But I did not seek out the Water Market because I craved death.
I sought the Market because I craved life.
Truthfully, I belonged more here than I did in the sanitized life I’d been born into.
These were not my people either––not by blood, nor by culture––so I could not explain the affinity there, but I also could not refute it.
Sighing as the square of blue and white light grew brighter up ahead, signaling the Water Market’s end, I mentally prepared myself to rejoin that sterile world––one smelling mainly of lavender-sweetened air and the sharper bite of chemical cleaners.
I tried to wrap my mind around the classes I had that day.
Illusionism was the main one.
It was every witch’s signature course, the one that mattered more than all the rest, given the need for it in the work of Heaven’s Sky. I had a test that day––a big one. As the reality of that crowded back into my mind, my anxiety worsened.
I found myself watching that square of light as it grew larger, counting the seconds to where I must return to that version of myself. I’d just begun to put on my normal, mask-like countenance, the one I wore every day in school...
When someone grabbed hold of my elbow.
I jumped violently, turning. She spoke before I could focus on her face.
“You, witch! You witch... right?”
I stiffened, blinking down at the old woman’s wrinkled face.
Was this about the lizard? I didn’t recognize the woman from the scene earlier.
She was small, hunched over with some kind of spine problem that caused her eyes to peer up at mine through black, greasy-looking hair. The top of her head only reached my chest, and I could see gray roots where her dyed hair had grown out, showing the sharp edges of some cheap product that left her hair brittle and stringy. The woman’s teeth sat in strangely symmetrical angles in her mouth, angles that reminded me of a pet rabbit I’d been given by my Uncle Karlen as a child. Unlike the rabbit, this woman’s teeth were stained dark brown with tobacco and betel nut.
“You witch?” she queried again.
She clearly hadn’t been schooled in the Regent’s tongue. She likely spoke the commoner language, with only a few words of Regent’s thrown in. I knew bits and pieces of that more guttural language, but not well, since I’d taught it to myself.
Facility with language was yet another of those talents of mine that seemed to have little use.
Still, I attempted to exercise that minor gift now.
“I am a witch,” I confessed in her language. “But I am only a student, auntie.” I bowed politely, in deference to her age. “I may not be able to help you, if you require a real witch’s services. My magic is very small.”
The woman barely seemed to hear my words. Her eyes lit up.
“You speak like me?” She grinned with those stained teeth, then bowed her head in respect. Before I could bow back, she snatched my hand out of the air by my hip and touched my fingers to her damp forehead.
Another rule broken, but I didn’t pull away.
Truthfully, I didn’t mind.
Also, I could hardly make it known I was a member of the royal family, so any attempt to resist would only come off as cruel.
A second smile split the woman’s lined face when she released my hand.
“You come with me, honored sister... come with me.”
Catching hold of my arm that time, she tugged me forward with surprising strength, yanking both of us towards a narrow opening between two of the wooden tables. One of those tables was covered in fish with red scales, lying on beds of melting ice. The other held stacks of woven bamboo cages, filled with small birds singing and chirping and darting back and forth.
I tried gently to get my arm back, but the old woman’s grip remained like iron.
“Come, come.” She squeezed my bicep tighter, and I glimpsed a kind of panic on her, an unmistakeable feeling of urgency.
Feeling the emotions of others by touch was another thing that came easily to me but was of little to no use in the magic of the monks.
“Important... very very important,” she muttered, still gripping me tightly. “No much time. No much time... must hurry.”
Sighing, I decided to give in to this.
If I was late for my test, Master Bawgoun would not be particularly understanding. Yet, I thought cynically, it would do little to better my final score to be there promptly at seven o’clock, either. Perhaps it was time to give in at last... to embrace my destiny.
I would be the first witch of the Royal Mayarani line to fail at my task as Regent.
Sighing as the thought brought on another wave of depression, but also a strange sort of peace in acceptance, I let my limbs grow pliable. I walked faster when she prompted me, blowing a wisp of my curly hair out of my eyes.
I followed mostly willingly as the old woman walked us past yet another row of tables, this one covered in raw sheep’s wool. We snaked through the dark maze of the market until we reached the warped planks that lived past the cement flooring. Now we were on the docks themselves, I guessed, having left the ledge of land that made up the river’s bank.
The smell definitely confirmed the river was close.
Glancing down, I had my impression confirmed when I glimpsed sloshing water between the loose floorboards under my feet. We were over the river itself. I’d never actually been so close to it before, in all the years of living less than a mile from its banks.
We entered a narrow passage between two buildings grown up off those plank-floors, and I realized in some shock that what I’d mistaken for stacked crates were actually small homes inhabited by dock-dwellers.
Built side by side, each had sliding metal doors as their front walls, all of them open, giving me full view of their living areas as we walked between them. Toddlers played on ripped linoleum floors, women sat stirring large bowls or cooking on open flames. Televisions ran soap operas in the background in the peasant tongue. I saw an old man snoring on a wooden bench and smelled even more cooking meat and unwashed feet and bodies than I did in the Market––yet the floors looked scrubbed clean and every inch of space precisely organized.
