Wards and their guardians. At least a half dozen of each. They often watch the agora on market days—to keep the peace, supposedly, but also to keep an eye out for any unsanctioned magic.
I haven’t drawn this close to them since the day they killed my father. I raise my hands in surrender, because that’s all I can do until I can try to convince them I’m not a bloodmage.
But then someone screams, “She’s going to cast her magic again!”
The horses pull up short, and the warded man in the lead slashes his arm through the air at me.
My world goes dark.
* * *
A light slap on the cheek brings me to semiconsciousness. I groan. The ground I lie on has the chilly smoothness of marble, and my hands are bound tightly behind my back. There’s a hush around me, but I can hear the scuffing of quite a few pairs of boots, the clop of shifting hooves, and the thrum of the city in the distance, muted as if by tall buildings, taller than I’m used to.
I open my eyes to see the blue-green, veil-covered sky shimmering alongside an inexplicable explosion of flowers. But then someone looms over me and shoves something between my lips, pinching my jaw open in a firm grip. It’s a skin of wine. I never object to wine, and so I take a pull without protesting. But when I try to stop there, they hold it against my mouth, tipping it back, until I choke and sputter and drink a good deal more than even I would want to.
I cough as soon as I’m freed. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Not sick,” a man says. “Just too muddled to do much of anything. Can’t be too careful, now can we?”
“I’m already muddled after what I had last night.” But then I taste it in the back of my throat: a sweetness too overpowering for any wine alone. The dizziness hits me a moment later.
“Why wake me up just to drug me?” I mutter. Rough hands haul me to my feet. For a moment, the world is too bright and fuzzy to make out.
“Because you need to walk now that the horses have gone as far as they can. You also need to answer questions—a lot of questions—but not use magic,” the man says, and I realize I’m speaking to the leader of the wards who found me, the one who knocked me out with a sigil in the market.
The market. Where I used blood magic. And now I’m under arrest and surrounded by wards. It’s almost too much to take in, and my wool-stuffed brain isn’t helping. I still have the presence of mind to look for them. I can only spot those horrible shadows now if I squint; they mostly blur into my strange surroundings. Nevertheless, to be near so many guardians makes me shiver.
Even if I can barely see straight, I still vividly remember how those shadows coalesced into men the day my father died. I can picture their cold, dead eyes. Hear the screams. Feel the wrongness of death walking among the living—killing the living.
Despite my fogginess, a different kind of clarity begins to sharpen inside me:
I’m fucked.
“Where am I?” I ask. White buildings swoop in the background, marble everywhere, intricate whorls of it comprising a massive trellis that arches gracefully over the square we stand in. Trellises are usually made of wood, and something about the many-branched shape of this one disturbs me. I realize it looks like a sun-bleached rib cage, and its blossoms like lichen growths. Creepy or not, I’m in a much nicer part of the polis than I usually frequent. Horses and red-cloaked people ring me in a dizzying circle.
And then my eyes snag on the swirling white spike of the palace towering over me.
“You’re in the royal agora, about to enter the Hall of the Wards,” the man answers me. “I am Captain Marklos, and you are…?”
My heart kicks like a horse in my chest, cutting briefly though my haze. “Why are we here? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t say you did. But you are a bloodmage like me, so we just need to sort a few things out first.” He says it casually, trying to sell the friendly act, but I’m not buying.
With my fingers, I make the slicing motion of the sigil for sever, which I usually use to cut yarn. I hope I hit the ropes binding me and not my wrists. Instead, I hit … nothing. Because the sigil doesn’t do anything. When I try to feel the shape of it, the true form that’s a mold for the world, forcing reality to fit and summoning the sigil into being, it simply slips away from me. And then my feet are trying to slip out from under my body.
“Steady now, I’ve got you,” the captain says—as if he wasn’t the one who drugged me—his grip on my arm like an iron band. He launches into motion, hauling me with him. “Isn’t this exciting?”
I can barely breathe, and not from excitement.
A wide stone building lined in white marble pillars rises up before us. Unlike the rest of the city, where stone goes mostly unadorned outside of public gardens, these columns are twined in scarlet vines in a pattern too regular and intricate to be natural. They must have been grown with magic. The decorative tops of the columns are difficult to make out through the foliage, but one with sparser growth leaves no doubt in my mind: It’s meant to look like the knobby end of a bone.
Bones, all around me, covered in blossoms. A death-obsessed city, my father called it. But this is the opposite of yesterday’s pageantry, where the living masqueraded as the dead. This is death dressed up as life, and it’s far more frightening.
I try to halt before we enter the building. I feel like if I go in there, I will never come back out.
“I’m not a bloodmage,” I insist, but the words slip and slur on my tongue.
“Of course you are. I pricked your finger while you were unconscious.” The captain glances back at me warily, without letting me stop. “I’ve never felt such raw power in someone’s blood before. The question is how, and more importantly why, you’ve hidden from us for so long. You are a citizen of this polis, and as such, you have a duty to it like everyone. Your duty is just … different. More important than most.”
