wrong all at once, then passed the guarantee across the table.

  Tonight was a step in the right direction. He felt just a little more ready to face what stood before him, and the pain of his injury receded, just a little.