Forgetting to care about my Illusionism test and where the old woman might be taking me, I peered into house after house, fascinated by the neat, compact lives I saw.
We came to a wall at the end of that row and the woman dragged me into an even more narrow corridor, this one running at a right angle to the main alley.
Within seconds, I found myself stumbling down a set of slippery, mossy steps.
The river was all around me now, and only a few meters below my feet. Alarm prickled my flesh when I looked down at its dark swells. I considered jerking free of the woman for real that time, but hesitated when it occurred to me that struggling on the stairs might cause either or both of us to tumble into the filthy water below.
Alone, the ominous smell of the grayish-green waves churning and frothing below the heavy wooden pile-ons might have been enough to unnerve me.
That wasn’t my main fear as we neared the water, however.
Ravagers had been known to swim up from the sea, from time to time.
It was the main reason only the poorest of the poor chose to live at the water’s edge. Those of us studying with the monks and living on the palace grounds were strongly cautioned to never venture in sight of the river, much less get this close to it.
According to the monks, humans still occasionally got carried off by stray ravagers.
Watching the sunlight-speckled water warily as we descended nearer, I didn’t turn away from its depths until I saw the platform to the right of the stairs.
On that platform stood a large wooden crate.
Seemingly the instant I focused on it, the woman released my arm and jumped with surprising agility down to the platform itself.
I followed more cautiously, stepping warily off the last slick step and finding my footing on the rocking, wate
rlogged series of planks. The structure felt solid enough, but moved under my feet from the motion of the water.
The old woman motioned urgently to me.
Following the direction of her hands, I bent down to peer inside the darkened crate as indicated. Once I had, I immediately took a step back, nearly losing my balance on the wooden platform in my slick shoes.
Given how strangely the woman had been acting, I’d half-expected to find a ravager locked up in there––perhaps wrestled into submission by a few dozen of the dock-dwelling peasants with rope and sharp sticks. Or maybe they would have another lizard, I thought... or a giant sea creature, or some other menace they felt required a witch.
Instead, I found myself staring into the deep black eyes of a man.
A very dirty, very angry-looking and very naked man... one clearly full-grown.
Whoever he was, he definitely wasn’t a peasant.
In fact, the longer I stared at him, the more it occurred to me he wasn’t really a man at all. Well, not in the conventional sense. Not in the way we used the word “man” inside the palace walls, to denote one of the male half of the regular human species.
He was a warlock.
And, whoever he was, he looked pissed off as hell.
Chapter 2
RED MAGIC
IT DIDN’T OCCUR to me until after I’d thought it, to wonder how I could know him as a warlock with such certainty. However that knowledge or certainty arose, once it reached my conscious mind, I could neither argue with nor shake it, though.
He was definitely a warlock, my mind told me––not human.
Whoever he was, he could not have been much older than me.
Half a dozen years at most. I guessed less than that, but it was hard to tell, given the condition he was in and the angry way he glowered at me.
He seemed to stare with particular anger at me, too, I noticed... not at the old woman, which struck me as a bit unfair under the circumstances.
He was filthy, so much so he must have come out of the river himself.
The mud and dirt smearing his neck, face and chest might have obscured his age and features somewhat, but it couldn’t disguise the defined muscles in his arms or abdomen, nor his thick, broad shoulders and back. His size alone distinguished him from the majority of the peasants I’d seen at the Water Market and living on the wooden piers.
For that matter, his size distinguished him from most of those I knew at the palace, and certainly from those warlocks I trained with at the monastery. I had a few friends among the Regent’s Guard who came close to his size, but that was it.
As noted before, the dirt he wore didn’t hide the fact that he was entirely naked, either.
From the looks of him, he’d also been in a least one pretty intense fight on his way to being caged.
I couldn’t help but stare at him in those few seconds after that first meeting of our gazes. I confess, I’d never really seen a naked man before. Not apart from in magic simulations, and certainly not up close like this.
Despite the dirt covering him, along with the blood and scratches and bruises, I found something about him very beautiful. Perhaps it was that same sense of life that struck me in the market above us, and in the giant lizard. Perhaps it was something else.
Either way, my admiration was definitely not reciprocated.
Throughout my appraisal he continued to glower at me through the bars of his cage with an intensity that almost suggested he knew me in some way.
Or perhaps he simply knew what––or even who––I was.
The thought made me tense.
It also brought me out of my curiosity-driven appraisal of him.
After all, a warlock might not be as ignorant about the features of a member of the royal family as the average dock dweller.
The realization finally penetrated the fog of my surprise at seeing him inside the crate at all.
I turned to the old woman next, as the shock of his imprisonment finally penetrated. My voice took on the imperious tone I myself never used, but heard used plenty by adult witches and warlocks in my life, particularly when they addressed me.
“What is the meaning of this?” I stared down at the old woman, my haughtiness dampened only slightly by the use of my stilted peasant’s tongue. “Why is he so caged?”
