“Don’t go telling your friends about this,” Ruti warns her. “I can’t take care of more than the two of us.” A joke. Kimya is alone, just like every Markless out there. It’s an old, self-deprecating joke that even the Markless don’t want to be around the Markless. If someone had taught her the language that she signs, that person is long gone now.
Ruti has managed to make just enough coin to survive until now. Her stomach is never full, but she eats sparingly and is healthy because of it. With Kimya comes less food and more hunger.
Kimya touches Ruti’s stomach one day, her little hands pressed to the sunken skin of Ruti’s abdomen, and she makes a tch sound through a gap in her teeth. Carefully, reluctantly, she offers Ruti her half of their banana.
Ruti blinks at her. “Kimya, no. Eat your food. I’m fine.” With time comes a reluctant care for the child, a little Markless girl who can’t speak but still manages to survive. “We just need … a little more coin.”
She looks around the shop, contemplating her options. There are chants that might bring them more customers, a protection chant that she’s been working on but couldn’t finish. The best protection chants require an offering—to the Maned One, to the Horned One, to the Spotted One, to an animal spirit that must be appeased. Not every song needs an offering, of course. To sing to the spirits is to beg them for their powers, and Ruti has made bold requests before and been granted their largesse. But she is acutely aware that the spirits’ favor will only go so far if she offers them paltry gifts or nothing in return, and their wrath will be uncompromising.
But the offerings she needs require far too much coin, specialized items in the Merchants’ Circle that she has never dared to haggle for. One glimpse of her unmarked palm and the merchants would chase her from their shops.
Kimya scoffs when Ruti points that out and scampers over to the table to find the black ink that Ruti uses for paints. Ruti shakes her head. “I won’t paint us,” she says. “It’s just a pretty lie.” The paints last for a few weeks with a chant, long enough for Markless to experience life with a mark and crave it for eternity. There are Markless who come to her once a month, begging her for a new paint, and she obliges with reluctance.
They will always be Markless. A little bit of paint can’t simulate the energies that follow the Unbonded or the powers of the Bonded, and the people they find while painted will come to despise them when they discover the truth. Ruti will never paint herself again, will never let herself taste any other life, not when she’s seen so many times how it destroys others.
But Kimya claps a hand to her mouth and then signs in the direction of the ink, patient until Ruti figures out what it is that Kimya is trying to say. “Just ink without the chants,” Ruti guesses, and Kimya bobs her head. Ruti tries another argument. “I won’t bring you with me. You’re too small, and—”
Kimya moves in a blur, barely brushing past Ruti, and she opens her fist when she’s on the other side of the room. There’s an amulet in her palm, an amulet that had been in Ruti’s pocket a moment before. “Little thief,” Ruti says, alternately frustrated and fond. “What happens if a merchant catches you?”
Kimya gives her an incredulous look, a no-one-will-catch-me look, and Ruti sighs. “Fine. Sit.”
She paints Kimya first, carefully moving the ink along her palm in firm, gentle strokes. She gives Kimya the half circle of majimm, the flowing waves that symbolize the water that follows majimm Unbonded wherever they go. Unbonded have half their marks, but they have no control over them. Instead, the energy escapes when they speak, when they move, at the most inopportune of times. It’s only once they’re Bonded that they have true command over their complete marks.
Her own mark she makes rough and earthy, the sign of endhi. She hasn’t seen an Unbonded with endhi in a long time, but she remembers the last, a farmer who’d been so furious with the Markless stealing his crops that the ground had split beneath them and nearly swallowed them up. Ruti hadn’t learned how to chant yet, and she’d barely managed to climb out of the farmer’s inadvertent pit.
“These won’t last,” she warns Kimya. “Hold your hand still while it dries or it’ll smear. We can’t take any chances.” The Merchants’ Circle isn’t as dangerous for Markless as the Inner Circle, but they are equally unwelcome there. Markless are bad for business.
The markets in the slums are the only place where Markless are tolerated, far from the nobles and any Bonded. The markets in the Merchants’ Circle are large and busy, clustered near the river that runs through Somanchi and brings traders in from all over Zidesh and beyond. Somanchi is the capital city of Zidesh, the largest of its cities and the home of the royal palace, and the Merchants’ Circle does its best to show no sign of the Markless slums to visitors.
When Kimya first sees the Merchants’ Circle, she gasps and clutches Ruti’s sleeve. Ruti has to stifle her own gasp as well. She hasn’t been to the Merchants’ Circle in years, and she’d been left with only vague remembrances that were more imagination than truth. But her imagination pales in comparison with what stands before them.
Food. Stands with clusters and clusters of bananas, more bananas than Ruti’s eaten in her life. Piles of orange carrots. Cucumbers that are green without a sign of rotting. An entire stand that is only melons, the kind that would feed the two of them for weeks, their sweet scent filling the air. Shopkeepers shout out their wares and crowds of people come to them, haggling over their sales in a cacophony of alternating noise.
“Much too much! I’ll give you eight!”
