After a few moments assessing Ruti, the men relent, slamming the door to their home shut. Ruti sighs, turning around, and the Heir and Orrin melt out of the shadows. “We’ll need to search the Wastelands,” she says.
The Wastelands are at the edge of the city, near where Somanchi hits forest, in the worst part of the slums. The land is so miserable there that no trees will grow. Instead, there is only wreckage and dry, cracked land, ravaged by people who don’t have a next generation to worry about. They say that even the spirits won’t roam free there, in a land too desolate to rest in. Ruti has never spent much time in the Wastelands, where only the most desperate of Markless hide.
She leads the Heir down the road, past little Markless children who stretch out their hands as Ruti walks by. The Heir looks perturbed as she watches them. “I thought my father opened orphanages here.”
“He did.” Ruti avoids the eyes of the beggars, conscious of her own weakness when it comes to little ones. “But the orphanages need coin to provide food. They make for safe shelter at night for the little ones, but children still have to find their own food to survive out here.”
“All for being Markless,” the Heir murmurs. She crouches suddenly, her gown and cloak sweeping against the grimy ground, and drops a coin into the hands of one of the Markless children. The others clamor, rushing to her with their hands outstretched, tugging at her cloak and her arms with desperate need.
The Heir stumbles back, overwhelmed, and Orrin charges forward. Ruti moves before she can think it through, stepping between Orrin and the crowd of children with her eyes flashing. “Out of the way, Markless,” Orrin grits out.
“Lay a hand on them and I’ll kill you,” Ruti snaps back. The Heir is still beset by children, but she’s passing out coin to them, her brow knit as she takes them in. Few of these children will survive for long, Ruti knows. Fewer still will make it somewhere they can use their new coin. “Go,” Ruti orders them. “Run and find food before the older boys take your coin.”
The little ones understand that, even if they’ll never understand who it was who just fed them for a week, and they scatter. The Heir tucks away her purse, still looking deeply perturbed, and Orrin mutters, “It’s a waste of coin.” Ruti might have thought the same thing, but she glowers at Orrin nonetheless.
“When I am queen,” the Heir says abruptly, and raises her chin. “The slums are a blight on Zidesh and its capital city. The only solution is to fund the orphanages.”
“I agree,” Ruti says, but she’s startled—both at the unexpected humanity from the Heir, and from the unexpected humanity toward the Markless.
The Heir turns to look at her, Orrin ignored, and her eyes are sharp. “Kimya was on this line once,” the Heir murmurs.
“How did you—”
“She told me.” The Heir motions with her hands, a lazy gesture that is Kimya’s exact sign for collecting. Ruti gapes at her. Somehow, in all the free time that Kimya’s spent wandering around the Heir’s apartments and after all the chocolate that Kimya has been sneaking into their room, it had never occurred to her that Kimya had been teaching the Heir her speech. “Would she have survived here?”
“No,” Ruti says immediately, then reconsiders. “Maybe. She was good at surviving. I think she might have made it past seven.”
“And how much longer after that?” the Heir asks, and Ruti has no answer for her.
They continue their long walk down the Beggars’ Road and slowly, rickety little shops begin to grow more and more sparse, replaced with old wreckage and fallen buildings that have never been rebuilt. They reach the edge of the Wastelands, and Ruti shivers and glances around.
It is nearly dusk, and she has the sense already of haunted eyes fixed on them. The Wastelands are different than the rest of the slums. Everywhere else, there are people surviving, struggling to get through the impossible just to live another day. But there is no food in the Wastelands, no shops with coin to steal, nothing to strive for. There are no threats in the Wastelands, either, because anyone who still has the desire to live is far outside of them.
Markless come to the Wastelands to die.
“I thought about coming here once,” Ruti whispers. The Wastelands are too quiet to speak aloud. “When I was very little. There was no food and nowhere to go, and it seemed … this seemed the most peaceful way to starve to death.”
The Heir is silent for a moment. “What changed your mind?” she murmurs. Her eyes flicker over the devastation of the Wastelands with wariness, and Ruti knows that she must feel the same haunted gazes on them.