I glanced back at the warlock. I felt my face warm when I caught myself staring at his sex. Looking away sharply, I motioned at his lower body with my gaze averted.
“...And where are his clothes?” I snapped.
Once I’d said it, I glanced back at the warlock’s face.
A flicker of what might have been surprise altered his coal-black eyes, which held a strange light in their depths, despite their midnight color. Swiftly, however, that surprise was replaced by an even more intense fury than before.
“If you’re going to kill me, do it now, ye pious, toady bitch...” He hissed the words in a strange accent, once more glaring at me through the bars. “Don’t keep me in suspense!”
I jumped a little, staring at him in surprise.
Like before, he ignored the old woman. And despite the odd accent, he spoke perfect Regent’s tongue, his deep voice resonating somewhere in my chest.
“I haven’t the time for games from a baby witch,” he added sourly. “Nor the patience for ‘em. So earn your ass-lick for the day, and go scurrying back to your lying, hypocritical masters. Tell ‘em you’ve found a juicy prize to torture in their cells for a few days...”
Staring at him incredulously, I felt my cheeks flush in anger.
That was despite the fact that I didn’t really understand his insults.
I mean, yes, I understood them.
But I didn’t understand what he meant, aiming them at me.
“I was defending you just now,” I snapped. “Are you deaf?” At his continued glower, I raised my voice. “Why have they caged you, sir? And what happened to you? Why do you look... and smell... like you slept in a sewage tunnel after fighting rats the size of horses?”
I was shouting at him.
I bit my lip once I realized.
Another rule broken. Oh, well. I was too angry to care.
Still glaring at him, I growled, “...And why in Heaven’s Sky would I want to kill you? Or see you tortured by the Guard or anyone else? Haven’t I already established I have no idea who you are? I was just now trying to discern that very thing!”
Again, a flicker of wary surprise touched his face.
He seemed to be assessing me then, his dark eyes lingering down the length of me, even more intently than mine had over him. When he finished, he gripped the bars of the crate, twisting them in bruised fingers.
“Who are ye?” It sounded more like a demand than a question. “If they didn’t send you to kill me, then why’re you here, princess baby witch?”
I stiffened at that too, staring at him.
From his expression though, he was mocking me. He didn’t know who I was.
My shoulders relaxed marginally, even as my voice grew colder.
“I have no idea why I am here,” I said, annoyed now more by his tone than his actual words. “We have already established that, as well.”
“Answer the damned question, bitch!” He didn’t seem to have any compunction about shouting at me. Or swearing at me, either. “Who the bloody hell are ye? Tell me at once! Or I’ll drag ye into the river with me by your over-coiffed hair, next I get out of here!”
I stared at him, folding my arms.
I got ordered around in my life plenty; the experience was hardly new. But I wasn’t about to take it from some naked, dirty warlock too stupid to keep from being caged by humans armed with nothing but fishing nets and pointy sticks.
“I was brought here just now... just as you saw. I know nothing of you, nor your situation. I came here with no purpose of my own.” My lips pursed when he let out a disbelieving grunt. “Are you soft in the head, that you would even need me to tell you as much, given how you saw m
e arrive? Or simply highly unobservant?”
His dark eyes shifted back towards mine, wary.
“You’re not sent here, then? By the Regent’s Guard?” he said.
I frowned, glancing at the old woman, then back at him.
I wasn’t about to confess anything about my connection to the Regent.
Anyway, there was no reason to, in this case. It had nothing whatsoever to do with how I’d come to be there.
Motioning again at the old woman, I let out an annoyed breath. “I was brought here by her, from the Water Market. My only awareness of you is from her, and she told me nothing.” When he shook his head, clenching his jaw in obvious anger, I again raised my voice. “...All of which you must now plainly surmise. Or must I really repeat it for you again?”
I was shouting again.
My mind churned over everything he’d said, though.
He must be a criminal, to fear the Guard so much. I couldn’t avoid the rage and frustration coming off him now in waves, thick enough to confuse my own senses and thoughts. That anger overpowered most everything else he might be feeling, but I got faint whispers of other emotions as well, including his awareness of his own vulnerability being naked and locked up.
I truly wondered how they’d managed to get him in that cage.
He hardly struck me as helpless, even now.
“Why have you not used magic to free yourself?” I asked, voice blunt. “You could have persuaded any one of them to let you out of there by now... even I could have done that much. Why do you allow them to continue to cage you?”
He glowered up at me again, obviously irritated by the question.
I still couldn’t understand why so much of that anger was aimed at me. Why wasn’t he asking for my help, if he really couldn’t free himself on his own?
I’d never seen him before. I was quite sure of that.
Granted, he was covered in mud, and most of my time was given over to royal blood witches and celibate monks... not warlocks, who were generally trained in a different part of the monastic compound. Being who I was, I was not allowed to fraternize with males very often anyway, whether witch or human. Not unless they were relatives.
Red Magic: an Adult Dystopian Paranormal Romance: Sector 6 (The Othala Witch Collection) Page 2