The second pries open her fingers, and the girl’s eyes widen, her mouth opening as if she’s trying to shriek, but unable. “Well, well,” the boy says gleefully. “Chocolate.”
Chocolate is next to impossible to find in the slums, and Ruti feels her own mouth watering from her doorway at the thought of it. The girl still doesn’t speak, but she reaches for the chocolate, heartbroken, and Ruti heaves a sigh.
It’s the little ones. She tells herself that she’s hardened, that she is made cynical and harsh by the slums, but she can never stop herself when they’re concerned. “Give that back,” she says, stepping out from her shop.
The boy holding the girl gives her a scornful look, but the others recoil, their eyes wide and fearful when they catch sight of her. “It’s the witch,” says the boy with the chocolate, flinching back. “We shouldn’t anger her.” Ruti tilts her head, waiting.
The first boy scoffs. “I’m not afraid of any witch. Especially not a Markless who claims to have the spirits’ favor.” As though he isn’t Markless as well. No one looks down on the Markless like other Markless do. “Give me the chocolate. You can choose to run.”
“Put the girl down.” Ruti’s voice is calm, but she takes a step forward, feeling quiet rage bubbling through her. “Now.”
The boy smirks at her. “Or what? You’ll sing a spell at me?” He looks speculatively at the shop. “I wonder what I might find inside that little house of yours.” He doesn’t notice the other two boys creeping back, their eyes on Ruti.
Ruti watches only the first boy. “You leave me no choice,” she says, and she begins to sing.
Her voice rises and falls in a glissando, rhythmic and musical, and she feels the bubbling sensation of magic as it emerges with her song. Her music has no words, no definable tune to follow, but she knows instinctively where it will carry her regardless. When Ruti sings, magic comes, the spirits drawn to her voice as though she has the powers of a Bonded.
The spirits gift the worthy men. To the Bonded, blessings ten. That’s how the old rhyme goes. The world is alive with magic, drifting through the skies and thick in the earth around them. The hungry spirits seize it all for themselves but they spare some—a gift—for each of the Bonded.
But Ruti is stronger than a Bonded. A Bonded only has mastery over one element, over whatever their joined marks give them. Ruti’s magic has no limits, as long as she has the favor of the spirits she beseeches. She collects offerings, prepares sufficient ones to appease the spirits when her song is not enough, and then she sings out her request.
She’d learned her first song on the streets from a wizened old man with no mark on his palm. The rest she had taught herself by watching how the spirits came to him and learning what sounds together might make magic. She is careful never to offend the spirits, to treat them with respect and bring them gifts when she asks for too much, and she can feel their affection for her in return. They have kept her alive until eighteen, and they can stop any Markless bully in his tracks.
She sings and sings until stone creeps up the Markless boy’s pale, red-pocked arm, immobilizing him, and the little girl can scramble out of his grasp. The boy stares at her in terror, unable to move his arm from its raised position, and Ruti stops singing and directs her glare to the second boy. “I think you have something that isn’t yours,” she says.
The second boy, his eyes wide, hands the girl back her chocolate. The girl scurries away to safety, and Ruti says, “I don’t want to see you attacking little ones again.” She hums a tune, a solemn chant that lets life return to the Markless boy’s arm, and the boys scatter and run, stumbling down the road away from her.
Ruti lets out a breath, leaning against her doorpost and casting an eye down the road. “You should go back to the orphanage,” she says. The little girl is somewhere nearby, she knows, lurking and watching her from the shadows. “The streets aren’t safe at night.”
There is no answer, but Ruti sees a flicker of movement in the alleyway beside her shop. “I know it’s bad in there, but it isn’t forever,” Ruti promises. “Stay in there. Get bigger and smarter. It’s the only way to survive.”
The girl emerges from the shadows and watches Ruti with dark brown eyes. Ruti stares back at her, nonplussed, and the girl takes another step forward, then another, walking toward Ruti with spindly, cautious movements.
When she’s standing in front of Ruti, she thrusts out a hand, and Ruti half expects her to ask for a paint, also. But no, her fingers open, and resting on her unmarked palm is the piece of chocolate. She looks up at Ruti, her chapped lips curved into a smile, and waits for Ruti to accept her offering.
Ruti blinks at her, uncertain of what the girl wants from her. Most of the other Markless fear her, or see only how she might help them. The little ones scamper away unless they’re in danger. “I’m not taking your chocolate,” she says. “I have corn bread inside. Would you like some?”
The little girl’s eyes shine. Ruti says, “Do you have a name, little one?”
The girl shakes her head. She touches her lips, eyes trusting as she looks up at Ruti. Ruti rethinks her question. “Can you speak?”
