Caster

by Elsie Chapman

  The rain has stopped by the time I get to Textile. Some sectors in the city are noted for their smells, but some leave their mark on the eyes, and Textile is one of these. Windows of shops grow colorful and lustrous with their bolts of fabric on display, posed mannequins dressed in suits and gowns. My mother has to come here whenever the shop needs new napkins or place mats. But before, she would send Shire, who would then take me, and the two of us would study the windows for hours.

  Today, though, I see none of this. The Mothery is in the middle of the sector, and as I weave my way through the streets to get there, all that’s on my mind is convincing Piper to be my backer. It helps that the sun is already low, so that it flashes off the windows and hurts my eyes if I’m not careful. Midnight, getting closer.

  Piper is beginning to feel essential. One, I need a steady flow of marks for ring starters, to get to fight. Two, I need the answers to the secrets that haunt me, and Piper could be a key. Did she back a fighter last year? Did she see Finch kill Shire? Could she know if he cheated? And three—well, it’d be nice to have one person on my side. Everyone else in the tournament I’ve spoken to is off-limits. Kylin’s just a kid and a part of me is drawn to protecting her, but she’s also a competitor. Navy is the champion’s backer. Embry is Embry.

  The Mothery’s window display is beautiful—wide spools of silk in different shades of blue are stacked in the back to imitate a sky of old, while spools of silk in shades of brown and green line the floor to create a healthy earth. Tinier spools of gold and silver are inserted randomly in between all the blue of the sky, for stars.

  I head inside and a bell over the door dings. The shop is basically the window display, only bigger. More bolts of silk along the walls, cabinets here and there with shelves stuffed with panels of color. The place smells how it looks, like roses and perfume and dust.

  Piper is helping two customers choose between patterns, and I wait for them to leave, doing my best to not run my hands over every single inch of silk I see.

  Then it’s just Piper and me. She shuts the door, casts leftover magic to flip over the sign on the window to say CLOSED. She makes no move to lock the door, and I wonder why she’s assuming no one’s going to try to come in anyway.

  Maybe it’s because no one trying to uncover secrets would ever guess they could be in a place full of silk. Or maybe the customers around here really would stop at the sign. But mostly I think it’s just Piper. How if someone came in, she’d only have to give them a single pointed look to make them leave again. Piper is someone you cross at your own risk.

  I take in her sleek pantsuit and perfect makeup as she approaches and barely keep from pushing back my still-wet-from-rain hair in response. The look in her eyes as she scans me is a reminder that I’m just business, a potential investment. How I need her more than she needs me. How neither of us is in this for friends.

  “Rudy the First,” she says. Her gaze goes to my casting arm, the palm of my hand. I think of how Coral did the same thing, as if potential can be judged by sight. “I’ve been thinking all day about that move you pulled on Luan.”

  “Because you want flair.”

  She smiles. “If you’re going to fight, you might as well do it in style.”

  “You invited me here so we could talk about you maybe being my backer.”

  “Do you know what it means to have a backer?”

  I nod. “You give me marks for ring starters, and if I become champion, you get a percent of the pot.”

  “Wrong.”

  I peer up at her, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “Having a backer means you’re representing that backer and yourself.” She circles me, all gloss and hair and silk, just as intimidating as Embry. “It means that backer’s put their marks and their faith in you. Having a backer means showing everyone they know how to pick a winner. Having a backer means they trust you to know how to use your magic and not for your magic to use you.”

  The age-old question for all of us casters of full magic. We carry it with us as surely as we carry the magic itself, one never without the other.

  “I know how to use my magic,” I say.

  “I don’t doubt that you think that. But if you’re going to represent me, I need to know what you represent. What honor means to you. What dishonor means.”

  I blink away the sting of tears. It catches me so off guard that it takes me a second to be able to speak. Ghosts are swirling around me, and I don’t know if I want to reach out for them or ask them to leave me alone.

  But this might be my best chance to win Piper over.

