Nocturna

by Maya Motayne

  Rayan massaged his temples. “One of you had to do a drunkening card. Dragon, you took a card from the Fox. Please return a card, as the rules state,” Rayan said to the girl, impatient.

  “You call these stupid things masks!” She gestured sloppily at her red mask. “I’ve worn more masks than you idiots can count! I could show you how it’s really done!”

  “Can we get on with it, missy?” the Bear growled. But the girl just kept laughing.

  Rayan gave a long sigh. “Just relinquish a maldito card, Dragon. That or forfeit your hand.”

  “Fine, fine!” she said. “But the truth is right in your face! In my face, actually,” she said, chuckling gleefully like a child with a secret. Alfie did not have time for her nonsense. He was so close to securing the books. His fingers itched to turn their pages and all he could do was sit and wait for this girl to stop laughing herself into a stupor.

  She finally chose a card to give up, but instead of placing it back in the deck, she flicked it at Alfie. She burst out laughing when it swatted against the nose of his mask. He should’ve let it drop to the ground. Should’ve moved out of the way or even stopped the card from touching him with a word of magic. But instead he raised his hand, letting his magic match the red shade he saw swirling in the card, and caught it as it fell from his face.

  Perhaps it was fate. Or just fast reflexes. Either way, it was done.

  As soon as he touched it, something jolted his finger as if he’d just pricked it on a lightning bolt. He’d been right about her magic being different; it wasn’t a trick of the eye. This card was strange. He focused on it. It was a charmed card full of the girl’s red magic. Just as when he’d watched it before, the color kept shifting in shade, a complex patchwork of reds that wouldn’t settle. He couldn’t mimic it at the drop of a hat the way he could the others’.

  The magic was lithe and sharp as a whip. If this magic had a face it would be smirking, and Alfie wanted to know why. He pressed the magic further and under the surface he felt a pulse. Each pulse getting faster as if something were coming to a head. It reminded him of something. A moment too late, Alfie thought of it.

  A countdown.

  From the face of the card exploded a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. Alfie dropped it on the table and shot out of his chair so fast that it clattered to the floor behind him. He covered his nose and mouth with his hands, sweat rolling down his face. Was it poisonous?

  Rayan, a wind twister, pushed the air away, inadvertently saving Alfie from breathing it in too. A fit of coughing erupted in the room. Alfie heard chairs toppling over and bodies hitting the floor. When the air cleared, all the other players were knocked out cold on the ground, their masks askew. Rayan’s men had charged into the room but had fallen victim to the smoke as well. Only Rayan and Alfie still stood. Alfie looked at the table and his heart sputtered in his chest.

  The prize books were gone.

  Everything he’d done was for nothing. He’d lied to his family and come home to the quiet palace full of Dez’s memory for nothing.

  “Thief!” Rayan screamed, pointing a sausage finger over Alfie’s shoulder.

  The woman in the dragon mask had dashed out the glass doors to the balcony before clumsily hoisting herself onto the stone rail, nearly falling over the edge in the process.

  “Gracias for the game, gentlemen.” She gave another loud hiccup, the card’s effects far from wearing off. She took off her mask to reveal a round face with full lips and heavy brows. “And don’t bother looking for me. I can be a bit hard to find,” she warned with a loopy smile.

  She ran her hands through her hair and the long, straight tresses turned into bouncy curls. She passed her hand over her face and the bridge of her nose straightened and shortened. Her eyes became wider set—her whole face changing with a quick touch.

  Another hiccup sent her reeling, and she windmilled her arms before falling gracelessly backward off the balcony. Alfie could hear her swearing as she landed and took off running. Rayan stood stock-still, his mouth agape.

  His fox mask secure, Alfie ran out of the double doors to the balcony and, after a moment’s hesitation, leaped over its lip. The fall was five men high.

  “Amortiguar!” When he landed in a crouch, his palm against the ground, the cobblestoned road was soft as sand. He braced his hand against the ground and took off at a run, disappearing into the night.