Ruti shrugs. “Stubbornness, I guess. I wanted to live. So I did.” It isn’t so simple, but she doesn’t think the Heir would understand the gnawing hunger she’d once known, the instinctual desperation to eat, stronger than any other conscious thought. She had thought about food for so long that the Wastelands had felt like an impossible sacrifice. Setting a single foot into the Wastelands alone would have been a surrender to starvation that Ruti hadn’t been capable of.
The Heir shakes her head, and for the first time she looks just as haunted as Ruti feels. “If my uncle had wanted to frighten me into bonding, he should have shown me this,” she mutters. There are tiny Markless here, little things who might be as old as Ruti scampering away into the shadows like mice. Next to them, the hungry wanderers of the rest of the slums look fat and sated. Everyone here is starved, and the sky is grey as though the sun never quite reaches this land.
Even Orrin looks uneasy. “Dekala, are you sure you want to—”
“Look,” the Heir says, and points off to the distance, into the dusk.
Beneath the grey skies, so deep in the Wastelands that Ruti isn’t quite sure that they’re even in Somanchi anymore, a little hut still stands. It’s just a bit higher than the wreckage around it, but it stands out by virtue of two things: the roof, a curved marvel in this dead place; and the vines of greenery that wind around it. It looks as though the vines are bleeding at first, but Ruti knows immediately what it is.
Fruit. Small, red fruits, the kind that the witch had sung into being as Ruti watched them blossom with envy. “That’s him,” Ruti says, and she quickens her pace.
It feels as though the hut is right in front of them, but Ruti is running for minutes and she still hasn’t reached it. The Heir is right behind her, the Wastelands growing dark now, and Ruti fiddles in the pockets of her clothes to find a speckled feather and a vial of star anise. She douses the feather with the anise and chants to the spirits until the Horned One seizes the feather from her, letting it flutter away in the wind. In its place is a glowing ball of light in front of them to illuminate their way. Orrin looks put off by this, and he flexes his wrist so that lightning glows bright in the sky, shining down on them.
Arrogant posturing, Ruti thinks grumpily, but she continues on, moving for an eternity toward the hut until finally she is close enough to make out the fruits on the vines. She plucks one off the vine and tastes it. The Wastelands and their pervasive hunger have made her ravenous.
“Careful!” the Heir snaps, and she actually sounds worried for a moment. “They might be poisonous or cursed or—”
“They’re just food,” says a voice from the doorway. It isn’t an old man. It’s a boy, not much older than Ruti, and he regards them with curiosity. “No one who makes it all the way out here is coming with ill will. Who are you?”
The Heir doesn’t speak. Nor does Orrin, so Ruti says, “I’m Ruti.” She raises her hand, displaying her empty palm. “I am looking for the witch.”
The boy raises his own unmarked hand. “I am Adisa,” he says. “The witch is dead.” He touches the doorpost beside him. “I stay in his home because of the magic that keeps me safe here. I don’t dare venture out into the Wastelands.”
Ruti stares at him, processing this new revelation. “Are you a witch?”
“No.” Adisa ducks his head. “I did not have the talent for it. I kept Fahim’s home while he was alive and learned from him how to make ointments and offerings to the spirits. But I can’t sing. Fahim said that he had only once met another Markless who had that skill.” He eyes Ruti for a moment. “A girl, he said. I had heard word of her in the slums, selling magic for food.”
Ruti smiles, a bittersweet pleasure filling her at the thought of the old witch knowing what she’d done with his lesson. “May we enter?” she asks.
Adisa steps back, his eyes narrowing as he takes in the rest of her entourage. “Your Highness,” he says, and bows low as they file inside.
The Heir blinks, startled. “How did you know?”
Adisa shakes his head. “No great feat,” he admits. “I only see the way you walk and the mark of sewa on your palm. A strong mark,” he murmurs, examining it. “The strokes of the mark are dark. You will be formidable when you become Bonded.”
“I will not be bonded at all,” the Heir says coldly. “We came to see if your master could help us with that.”
Adisa is taken aback. “Ah,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s … it isn’t done,” he says finally. “It’s.…”
