by V. E. Schwab
III
Despite a wealth of natural magic, and years of rigorous study alongside the Aven Essen, Kell didn’t know everything there was to know about spells. He knew that, but it was still disconcerting to be surrounded by so much evidence in support of the fact. In Maris’s market, Kell didn’t even recognize half the objects, let alone the enchantments woven through them. When the spellwork was written on an object’s surface, he could usually make it out, but most of the talismans bore nothing but a design, a flourish. Now and then he could feel their intent, not a specific purpose so much as a general sense, but that was all.
He could tell the Feras Stras was a place where most people came with an object in mind, a goal, and the longer he wandered without one, the more he began to feel lost.
Which was likely why he found the room of knives so comforting. It was the kind of place Lila would gravitate to; the smallest weapon was no longer than his palm, the largest greater than the spread of his arms.
He knew Maris didn’t deal in ordinary weapons, but as he squinted at the spellwork shorthand carved into the hilts and blades—every magician had their own dialect—he was still taken aback by the variety.
Swords to cut wounds that would not heal.
Knives to bleed truth instead of blood.
Weapons that channeled power, or stole it, or killed with a single stroke, or—
A low whistle behind him as Alucard appeared at the entrance.
“Picking out a gift?” asked the captain.
“No.”
“Good, then take this.” He dropped a ring into Kell’s hand.
Kell frowned. “I’m flattered, but I think you’re asking the wrong brother.”
An exasperated sound escaped the man’s throat. “I don’t know what it does, but it’s … like you. And I don’t mean pompous and infuriating. The magic surrounding that ring—it’s Antari.”
Kell straightened. “Are you sure?” He squinted at the band. It bore no seals, no obvious spellwork, but the metal hummed faintly against his skin, resonating. Up close, the silver was grooved, not in patterns but in rings. Tentatively, Kell slipped it onto his finger. Nothing happened—not that anything would, of course, since the ship was warded. He let the band slide back off into his palm.
“If you want it, buy it yourself,” he said, handing it to Alucard. But the captain shied away.
“I can’t,” he said. “There’s something else I need.”
“What could you possibly need?”
Alucard looked purposefully away. “Time is wasting, Kell. Just take it.”
Kell sighed and lifted the ring again, holding it between both hands and turning it slowly in search of markings or clues. And then, the strangest thing happened. He pulled gently, and part of the ring came away in his hand.
“Just perfect,” said Alucard, looking around, “now you’ve gone and broken it.”
But Kell didn’t think he had. Instead of holding two broken pieces of one ring, he was now holding two rings, the original somehow unchanged, as if it hadn’t given up half of itself to make the second, which was an exact replica of its brother. The two bands both thrummed in his hands, singing against his skin. Whatever they were, they were strong.
And Kell knew they’d need every drop of strength they could muster.
“Come on,” he said, sliding both rings into his pocket. “Let’s go see Maris.”
* * *
They found Lila still standing outside the woman’s door. Kell could tell it had taken a feat of self-restraint for her to stay put, with so many treasures strewn across the ship. She fidgeted, hands in the pockets of her coat.
“Well?” asked Alucard. “Did you get it?”
She shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I’m saving the best for last.”
“Lila,” chided Kell, “we only have one chance—”
“Yes,” she said, straightening. “So I guess you’ll have to trust me.”
Kell shifted his weight. He wanted to trust her. He didn’t, but he wanted to. For the moment, it would have to be enough.
At last, she flashed a small, sharp smile. “Hey, want to make a bet?”
“No,” said Kell and Alucard at the same time.
Lila shrugged, but when he held the door for her, she didn’t follow.
“Trust,” she said again, leaning on the rail as if she had nowhere else to be. Alucard cleared his throat, and Maris was waiting, and finally Kell had no choice but to leave Lila there, staring hungrily out at the market.
Inside, Maris was sitting at her desk, paging through the ledger. They stood there, silently waiting for her to look up at them. She didn’t.
“Go on, then,” she said, turning the page.
Alucard went first. He stepped forward and produced, of all things, a mirror.
“You’ve got to be joking,” growled Kell, but Maris only smiled.
“Captain Emery, you always have had a knack for finding rare and precious things.”
“How do you think I found you?”
“Flattery is no payment here.”
The sapphire above Alucard’s eye winked. “And yet, like coin, it never hurts.”
“Ah,” she countered, “but like coin, I have no interest in it, either.” She put down the ledger and held one hand out, across the table, but to the side, her fingers drifting toward a large sphere in a stand beside the desk. At first, Kell had taken the object for a globe, its surface raised and dented with impressions that could have been land and sea. But now he saw that it was something else entirely.
“Five years,” she said.
Alucard let out a small, audible gasp, as if he’d taken a blow to the ribs. “Two.”
Maris steepled her fingers. “Do I look like the kind of person who haggles?”
The captain swallowed. “No, Maris.”
“You’re young enough to bear the cost.”
“Four.”
“Alucard,” she warned.
“A lot can be done with a year,” he countered. “And I have already lost three.”
She sighed. “Very well. Four.”