  5

  The Face Thief

  Alfie pursued the girl through the Bow, his mask secured.

  He chased her as she darted through the rows of colorful estates, winging his shoulder on the trunk of a flourishing, well-tended mango tree between homes. He trailed her around a corner toward a square of expensive shops where the wealthy spent their pesos, but when he burst out of a narrow, hacienda-lined road into the shopping square, the girl was nowhere in sight. His chest tightened as he turned in a circle, looking every which way. She had to be here, didn’t she? He’d been just behind her. Alfie couldn’t lose her, couldn’t lose those books. Tonight had to be worth coming home to Dez’s absence and lying to his family. He would not go home empty-handed.

  Alfie walked through the square, peeking into the narrow spaces between stores where she might hide. During the day, this shopping square would be full of vendors doling out wedges of flan and cones of thick-cut yucca fries. But they’d gone home hours ago. Below a full moon, the square sat dark and silent.

  As he darted past a dressmaker’s shop, glass crunched beneath his feet. Its window had been broken, but the shop was empty. Strange. He kept going. He didn’t want to lose her. Ahead, a woman wearing a yellow dress and a brimmed hat stumbled out of the alley between two shops. He paused. How many people would be out in an empty shopping square in the middle of the night? Her shadow swayed at her feet like a drunken sailor. When he focused on her, he could see that shifting, red magic buzzing within her. Alfie jogged to catch up to her.

  “Señorita,” Alfie said, stepping in front of her. “The books.”

  The slurring voice beneath the floppy hat was forcibly high-pitched, as if she were trying to disguise herself. “Young man, I have no idea what you are talking about!”

  There were many ways she could have hidden from him, including changing her face. The drunkening card must’ve been very strong for her to act this ridiculous.

  Alfie knocked the hat off her head, and there was the face he’d seen before she’d fallen from the balcony. “I know who you are. The books, if you please.”

  “Rude,” she tutted before shoving him away. “And you don’t know me. No one does.”

  “How drunk are you if you truly thought this absurd disguise would work?” Alfie asked.

  “Drunk enough to tell you to go screw yourself,” she quipped. Her shadow whipped angrily about her, like a threatened animal. She swayed on her feet and Alfie gripped her by the shoulders to stop her from falling. “Get off me.” She pushed him away. Alfie raised his hands in surrender. He didn’t know how to go about this. She was drunk, he didn’t want to take advan—

  He shook his head. She’d been the one to take advantage. He owed her nothing.

  “Please don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be. I won’t report you to the guards. Just give me the books and you can be on your way—whoever you are beneath that illusion spellwork.” When her magic settled on a shade for a fleeting moment, Alfie finally got his to match hers. He reached for the magic she used to conceal herself, hoping to disrupt it just as he’d disrupted the charmed cards in the cambió game.

  His brow furrowed. He didn’t feel the frame of illusion spellwork on her. Strange. It was the equivalent of finding not a single stitch on a piece of clothing. He felt nothing but the red magic that ran through her like a second current of blood, seamlessly. Every propio had a limit, a hard restriction on its power. When it came to Alfie’s, the only type of magic that was impossible for him to disrupt was someone’s propio. If he could not dismantle the magic she was using to change her
appearance, then it must be her propio. Paloma had always told him that one’s propio was a reflection of who they were, their very soul. What kind of person was she if, underneath it all, she was someone else?

  A liar, Alfie thought. Someone not to be trusted.

  Still, he didn’t want to hurt her if he didn’t have to.

  He stretched out his hand. His shadow curled tight around his feet. “The books, por favor.”

  She stepped back with a drunken sway. “‘Please’ isn’t an accepted form of payment here. You want the books, you can pay for them or you can give me something of equal value. If not.” Hiccup. “Then you really can piss off.”

  “Fine.” He gave a sharp sigh. “How much?”

  Her eyes roamed over him and he knew she was trying to decide how high he would go. He wished he hadn’t worn a cloak made of such rich fabric.