“Do you take me for a Markless fool? I will give you my best for twelve coins!”
“Absurd!” Louder and louder, items clunking onto counters and rustling into bags, an occasional fruit landing on the ground instead to provide a burst of freshness to the odors that suffuse the crowd. Back and forth the customers and sellers fight, the rise and fall almost like a chant of their own. Ruti wonders if she could compose a chant like that, with battling cadences in the highs and lows.
There are winding paths that lead from the road to temples etched with images of the Horned One and the Fanged One, of the Spotted One who is the symbol of Zidesh. Men and women with thick, glossy clothing carry jewels and baskets full of food toward the temples as offerings to the spirits so that their journeys might be blessed.
Brightly colored clothes hang from the closest stand to them, dresses and gowns for the wealthiest of customers. There are hats and shoes and scarves in an array of colors, and Ruti has never seen so much wealth in her life. Little shops sit behind each stand, even more inside of them, and Ruti and Kimya wander together, Kimya pointing frantically at different stands with excitement. Her hand flashes out for a moment from beneath her grubby clothes as they walk past the carrots, and Ruti steers them away from the stand before Kimya is seen.
But there are too many people around to be caught, she thinks. The people in the Merchants’ Circle vary from wealthy traders to locals. Ruti makes sure to find excuses to raise her hand to her thin lips, to her dark hair, to flash the painted mark on her olive-skinned palm at passersby who eye her suspiciously. They might not like her as a poor Unbonded, but they won’t start a fuss over it.
Ruti waits until they’re out of the main rows of the markets, where there are fewer stands and more quiet shops, before she says to Kimya, “Give it.”
Kimya pulls a carrot from her pocket obligingly, cracking it in half and offering Ruti the smaller piece. Ruti bites into it. It tastes fresh and juicy, better than anything in the slum markets. “What else did you get?” she asks. There must be more. Kimya is too fast and too young to resist the markets.
Kimya bites her lip and then grins, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a silver ring with a jeweled stone on it. Ruti looks at it, openmouthed. “What is that? Where did you—I didn’t see any stands selling something like that.”
Kimya mimics slipping a hand over Ruti’s and sliding something off her finger. Ruti lowers her voice. “You stole it off of someone?” Kimya bobs her head proudly. Ruti stares at her. It’s a bad idea, stealing from nobles. The merchants might not notice a few missing fruits, but a ring from a visitor will be missed. “Do not do that again,” Ruti hisses, glancing around. “We can’t be noticed. My paints won’t last long.”
She spots a shop a few feet away, the stand in front of it displaying cheap beaded jewelry, and Ruti moves to it, peering inside. There is little on the walls inside the shop, only a table and shelves behind it with more expensive jewelry. Perfect.
The jeweler sneers at them, holding out his palm for each of them to press with their own. “Out, urchins,” he says. “This is no place for you.”
Ruti holds up the ring. “How much will you give me for this?”
The jeweler pauses, his eyes gleaming with suspicion as he takes in the ring. “Where did you get that?”
Ruti drops her head, crumpling her face. “It was our mother’s last possession before she …” She swallows, pulling her shoulders together in an attempt to look younger than she is.
The jeweler considers her for a long moment. “I’ll give you fifty coin for it,” he says finally. “Not a coin more. It’s the best deal you’ll get.”
They’re being fleeced. Ruti can see the greed in the jeweler’s eye, and Kimya stamps her foot in outrage. But they can’t afford to keep the ring any longer, and Ruti pretends to ponder and then nods. “We’ll take it.”
Fifty coin is more than they’d had before, and Ruti hurries Kimya from the shop, glancing worriedly over her shoulder. With fifty coin, they can collect some of the material that she needs for her chants without stealing it.
“Here,” she says, stopping outside one stand. There is no shop, only the stand and a row of shelves jammed into the ground behind the seller. On the shelves are the items Ruti needs: powdered antler, animal skins that have been dried into strips, and herbs and roots from deep in the wet woods.
The seller is a woman who holds out her hand for them to press their palms to hers. Ruti glances at her own palm when she pulls away, relieved that her mark has held intact. “What can I help you with?” the woman says, and her voice lilts, flowers growing in the vase beside her as she speaks. She’s a Bonded, her mark made of endhi and majimm combined into a mastery over plants.
Ruti points out the items she wants, and the woman loads them into a bag made of animal skin that they purchase from her as well. Fifty coin buys them more than Ruti had thought it would, and she finally begins to relax. Kimya’s foolishness has saved their trip, and they’ll be back home soon, safe in the Markless slums.
The woman chats with them as she gathers the last of the skins. “These will tide you over for the Spotted One,” she says. “But don’t give the Toothed One these roots or you risk offending him. Water spirits require fish offerings.” She gestures toward the distance, where the River Somanchi flows through the city.
It’s nowhere near the slums, and not Ruti’s concern. “Thank you,” she says politely, taking a few last wet roots and counting out the coin for the woman. “This is all I need.”