  “My sister, Shire, was the fighter Finch killed last year,” I say.

  She goes still. Her gaze is nearly soft now as she looks more carefully at me. “You’re Shire’s sister? Yes, your faces—they’re the same, deep down. Shire was very good.”

  “But I’ll have to be better.”

  “To beat Finch? Yes.”

  “I have to do what Shire couldn’t.”

  “Finch is a merciless fighter, his hunger for victory boundless. Like Etana the Cruel. We must respect him as a fighter if not as a caster, yes?”

  I nod. “What do you know about his backer?”

  “His older brother, Oliver. Who often looks like he’d rather be anywhere else than ringside, but I suppose Finch is family, and family can complicate things.”

  My throat has gone tight. “Family can definitely.”

  And his name is Oliver. It’s nicer than Navy.

  So he backs his brother but doesn’t fight. He might not even like fighting. I wonder if they’re brothers in full magic, the way Shire and I were sisters. I’m reminded that I’ve never seen Oliver cast either way.

  “Family might be especially hard for those two,” Piper says, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s just them on their own, running the Salt Lick over in the Spice Sector.”

  “What happened to their parents?”

  “All I know is that they’re gone.”

  It means Finch fights with ghosts behind him, too. How fresh are they? Do they have anything to do with him being in the tournament in the first place?

  “Do you think Finch cheated last year to win?” I ask. “If Shire was the favorite all along?”

  Piper taps her lips with a finger. “Cheat? It’s hard to cheat in a tournament with so few technical rules. Perhaps you’re thinking about bending the rules rather than breaking them. Because there’s still honor in doing what must be done to survive, even if such ways are ugly.”

  “Ugly?”

  Her lipsticked mouth curls into a smile. “Survival and ugliness are often one and the same, and as a fighter, you need to remember that.”

  I try not to shudder. For all her beauty and soft silks, Piper is as barbed as wire.

  “Okay, so if it’s still honorable to fight ugly when it comes to survival,” I say, “then it becomes dishonorable when it’s no longer about survival. Ugly versus dirty.”

  “Very generally speaking, yes.”

  “So do you think Finch fought dirty last year to win?”

  Piper smooths another nail. “I suppose it’s possible. A lot of things are made possible with full magic, depending on the caster—their capacity, control, intent—”

  “What about gathered spells?”

  Her expression stiffens. “Careful, Rudy. The line between honor and dishonor can shift, yes, but never more so than with spells some believe should never have existed in the first place.”

  I flush. “I just want to know what they are. How they started.”

  “Back in the days of the Guild of Then, members began to experiment with spells. They wanted to create ones for effects normal full magic wouldn’t do. But these man-made spells ended up calling for full magic that was beyond what was found in the earth, and so they ended badly, with casters dying or falling ill and never recovering. So the Guild stopped experimenting and that was that.” She lifts an arched brow. “But no full magic is limited by form—once it learns
the shape of a spell, it never truly forgets it. So that ghosts of those spells are always just lying around, waiting to be discovered and formed again.”

  “And these are gathered spells?”

  “Gathered spells are what remain of those experiments. Some casters—gatherers are what they’re called now—began to view magic as a toy at their disposal, and so re-formed certain man-made spells back into being. And instead of dying as a cost for these gathered spells, casters have to pay a great price in other ways.”

  I picture it. These spells that are as formless as my magic, but instead of red amorphous clouds, they are invisible vapors, floating around lost in the ether, before someone else’s cloud of magic comes and finds them.

  “Can you give me an example of a gathered spell?” I ask.

  “Bringing the dead back to life. Snuffing out the sun. Time looping. The price is perhaps another caster’s life. Their mind. Their magic.” Piper lifts her other arched brow even higher. “Need I go on?”

  “No, it’s okay.” No wonder the Guild of Then tried to destroy such spells. There’s a madness in them that makes the earth slowly falling apart day by day seem almost kind.