  “One million gold pesos,” she crowed, her head tilting back as she shouted.

  “Qué?”

  “You heard me.”

  Alfie stared at her. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She shrugged. “Don’t lose card games.”

  Alfie gritted his teeth. “Señorita, I do not want to hurt you.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said with a bubbling laugh. “You won’t.”

  Alfie bristled at the cutting sound of her laugh. “The books are mine. If you hadn’t interrupted the game I would have won them honorably.”

  “You think so?” She smirked. He had a feeling that this expression was her default regardless of what face she wore. She glanced down at his shadow, which writhed in annoyance at his feet. “I’d venture to guess that you were using your propio. Not so honorable, if you ask me.”

  Alfie’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you to call me dishonorable? You’re a thief.”

  She threw her hands in the air as if he’d just said the dumbest thing she’d ever heard. “And you’re trying to steal from a thief. I’d say that puts you beneath me.”

  Alfie glared at her before taking a deep breath through his nose. “Look, I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, his voice rough with annoyance.

  She crossed her arms. “That’s all well and good because I doubt you can.”

  Something in her tone rubbed him raw. “Then let me prove it,” he said, his voice level and sure. He wanted to feel dangerous, like the players at the cambió game. He was wearing a fox mask, but he was behaving like a maldito doe. This girl had stolen from him, yet he was still hesitating. Tonight, he would be a fox. “We’ll play a game for the books.”

  “Haven’t you lost enough games for one night, muchacho?” she asked with a snort.

  “Every time I wound you,” Alfie pressed on, “I get a book. Every time you wound me—”

  “Wounding you will be enough of a prize, thank you very much.” She pulled the dress over her head and cursed like a sailor when her arms and head got stuck in it for an awkward moment. Alfie rolled his eyes. This was like dealing with a more violent version of drunk Luka.

  She threw the dress over her shoulder. Now she wore the black shirt tucked into her belted trousers that she had worn at the cambió game. Her black bag stretched across her body from one shoulder to the opposite hip.

  She sank into a sloppy defensive stance, breaking form to hiccup. “Let’s play, then.”

  There was a moment of silence. That tense moment that must boil over before two people can be at each other’s throats. Through the slanted holes of his mask, their eyes locked. With an upward thrust of her wrist, a line of stones the size of his fist rose from the cobbled ground.

  Part of his body screamed to attack quickly, desperately. But he waited.

  Paciencia, Prince Alfehr. Patience is a magic all its own. Paloma’s voice rang in his head. Alfie moved into a defensive stance and waited. The girl looked at him and let out an annoyed puff of air.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a little sauced. I’d like to be in bed at a decent hour. So let’s make this quick.” She tilted her head and slowly looked him up and down. “Unless you’d like to skip the fight and join me there?”

  Alfie stiffened, breaking his stance slightly.

  With a splaying of her fingers, the stones shot forward. Alfie clumsily pulled tendrils of water from the humid air and froze it into a sheet of ice to block. But he hadn’t summoned enough. He blocked two of the stones but was pummeled in the chest by the last few. He backed up before pressing a hand to his stinging chest. Blood welled beneath his shirt.

  “Sanar,” he said, healing the wounds.

  “That’s one.” She grinned. “Let’s say three strikes for this game. It’s a bit late for a kit like you to be without your mamá. We don’t want her to worry, do we?”

  Alfie glared at her through the mask.

  Elemental magic was visceral, physical. It didn’t require as much study or focus as spoken and written magic did. What it required was instinct, which Alfie always seemed to be in short supply of. And because of the noble preference for written and spoken magic, another holdover from Englassen rule, only rudimentary study of the elements was necessary to complete one’s bruxo studies. Alfie had never defended against it in a fight.

  “Why’d you back up? Scared of me already?” Her smirk sharpened.

  Alfie ground his teeth. “Fine, three strikes and the game is over.” This time he would be ready. She could barely stand on her own feet. He’d use that to his advantage. He beckoned her with an outstretched hand. “You want to end this fight, then come finish it.”

