Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Acknowledgements
Some Notes on This Book’s Production
Ruti saw her first soulbinding when she was six. She was stealing a few coins from the coat pockets of Ayra, whose blacksmith shop sat in the slums of Somanchi. Ayra was prone to little cruelties toward the Markless—a kick or a shove here and there—and he deserved to lose a few pennies so that Ruti and Kita could eat that night. Ruti slipped into Ayra’s shop and crept over to the table where he’d laid his roughspun brown coat, made from the cheap fibers of the slums.
A wealthy woman stood in the shop, fine azure cloak held to her round midsection as though she was afraid of touching anything. Her daughter tucked in beside her, huddled into her own smooth cloak and peering around at the clanking-loud, dusty shop. The woman peered at Ayra’s intricately wrought metalwork, then began to haggle.
Then Ayra’s dusty-faced apprentice tumbled into the room. Not a true apprentice—he hadn’t been bonded, then, and he had no skill over metal. Instead, fire followed him from room to room, little bursts of flame whenever he was angry, such as when he kicked Markless away from Ayra’s hot stoves in winter. The woman and the girl eyed him with suspicion and lifted their hands in greeting.
Ruti saw the marks on each of their palms—the completed circle on the woman’s, an etched pattern made half majimm and half endhi—and the unfinished circle of majimm on the girl’s hand. She allowed herself a moment of envy, a weakness no Markless will ever admit, and she watched from the shadows as the apprentice pressed his own palm with its ashto half circle to the woman’s and then the girl’s.
When his palm touched the girl’s, a glow erupted between them, emanating from their hands and joining them, and Ruti felt as much as saw the way that the girl’s eyes lit up in quiet ecstasy. Her mother looked on in horror. An apprentice in the slums was no match for a noblewoman, but when their hands separated, they’d each had a full circle on their right palms.
The apprentice left the slums soon after. Majimm and ashto combined means mind, a formidable power but one with no use in a blacksmith’s shop, and he had a rich soulbond now, anyway. Ayra had replaced him with another fire-prone apprentice with ashto in the half circle in his palm, and they’d moved soon after to a bigger shop far from the slums.
Ruti had never left the slums. She’d brought back the food for Kita, but he’d still been so sick that he couldn’t move. She rubbed the underside of his jaw until he opened his mouth to eat, spooning in mashed corn while he shivered helplessly, skin the pale grey of old snow. In the morning, she felt the cold block of him curled up against her, the breath gone from his body. She was alone again.
There had been others in the twelve years after Kita, more Markless who found her and stayed with her for a time. At first, it was only because Ruti was quick and resourceful, skilled at finding food where others could not. Later, they came to her for her more unique abilities.
“I want a paint,” a Markless boy tells her today. He’s young, maybe only nine or ten, and he looks around furtively in Ruti’s tiny shop. There isn’t much to see, only shelves with unmarked jars and dusty books. Ruti keeps anything that matters in the back room where she sleeps. “I know you gave Eidan one. I need one, too.”
“Eidan is twice your age,” Ruti reminds the boy. “I don’t give paints to little ones.”
The boy raises his pointed chin. “I’m not afraid. I can take the pain.” He pulls down his tunic past his necklace, showing her a scrawny copper chest covered in scarring. “A Bonded guard with lightning once found me in the Royal Square,” he says, not without some pride in his voice. “But I survived.”
But I survived, the rallying cry of the Markless. It’s dangerous to be a Markless in Somanchi, and even more so in the Inner Circle. In the slums, there are few who can afford to do more than harass the Markless. Being Markless in the Inner Circle is a death warrant.
Ruti narrows her eyes at the boy, seeing what he isn’t telling her. “And why were you in the Royal Square?”
The boy’s jaw clenches. “I was just … I was looking,” he says finally, defiantly. “My parents were nobles. I know it. I have a locket from them.” He shows her the necklace again, opening it to show her letters etched inside. “This is gold. They left it for me because they knew that I would find them with it. But I can’t find them without a mark. I need a paint.” He slams his hand down on the table between them, palm up, beseeching. “They want me. I know they do. I know—”
“You know nothing, little one,” Ruti says sharply. The dreamers are the ones who get killed first. “Your parents threw you away because you were Markless. They won’t want you even if you do find them. Even if you have a false mark on your palm. They will never accept you.”
The boy stares at her, his fists clenched, and Ruti waits, staring back with uncompromising eyes. He is the first to fold, sagging as he shatters into tears, and Ruti slips around the table and wraps her arms around him.
He’s just a little one, a child who wants to pretend. Ruti had been a dreamer too, when she’d been a babe, and she holds him tightly now, sways with him, and sings a few words in a whisper to summon a spirit to soothe him. Still, the boy quakes in her arms, and only after a long time can he look up to face her.
But there is no acceptance in his eyes now. “You’re wrong,” he says, eyes like fire, and he twists around and walks to the door of Ruti’s shop. He stops in the doorway, turning back. “I’m going to find them. And they’re going to love me.” He runs from the shop, and Ruti glimpses him through a dusty window as he races off in the direction of the Inner Circle.
“No one loves the Markless,” Ruti murmurs, and she knows that she’ll never see the boy again. She closes her eyes, hums a quiet chant for his protection, but it won’t be enough. Not for a Markless child who hasn’t learned his place. Not for a Markless child who still longs to be marked.
There are precious few Markless adults. Children are too quick to dream.
Ruti sighs, closing the door to her shop for the day. After sunset, the older Markless will raid shops and attack strangers on the streets, desperate for something to eat or use. They give her shop a wide berth, fearful of her chants, but it’s better not to tempt them.
She tidies up with an eye out the window, watching for little ones who might be out alone. Most of the Markless children are in the orphanages that the late King Adiel opened in the slums. It had been an immensely unpopular decision among the Bonded, but a necessary one as disease from the slums had threatened to spread into the Inner Circle. The Bonded might not see the Markless as worthy of the treasury’s coin, but they’d shuddered at the thought of Markless children passing on their sicknesses to the children of the Inner Circle.
The orphanages are grimy, unpleasant places, but still the safest place for the smaller children at night.
She catches sight of a grubby little girl through the window, peering out from behind a pile of old garbage across the road. Ruti hurries to the door and pulls it open. The girl stares at her, matted brown hair plastered against dark, rough skin, quick hands forming into trembling fists. Her fingers are narrow and long, bare of any hint of fat. “In,” Ruti orders.
The girl scampers away. Her foot treads on an uneven end of the coarse brown rag that she wears, tearing it free, then she hesitates and peers back. Ruti purses her lips. She hears a raucous shout from down the road, Markless boys who’ve gotten into the drink, and the girl freezes, clutching her slender fingers around something in her hand.
Aha. The girl has stolen something, something she’s fearful of having to share, and Ruti says again, urgently, “In. I don’t want it.”
The girl only stares.
Down the road, the Markless boys appear, brandishing a green bottle that they take turns drinking from. There are three of them, and they look—not well-fed, but not malnourished, either, an unusual sight in the slums. “Look,” one of them slurs to the others. He points at the girl. “What’s she got?”
The girl quakes, squeezing her prize more tightly in her grubby brown hand. “Hand it over,” the second boy says, sneering down at the girl. The girl squeaks and turns, making a mad dash for an alleyway, but the boys are too quick.
In a moment, one of them is upon her, and he lifts her in the air by the foot as she flails, peering at her critically. “She’s not going to survive the night, anyway. Why waste food on this little thing?”