“Wait.” I try to pull away on pure reflex. I’m not sure where I could run, even if my hands weren’t tied behind my back. Bound like I am, unable to use sigils, it’s hopeless.
“Rovan, don’t! Just go with them, and it’ll be okay.” Bethea’s voice.
I turn in surprise, nearly tripping. My friend is among the group just behind me and the captain. I didn’t see her before. She isn’t bound, but her face is drawn beneath her still-damp hair. I hope she’s more afraid for me than she is of me. But then I remember how she stood in front of the mob for me, and my attention catches on her pale lips.
“She’s cold. The least you assholes could do is offer her one of your fancy cloaks.”
Most of them stare at me in shock, for my language or audacity, I’m not sure. And I don’t care, because a ward actually unpins her chlamys and drapes it over Bethea’s shoulders.
“You were the one who tried to drown her in the fountain,” Captain Marklos said. “Rovan, is it?”
He frowns when I only glower at him, then tugs me back into motion, heading between the columns into the massive entry hall. The polished marble is cool under my bare feet, smoother than anything I’ve felt before. More unnatural red vines climb the walls and pillars, enough to drape the ceiling high overhead in a leafy canopy.
I struggle to get my breath under control. I need to focus.
“What is she doing here, anyway?” I ask, tossing my head back at Bethea. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Witnesses said she was the one caught by your magic, so we took her for questioning just in case.” In case you don’t want to answer our questions, is the unspoken threat. “Are you friends?”
I don’t respond. The less involved Bethea is, the better. Maybe she’s thinking the same thing, because she doesn’t answer, either. That’s wise on her part, even if it stings a little.
It shouldn’t sting. I’m the one who has chosen to never get too attached. I’ve been planning to leave Thanopolis, after all. And besides, terrible things happen to people who get too close to you, at least in this city.
And at least if you’re a bloodmage.
“You have nothing to fear, Rovan,” the captain says. “We just need to list your name in the Registry to establish your future bloodline and assign you a guardian for your protection. It’s all for the best. Think how much good you can do for your fellow citizens, your king, once you’re able to use your magic in service of the polis.”
Guardian. My feet stutter to a halt before a column-lined hallway that cuts a wide swath into the center of the building. My father died to keep himself—to keep me—from the guardians. I’ve despised and dodged them every day since.
“Excuse me, I’m really going to be sick,” I say.
“I highly doubt—”
I double over and throw up on his boots. Red to match the vines splatters the pale marble of the floor with truly stunning range.
“Goddess,” Marklos hisses, abandoning his grip on me to back away. “I didn’t give you that much wine!”
“I told you”—I gag—“I was already hungover.” I spit up even more, hunching over between my knees, arms twisted painfully behind my back.
“She’s telling the truth,” Bethea murmurs somewhere behind me. “She had … a lot to drink last night.”
When I finally glance up with teary eyes and sticky lips, the man gives me a look that rests confidently between disgusted and disappointed. I’m fine with that. Used to it, frankly. And at least he isn’t trying to force more drugged wine down my throat. With any luck, there was only time for a partial dose to kick in.
“You,” he declares, “are disgraceful.”
“I know,” I blurt. “You’ve made a mistake. I want to be retested. I’m not a bloodmage, and I can prove it.”
The captain’s understanding smile isn’t comforting. “Of course. I was just about to have you tested again in front of the Ward Council to show them what I found. There’s your opportunity to prove me wrong.”
I try not to let anything show on my face as he drags me to my feet. Because I can fool him if I have another chance at the test … but I’ll need someone else’s blood to swap in place of my own. I’ve only ever used my mother’s. And yet I once saw my father rip a stranger’s life force out through her neck. Maybe I can borrow a little blood from someone else even if their finger isn’t pricked. But, without such easy access as a needle gives, it would take a subtle touch not to alert anyone, and I’m not sure I can manage subtlety in my drugged state.
If only …
There’s a cry behind me. “Rovan!”
It can’t be. That’s my mother’s voice.
I try to tear away from my captor. “Mother!”
I shouldn’t be so glad to see her. I should want my mother far away from all of this. But I want to fall into her arms as if I were nine instead of nineteen.
“Let me go,” my mother shouts at the two wards who’ve seized her with invisible sigils in the middle of the entry hall. “That’s my daughter!”
Marklos eyes her curiously. “Let her through. Perhaps we’ve found another unregistered bloodmage.”
“I am not,” my mother spits, swatting a chunk of her frizzy, gray-streaked dark hair out of her face. She pushes through the crowd to me. The fact that she doesn’t comment on my appearance proves more than anything how worried she is. She must have sprinted here, by the sweat on her face. “Release my daughter.”
Captain Marklos smiles his unconvincing smile. “I will in just a moment, after she’s answered a few questions. Would you care to join us?”
My mother huffs and straightens her chiton. “Of course.” She meets my eyes. “You can test her, you can test me, and then you can leave us be.”
The captain cocks his head. “Do I know you?”
My mother draws herself up to her full, meager height. “No. Why would you? I have nothing to do with you lot. I mind my own business, keep my head down. I’m a simple craftswoman, a weaver, as is my daughter.”