  Corpses can be made to breathe again, but the intangibles that make up who that person is in terms of their mind are gone forever.

  Snuffing out the sun is, in general, not a great idea.

  Time loops are dangerous because they play with reality.

  And to lose your magic … It comes dangerously close to losing yourself. A person might not be their magic, but if their magic isn’t them, then what is it? What part of you has been lost, sent into that ether, waiting to be found or taken?

  “I don’t know how you’d find out if Finch used a gathered spell anyway,” Piper says. “He would likely never admit outright the price he must have paid for it. You could cast a reveal spell, I suppose, though I doubt he would ever give you the chance to try.”

  Shire, if you could do it all over again, would you use a gathered spell if it meant living? How far would you go to stay alive, to win? Would you let magic use you instead of you using it?

  It takes a moment before I notice Piper has stopped talking. She’s measuring me up like I’m one of her bolts of silk, and she’s deciding the best way to cut me, to hang me up for display.

  “You really are determined to succeed where your sister could not. Revenge can be a dangerous motive, but it’s also an honorable one.” Her gray eyes flash, their lashes coated into tiny feathers. “I will be your backer, Rudy the First, if you’ll be my fighter.”

  Relief, trepidation, a sense of things falling into place—my stomach’s churning even as I smile. “My real name is Aza, but I’ll stay Rudy for the tournament.”

  “Aza. All right. I’ll save that for after you win, then. Tonight, come find me before the fight, and I’ll give you marks to buy your ring starters.” She reaches for a bolt of cream silk, the fabric of it shot through with pink and red peony blossoms. “Now, for the armband you’ll wear to show that you’re fighting on behalf of the Mothery.”

  She smiles and presses a folded ribbon of silk into my hand. “I’ll find you at midnight. Don’t be late.”

  I make my way to the Flower Sector in the dark, winding through alleys and taking small detours. It’s not likely that Jihen and Cormac are on me this far out of Tea, but I’m still annoyed by having been caught off guard by both. I curse them from beneath my mask. All the other fighters are going to be sneaking around tonight, too, but none of them have to also keep shaking off a gang enforcer and Scout.

  Inside my starter bag, the empty glass jar of healing meds clanks softly against stones and twigs. One more thing I still need to get done. Tonight, then, after the fight, and I curse Cormac again for showing up as he did.

  Thorn Avenue is on the east end so that I have to navigate through the entirety of the neighborhood to get there. But the night air is sweet with the scent of roses and lavender, and sidewalks are carpeted with fallen blossoms. Baskets of blooms decorate every corner, and if a shop isn’t a flower one, it’s selling herbs or grasses or small potted trees.

  I pass the sector’s display cage hanging from a lamppost, and someone’s taken the trouble to wind green vines around the metal bars. Scouts wouldn’t normally allow the vines—the Ivor inside could turn the vines into whips or another weapon of some kind—but this one is bent nearly in half, too wrecked to want to cast anymore.

  The address of the fighting ring turns out to be an apartment building. It’s a low-rise, and it’s old, the banisters full of rust, the siding warped, moss on the dipped roof. And clearly abandoned, with the weeds that make up the lawn knee-high and the adjacent carport a long and empty stretch of cracked cement.

  It’s a place at its end, just as the mall was. It must be easier for the Guild to maintain its magic over dead things. To not have to work against the will of something living.

  I cross the street and head toward the front entrance. Roses leave my nose as the scent of spent firecrackers takes over. Closer now, the soot stains on the walls show themselves, and some of the windows are shattered inside their buckled frames.

  Fire is what chased everyone away. The yellow and blue kinds, not the gentle red of our teahouse.

  I find the black coin—the key starter—and cast on the lock. The pain is a minor twinge in my bones as the metal of the bolt retracts.

  The lobby is small and smells of age and mildew and rotting wood. Through the broken windows, moonlight leaks in and reveals the blackened floral carpeting, the warped paintings on the walls. The water used to put out the fire lingers as a cool dampness in the air.