Kell still didn’t understand, not until Alucard set the mirror on the desk’s edge and went to the sphere. Not until he placed his hands in the grooves on either side as the dial turned, ticking up from zero to four.
“Do we have a deal?” she asked.
“Yes,” answered Alucard, bowing his head.
Maris reach out and pulled a lever on the sphere’s stand, and Kell watched in horror as a shudder wracked the captain’s body, shoulders hunched against the strain. And then it was done. The device let go, or he did, and the captain took up his bounty and retreated, cradling the mirror against his chest.
His face had altered slightly, the hollows in his cheeks deepening, the faintest creases showing at the corners of his eyes. He’d aged a fraction.
Four years.
Kell’s attention snapped back to the sphere. It was, like the Inheritor around Maris’s neck, like so many things here, a forbidden kind of magic. Transferring power, transferring life, these things contradicted nature, they—
“And you, princeling?” said Maris, her pale eyes dancing in her dark face.
Kell tore his gaze from the sphere and dug the rings from his coat pocket, and came up with one instead of two. He froze, afraid he’d somehow dropped the second, or worse, that the coat had eaten it the way it sometimes did with coins, but Maris didn’t seem concerned.
“Ah,” she said as he placed the object on the desk, “Antari binding rings. Alucard, your little talent is quite a nuisance sometimes.”
“How do they work?” asked Kell.
“Do I look like a set of instructions?” She sat back. “Those have been sitting in my market for a very long time. Fickle things, they take a certain touch, and you could say that touch has all but died off, though between my boat and yours, you’ve managed quite a collection.” Shock rattled through him. Kell started t
o speak, but she waved a hand. “The third Antari means nothing to me. My interests are bounded by this ship. But as for your purchase.” She steepled her fingers. “Three.”
Three years.
It could have been more.
But it could have been less.
“My life is not my own,” he said slowly.
Maris raised a brow, the small gesture causing the wrinkles to multiply like cracks across her face. “That is your problem, not mine.”
Alucard had gone silent behind him, his eyes open but vacant, as if his mind were somewhere else.
“What good is this to you,” pressed Kell, “if no one else can use it?”
“Ah, but you can use it,” she countered, “and therein lies its worth.”
“If I refuse, we both end up empty-handed. As you said, Maris, I am a dying breed.”
The woman considered him over her fingertips. “Hm. Two for making a valid point,” she said, “and one for annoying me. The cost stays at three, Kell Maresh.” He started to back away when she added, “It would be wise of you to take this deal.”
And there was something in her gaze, something old and steady, and he wondered if she saw something he couldn’t. He hesitated, then moved to the sphere and placed his fingers in the grooves.
The dial ticked down from four to three.
Maris pulled the lever.
It did not hurt, not exactly. The orb seemed to suddenly bind to his hands, holding them in place. His pulse surged in his head, and there was a short, dull ache in his chest, as if someone were drawing the air from his lungs, and then it was done. Three years, gone in three seconds. The sphere released him, and he closed his eyes against a shallow wave of dizziness before taking up the ring, now rightfully his. Bought and paid for. He wanted to be free of this room, this ship. But before he could escape, Maris spoke again, voice heavy as stone.
“Captain Emery,” she said. “Give us the room.”
Kell turned to see Alucard vanish through the door, leaving him alone with the ancient woman who’d just robbed him of three years of life.
She rose from the table, knuckles whitening on her cane as she used it to lever her old body up, then crossed behind the sphere.
“Captain?” he prompted, but she didn’t speak, not yet. He watched as the old woman splayed one hand across its top. She murmured a few words, and the surface of the metal glowed, a tracery of light that withdrew line by line beneath her fingers. When it was gone, Maris exhaled, shoulders loosening as if a weight had been lifted.
“Anesh,” she said, wiping her hands. There was a new ease to her motions, a straightness to her spine. “Kell Maresh,” she said, turning the name over on her tongue. “The prize of the Arnesian crown. The Antari raised as royalty. We’ve met before, you and I.”
“No, we haven’t,” said Kell, even though the sight of her tickled something in his mind. Not a memory, he realized, but the absence of one. The place where a memory should be. The place where it was missing.
He’d been five years old when he was given to the royal family, deposited at the palace with nothing but a sheathed knife, the letters KL carved into its hilt, and a memory spell burned into the crook of his arm, his short life before that moment erased.
“You were young,” she said. “But I thought by now you might remember.”
“You knew me before?” His head spun at the thought. “How?”
“I deal in rare things, Antari. There are few things rarer than you. I met your parents,” continued Maris. “They brought you here.”
Kell felt dizzy, ill. “Why?”
“Perhaps they were greedy,” she said absently. “Perhaps they were afraid. Perhaps they wanted what was best. Perhaps they wanted only to be rid of you.”
“If you know the answer—”
“Do you really want to know?” she cut in.
He started to say yes, the word automatic, but it stuck in his throat. How many years had he lain awake in bed, thumb brushing the scar at his elbow, wondering who he was, who he’d been, before?
“Do you want to know the last thing your mother said? What the initials stand for on your father’s knife? Do you want to know who your true family was?”