He casts a disdainful glance down at the spray of my vomit. “A veritable artist, it seems.” He continues down the hall, dragging me after him. “We’ll see for certain.”
I have no choice but to stumble onward. “How did you know they took me?” I ask my mother out of the corner of my mouth. She’s by my side.
Her voice is tight, and her eyes dart around at our ostentatious, magic-infused surroundings. She’s clearly more frightened than she seemed a moment ago. “The man who sells fruit came to the house and told me. He saw … what happened.”
So even after the fruit vendor discovered I can wield blood magic, even after I vomited on his oranges, he still warned my mother. At least one person in the market doesn’t hate me—the one who has the most right to—and hopefully that means I can convince the rest of them that their eyes deceived them. At least long enough for me to depart for Skyllea and leave my mother in peace.
Maybe there’s still a chance I can get my life back. Never mind my dreams. The thought feels fragile, as if even considering it too much might break it.
And first, I have to pass a test.
3
Our party soon reaches a wide, high-ceilinged chamber, all of it twined in scarlet vines as if we’re standing inside a beating heart. Tall windows cast huge slants of light onto a half circle of red marble tiers like an amphitheater’s. But now I’m down on the stage, with the audience arrayed above me. Luckily the seating isn’t full. This meeting has obviously been called on short notice.
“My lords and ladies of the council,” the captain calls, hauling me forward by my still-bound arms. “This is the girl I’ve summoned you here to see, and these are her witnesses.” He nods at my mother and Bethea.
Several dozen people quit their murmuring to look up. Just like Captain Marklos and the other wards I’ve seen, they all have red marks decorating their skin. Bloodlines. I still don’t entirely know what they mean. Whenever I ask my mother about my father’s, she says it was his history written on his skin, but then she’ll inevitably go on to grumble about handsome blue-haired mages with grand pasts and future plans who sweep you off your feet and then get killed, leaving you to raise a child all alone in an uncaring world. Honestly, I don’t think she knows much more about bloodlines than I do. All I know is those marks are sigils, only in numbers far greater than the few simple ones I know, and a bloodmage is much more powerful with them than without.
“And what do you say, Marklos?” a severe woman at the center of the first tier demands. “Who is she?”
“Lady Acantha,” he addresses her with a brief bow of his head—she’s obviously noble—and then he gestures at me. “This is an unregistered bloodmage caught this very morning working a sigil of great strength. She kept this young woman from falling off the king’s gazebo in the agora, most notably drawing all the water from the fountain to break her fall.”
The king’s gazebo, not the goddess’s gazebo. It’s an odd thing to notice, especially at a time like this, but I do. Perhaps they honor the first king of the polis, Athanatos, before the goddess?
Acantha’s eyes widen. “That would be utterly unprecedented from someone without the strength of a bloodline behind their magic. Did you see it?”
“No,” Marklos says, dragging Bethea forward, “but she did, as did many others.”
Acantha turns to Bethea. “What happened? How do you know this supposed bloodmage?”
Bethea quivers in fear, nearly in tears. “She … we…”
“Start somewhere. What were you doing on top of the gazebo?”
“Drinking wine and k-kissing.”
I can’t help giving her a sidelong look. Dear goddess. She doesn’t need to tell the woman everything.
The councilwoman’s eyebrows rise. “And then?”
“I f-fell. Something caught me.”
“What thing?”
Bethea shoots me a terrified glance. “I felt a tug on my body. All over my body, from the inside. And then I landed in water.”
“Water that wasn’t there to begin with,” M
arklos adds.
“Yes, thank you, I realize that,” Acantha says drily. She turns back to Bethea. “What is it you do?”
“Do?”
“Yes, do, for a living, you or your family.”
“My mother tells fortunes and communes with the dead.”
“Oh?” I don’t like the tone of the woman’s voice. “How interesting. Maybe the aptitude runs in your family. We can always use more acolytes in the necropolis.”
Bethea lets out a frightened squeak.
The necropolis is where the city’s dead are washed and interred while their shades journey to the underworld, but also where shadow priests, those who study the magic of death, dwell along with their acolytes. To understand death, shadow priests must stay close to it, even live like the dead, separate from the things that make life worthwhile, in my opinion: light, music, laughter, wine, and sex.
Shadow priests’ abilities are learned rather than innate. Anyone other than a bloodmage can study death magic—the pneumatic arts, as they’re called—as long as they’re willing to act like corpses for long enough, and provided they live long enough. Shadow priests tend to become so enamored with death that they die quickly. Honestly, death magic seems more like a terrible disease to me.
It’s shadow priests who perform the rite to bind guardian shades to their wards, since blood magic and death magic can never be wielded by the same person—at least not without killing them immediately, I’ve been told. I don’t know what the binding process involves and hope never to find out.
And I certainly don’t want Bethea to join the shadow priests as punishment simply for knowing me—to be cursed with a fate almost worse than death and then die sooner rather than later, anyway.
In the Ravenous Dark Page 3