The girl shakes her head again. Ruti twitches, uncertain of what to do now with this girl who won’t run from her. “There’s no use in saving you if you’re just going to get yourself killed anyway,” Ruti decides reluctantly. “Come inside. You can eat your chocolate in peace.”
The girl follows her inside, and Ruti bolts the door behind them.
It’s been twelve years since Kita, and she’s still picking up Markless children who will inevitably be gone soon enough, lost to Bonded guards or to other Markless children who see no other way to survive than to destroy their own.
This is the fate of the Markless, the children who never should have existed at all.
The girl stays. It’s through no particular effort on Ruti’s part. The little ones who take shelter in her shop tend to scamper off in the morning before she awakens, wary of her even as they look to her for protection. But the girl is still there in the morning, curled up at the foot of Ruti’s bed in a ball of ragged cloth and tangled black hair, and Ruti doesn’t quite know how to ask her to leave.
She tries at first. “This is no place for you,” she says on the first afternoon. But then an Unbonded man appears in the shop, demanding that Ruti sing an empty satchel into riches.
It isn’t the first time that an Unbonded has tried to throw his weight around Ruti’s shop, demanding her magic with a meager payment that would never satisfy a Marked witch. “This is too much to ask of the spirits,” Ruti says tersely, but the man insists that she try, his eyes narrowing as they flicker to the little girl huddled in the corner.
He has the ugly look of a man who would push too far, who would force Ruti to sing a defense that might not work, and Ruti is not so desperate and foolish that she picks fights with every Unbonded man who swaggers into her shop. Instead, she sings in a high, thin voice to the Scaled One, master of transmutation, asking a gift so bold that she expects punishment at once.
She feels the outrage at her boldness as she sings, the magic that soars through her veins turning jagged and angry and cruel. The air darkens around her, and she can see—for a single moment—the pale glare of the Scaled One, the fury at a witch who dares to ask more than she offers. The hissing bellow fills the shop, and the Unbonded man flees as Ruti cries out, pain shooting through the side of her abdomen as though teeth had snapped into her.
The spirits leave no marks when they are displeased, only an agony that lingers for longer than any salve can abate, and Ruti has to close her doors and lie down on her bed for the rest of the day. And still the little girl remains, hovering near the bed as though she hasn’t heard Ruti’s warnings. “This is not a safe place for a Markless who can’t sing,” Ruti repeats.
The girl ignores her, and Ruti says, “Are you listening to me?”
The girl twists around, her eyes flashing with fierce determination, and she gestures suddenly, a graceful motion that Ruti doesn’t understand. Her hand dips, then curves upward to cup the air around her mouth. Ruti shakes her head. “I will not play games with you,” she says tiredly. “I have more to do today than negotiate with a little one.”
But the girl makes the same motion again, the dip of her hand like a wave rippling through the River Somanchi, her hand moving to her mouth once more. Cupping the air, as though she’s drinking. “Water,” Ruti guesses. “You want water?” The girl beams at her.
If it will get the girl to leave, then Ruti will give her water. “There is a sealed jug beneath my table in the front of the shop,” she says, curling back around her nonexistent wound. The spirits chastise her from time to time, and it hurts enough that it makes her use of casual magic frugal. She only has to wait it out and give the Scaled One some time. For now, she burns a waxen candle of incense in regret, an apology for her nerve.
She listens for the sound of the door closing, of the little one running away and leaving Ruti to her pain. Instead, the girl reappears a moment later with a wet cloth clasped in her hands, and she presses it to Ruti’s side. Ruti blinks at her, startled. The girl makes a motion that Ruti can’t understand, and another that Ruti does. A hand pressed to her chest, then her palm outstretched over the floor, spread out in a simple and unmistakable message. I will stay.
And so Ruti gives her a name. Khumeía, she calls her, after the ancient word for mixing offerings, but it becomes Kimya soon enough.
Kimya makes herself useful from the start, cleaning up after Ruti puts together offerings to the spirits and getting them food from the market. The first time Ruti sends Kimya out with a few coins and instructions, she expects Kimya to take the coins and run. Markless can’t afford to trust others, not when there’s food involved. But Kimya returns with bread and nuts and fruit, and she eats a banana with gusto and vomits up the entire fruit later.
She is too small for her appetite, so Ruti rations out her food after that, a small piece of bread first and a spoonful or two of mashed banana later. Kimya eats everything happily and enthusiastically, and as the weeks pass, her concave stomach begins to fill out. Ruti replaces her rags with a new payment from an Unbonded, a simple grey dress with only a few holes in it, made from scratchy but solid fabric.