Maris rounded her desk and took her seat with a slow precision that belied her age. She took up a quill and scribbled something on a slip of parchment, folding it twice into a small, neat square. She held it out between two aged fingers.
“To remove the spell I put on you.”
Kell stared at the paper, his vision sliding in and out. He swallowed.
“What is the price?”
A smile played across the woman’s old mouth. “This one, and this one alone, is free. Call it a debt now paid, a kindness, or a closing door. Call it whatever you want, but expect nothing more.”
He willed his body forward, willed his hand not to tremble as it reached for the paper.
“You still have that crease between your eyes,” she said. “Still the same sad-faced boy you were that day.”
Kell closed his fist around the slip of paper. “Is that all, Maris?”
A sigh escaped like steam between her lips. “I suppose.” But her voice followed him through the door. “Strange thing about forgetting spells,” she added as he hovered on the threshold, caught between shadow and sharp light. “Most will fade on their own. Stuck on at first, sure as stone. But over time, they slide right off. Unless we don’t want to let them go.…”
With that, a gust of wind cut through, and the door to Maris’s market swung shut behind him.
IV
The market called to Delilah Bard.
She couldn’t see the threads of magic like Alucard, couldn’t read the spells like Kell, but the pull was there all the same, enticing as new coins, fine jewels, sharp weapons.
Temptation: that was the word for it, the urge to let herself look, touch, take.
But that shine, that unspoken promise—of strength, of power—reminded Lila of the sword she’d found back in Grey London, the way Vitari’s magic had called to her through the steel, singing of promise. Almost everything in her life had changed since that night, but she still didn’t trust that kind of blind, bottomless want.
So she waited.
Waited until the sounds beyond the door had stopped, waited until Kell and Alucard were gone, waited until there was no one and nothing left to stop her, until Maris was alone, and the want in Lila’s chest had cooled into something hard, sharp, usable.
And then she went in.
The old woman was at her desk, cupping Lila’s watch in one gnarled hand as if it were a piece of ripened fruit as she drew a nail across the crystal surface.
It is not Barron, Lila told herself. That watch is not him. It’s just a thing, and things are meant to be used.
The dog heaved a sigh beneath Maris’s feet, and it must have been a trick of the light, because the queen of the market looked … younger. Or, at least, a few wrinkles shy of ancient.
“Nothing strike your fancy, dearie?” she said without looking up.
“I know what I want.”
Maris set the watch down, then, with a surprising degree of care. “And yet, your hands are empty.”
Lila pointed at the Inheritor hanging from the woman’s throat. “That’s because you’re wearing my prize.”
Maris’s hand drifted up. “This old piece?” she demurred, twirling the Inheritor between her fingers as if it were a simple pendant.
“What can I say?” said Lila casually. “I have a weakness for antiquated things.”
A smile split the old woman’s face, the innocence shed like a skin. “You know what it is.”
“A smart pirate keeps her best treasure close.”
Maris’s sandy eyes drifted back to the silver watch. “A valid point. And if I refuse?”
“You said everything had a price.”
“Perhaps I lied.”
Lila smiled and said without malice, “Then perhaps I’ll just cut it from your wrinkle
d neck.”
A gravelly laugh. “You wouldn’t be the first to try, but I don’t think that would go well for either of us.” She traced the hem of her white tunic. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get blood out of these clothes.” Maris took up the watch again, weighing it in her palm. “You should know, I don’t often take things without power, but then few people realize that memory casts its own spell, that it writes itself on an object just like magic, waiting to be picked over—or picked apart—by clever fingers. Another city. Another home. Another life. All bound up in something as simple as a cup, a coat, a silver watch. The past is a powerful thing, don’t you think?”
“The past is the past.”
A withering look. “Lies don’t write themselves on me, Miss Bard.”
“I’m not lying,” said Lila. “The past is the past. It doesn’t live in any one thing. It certainly doesn’t live in something that can be given away. If it did, I would have just handed you everything I was, everything I am. But you can’t have that, not even for a look around your market.” Lila tried to slow her heartbeat before continuing. “What you can have is a silver watch.”
Maris’s gaze held hers. “A pretty speech.” She lifted the Inheritor over her head and set it on the desk beside the timepiece. Her face betrayed no strain, but when the object hit the wood, it made a solid sound, as if it weighed a great deal more than it seemed, and the woman’s shoulders seemed lighter for the lack of it. “What will you give me?”
Lila cocked her head. “What do you want?”
Maris leaned back and crossed her legs, one white boot resting on the dog’s back. It didn’t seem to mind. “You’d be surprised how rarely people ask. They come here assuming I’ll want their money or power, as if I’ve any need for either.”
“Why run this market, then?”
“Someone has to keep an eye on things. Call it a passion, or a hobby. But as to the question of payment…” She sat forward. “I’m an old woman, Miss Bard—older than I look—and I really want only one thing.”
Lila lifted her chin. “And what is that?”
She spread her hands. “Something I don’t already have.”
“A tall order, by the looks of this place.”
“Not really,” said Maris. “You want the Inheritor. I’ll sell it to you for the price of an eye.”