  The girl snorted at him. “If you insist.”

  She dashed forward, her steps fast but clumsy. When she raised her hands, Alfie watched her red magic flow sloppily from her body to the ground to pull three large stones from the cobbled street. She’d expelled so much energy just to grab three stones?

  Just as she meant to attack, Alfie looked down at her feet and said, “Adherir!”

  The girl’s feet stuck to the ground as if glued. The momentum she’d built while running worked against her and she fell forward onto her face with a loud thwack. The stones clattered to the ground, one hitting her on the back. She shouted a stream of expletives as she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees. Her forehead was bleeding. Alfie let the magic release her feet.

  “One to one, then.” He crossed his arms in pride. She was a fighter, but she wasn’t properly trained. When stone carvers who’d studied magic called upon the earth, Alfie could see their colored magic surge with precision to raise stones. Hers barreled out of her recklessly only to grip three rocks. With an expulsion of that much energy she should have been able to do more, but she had no discipline. She’d soon tire herself out. If he played this right, it would be just like the cambió game—she might be stronger and faster, but he was smarter.

  “Of course you’re into desk magic,” she grumbled, shakily standing. Alfie cocked his head. He’d never heard of spoken and written magic referred to by that term or with such disdain. “Figures, you move like you’ve been sitting at a desk all your maldito life.”

  Alfie outstretched his hand. “A book, please.”

  She glared at him, indignant. “You didn’t wound me.”

  Alfie shot her a look. “You wounded yourself thanks to my magic. It counts.”

  She sucked her teeth and threw a book at him with such force it slammed into his chest.

  “Your first and only win for the night, Fox,” she said with a slur. “Cherish it.”

  A smirk tugged his lips, one that he hoped rivaled hers. “We’ll see about that, Dragon.”

  In a flash of movement, she launched herself at him, fists raised. She threw a messy punch. Alfie shifted sideways, her knuckles clipping his cheek as he caught her arm in his hand.

  “Adormecer!” Numb.

  Her arm fell limply to her side, swinging like a pendulum. She stared at it. “What the—”

  Alfie landed a swift kick to her stomach, sending her falling onto her back. It wasn’t a rib-breaking hit
, but it still would hurt in the morning.

  The girl forced herself onto her knees, her arm still limp. A plume of satisfaction caught in his chest when he saw her shocked face. Maybe he was more fox-like than he’d thought.

  Alfie closed the distance between them and held his hand out. “I’d numb the other arm too, but then how would you give me another book?”

  The girl glowered up at him. On the ground between them their shadows snapped at each other. By the sheer force of her glare alone, he should’ve known that she was about to cheat. But Alfie was distracted by their shadows sniping at each other. It looked exactly like what happened whenever he and Dez had gotten into arguments as children. His heart ached at the sight.

  Just like with her trump card, he guessed her intentions a moment too late. She whipped her hand upward. A stone from the road shot up between Alfie’s feet to hit him in the groin.

  The pain roiled his stomach, sending him staggering. Then she was on her feet, her fist cloaked in a globe of stone. Before he could say a word of magic, she struck him with a powerful punch. His nose broke under the stone. The chunk of mask around his nose and cheeks shattered, crumbling away. She stepped forward, her palm thrusting up toward the sky. A column of cobblestone-tipped earth rose from the ground and pounded against his stomach like a fist.

  He flew back, slamming into the wall of the shop behind him. His bag flew off his shoulder and landed ahead of him, at the midpoint between him and the thief.

  Finn let the column of earth fall back into the ground.

  For a moment, she thought he was going to walk it off. He pushed off the wall, raising his hand in her direction, but then he fell back against it, crumpling slowly to the ground until he lay pathetically on his side. His mask, now cracked and loose, was hiked up over his bleeding nose.

  She swung her numbed arm uselessly. It was beginning to prickle. Hopefully it’d wear off soon. The idiot had numbed it so much that he might as well have chopped it off.