  But there’s the faint echo of voices. The walls and ceiling are full of small tremors, reverberating with the presence of the tournament two floors above.

  I cast on the elevator using the black coin. Just as with the mall, the power being already cut here makes no difference, either, and the Guild’s tournament magic sets the motor running. I press the button for the third floor and fall back against the side of the elevator.

  My nervousness climbs just as the elevator does. It’s almost harder walking in to fight now that I know what to expect. Or maybe it’s just that I know what’s expected of me. I know everything that can be lost now if I screw up.

  How can I repeat what still feels like a fluke? What if every spell I’ve ever cast was never a sure thing, my control over them only perceived? What if seeing Finch makes it hard for me to see that line between honor and dishonor?

  I shove my mask away, take a deep breath as the elevator doors open, and step out into the mouths of apartments that no longer exist. Yellow and blue fire were hungriest here, so that the Guild chose it to be the location of tonight’s fighting ring—easiest to fill what is no longer there.

  The third floor is a cavernous shell, its space full of high, shadowed corners and thick support beams charred along their edges. All its inner walls are gone, with only broken wooden framing and pipes to mark where they were. Its ceiling is missing, too—peering upward is to see a floating darkness, then the hint of the fourth floor’s ceiling. Random furniture the fire didn’t get to is pushed up against the outer walls, remnants of those who once lived here—a stained couch, mattresses, an old-fashioned console. Light glows down from the dozen or so bulbs that hover in the air. That light wasn’t visible from the ground, I remember—the Guild’s magic, woven to hide even the smallest parts of the tournament from the outside.

  Just as with the food court, the entire space is crowded with casters. There’s a table set up on the left side of the room, and someone’s scrawled the word REGISTRATION on the wall behind it in thick white letters. The starter counter is at the far wall, while the bets counter is on my right. Here again the casters are the loudest and most anxious, pushing at one another to get their bets in on time.

  “Twenty-mark technique on Wilson to cast five bone spells, five-mark status on Nola to survive!”

  “Hundred marks on Finch to survive!”
An image of Finch flashes, his eyes cold green glass. I’ve already noticed his face in Oliver’s—has he seen Shire’s in mine?

  “Seventy marks on Pav to request a bow-out!”

  “Fifteen marks on Rudy to survive!”

  More gamblers betting on me.

  A surge of pride leaves my face warm, even as fresh fear is a trickle in my stomach. I want this, and I need the marks collected with each bet. But expectations are also weights, and they’re piling up now, breathing down my neck—faith, revenge, escape.

  “Rudy.”

  I turn to see Piper swiftly crossing the floor. She’s changed into a green silk dress, her purse a mass of sequins and beads hanging near her hip. Her red hair is coiled into a sleek crown on top of her head.

  She takes out marks from her purse and hands them over to me. “Two hundred for your ring starters. Are you ready?”

  I slide the wad into my pocket. “I think so?”

  She purses her glossed-over lips. “Try again.”

  “I mean, yes, I’m more than ready. Absolutely. I’ll out-flair everyone in this room.”

  “Well, you’ll never out-flair me, but the other twenty fighters are fair game.”

  I take out the folded silk ribbon from my starter bag. “Should I put this on now?”

  “As good a time as any. Let me help.”

  She winds the ribbon around my upper arm, snugly enough so that it doesn’t move when I do. Silk peony blossom print shimmers as I move my arm beneath the lights. The weight of expectation grows another degree.

  Piper squeezes my arm through the band. “There will be many bets placed on you this match, so don’t forget to go by the bets counter afterward to claim your winnings.”

  I nod, flush a bit. “I already heard a gambler bet on me. To survive.”

  “Then don’t let them down, or me.” Her tone isn’t unfeeling, but it reminds me how the tournament is a business to her and nothing personal. After all, just this time yesterday it was Luan who was wearing the Mothery’s silk band. Has a backer ever walked away from their fighter, if another becomes a better investment?