“Are you apprenticing with a witch?” the woman asks curiously. “I wasn’t aware that Saha took them so young.…” Her voice trails off, her eyes on Ruti’s hand as it counts out the coin. Ruti follows her gaze and sees, with mounting horror, exactly what it is that the woman sees.
The coin are smeared with ink, and the mark of endhi that Ruti painted onto her palm has been smudged by the wet root. It’s nothing more than a blur of black against her calloused skin, and the woman recoils. “Markless!” she hisses, rearing back. The flowers in her vase grow thorns, spiky and long.
Ruti looks around frantically, afraid that someone else might have heard. Instead, she sees the jeweler down the road with two royal guards, gesturing at Ruti. Royal guards. Whom had Kimya stolen that ring from?
The woman shrieks, “Markless!” again, and this time people hear. The volume of the crowd rises, people around them scampering back in fear as though Ruti might pass on her condition to them all. The guards twist around, lunging through the crowd, and Ruti shoves the bag into Kimya’s hands.
“Go,” she hisses. “Run home.” Kimya’s dark lips form into a scowl. “I’m a witch, remember?” Ruti says urgently. “I’ll be fine. Go.” Kimya runs at last, and Ruti faces the crowd.
“Markless!” someone else shouts, and a beaded necklace is flung at her, then a ripe tomato. Ruti turns and flees, racing in the opposite direction than the one Kimya had taken, hurtling through the market and leaving chaos behind.
She dodges through malodorous crowds of people, head down and unmarked hand squeezed into a fist. People snap curses at her, shove her back and almost unbalance her, but she’s nearly at the edge of the Merchants’ Circle, nearly at the stables where she might be able to hide in a wagon and make her way back safely to the slums. It’s just a few more turns.
She careens around a corner, toppling over a stand of colorful shirts, and she tangles in soft fabric as the shopkeeper howls at her. On the ground, she rolls over, kicking away a shirt, and she breaks into a run again just as a bolt of lightning crackles from the sky in front of her.
She gapes at it, rearing back, and the energy spreads toward her, consuming her with its acrid scent. At once, she’s shaking, seized by the lightning until it feels as though she’s being burned alive, her skin crackling. Lightning. Ashto and sewa. This isn’t an accident. A Bonded has found her.
She can’t move, can’t escape the lightning. Through the flashing lights surrounding her, she spots a sour-eyed royal guard moving toward her, another two behind him. They flank a beautiful girl who watches the affair with unreadable brown eyes, her face all but concealed beneath a golden scarf and cloak. Her ring, Ruti thinks faintly, and then she thinks nothing at all.
She awakens in a pitch-black dungeon, her entire body still burning and the noxious smell of scorched flesh trapped in her nostrils. Beneath her is a hard dirt floor, and the air is cool and wet as it rarely is aboveground. She chants, almost in a whisper, calling on the spirits to heal her. Slowly, slowly, her skin grows soft and warm olive again, the burns fading and her voice rising.
“Hey!” Someone bangs against the wall near her. “Keep it down!” Ruti jumps, banging against something hard.
Upon further examination, she discovers that it’s a piece of the stone wall that had never been filed down. Jagged rock pokes out all across the wall of her cell, and she feels her way along it, nauseated with dread.
Markless thieves are often thrown into the dungeons and never emerge. There are no public trials, no grand executions. The rumor in the slums is that Markless aren’t fed in the royal dungeons, only locked in and abandoned until they starve to death.
She can’t sing her way out of a dungeon, not when she can’t even see where she is. The spirits might give her a little help, but they won’t transport her to a whole new place. Even requesting it of them is asking for a reprimand that will leave her incapacitated for days. If she could feel her way to the bars of the cell, perhaps she might be able to make them bend open, but she can hardly move.
With a sigh, she stretches out on the uneven dirt floor again and begins to chant, ignoring the banging noises from the cell beside her. Her body still aches once the burns are gone, but her skin no longer feels as though it’s aflame, every movement searing her anew. The spirit of the Fanged One is strong in the darkness, and she can feel his healing venom with every word from her mouth.
She’s hungry and she’s tired and she has no idea if Kimya made it home, and that last one niggles most. She chides herself for getting too attached. She hasn’t made it this far by hinging her contentment on the survival of other Markless. She can’t.
But she does.
After what must be hours, there’s a movement from one side of her black cage. A flicker of light, and Ruti follows it hungrily, desperate for any chance to illuminate this dungeon. But it’s distant, only a gleam far away, and she curls up again and whispers her chants as she waits for the light to approach.
It comes, and Ruti sees that it’s a flame held in the palm of a Bonded guard. Ashto and ashto. Fire. Now she can see the dungeon around her. There is nothing but a stone wall across from her cell, corrugated with years of water that slides down it. Her cell itself is a cramped space with little to see inside.
The guard kicks the metal bars at the front of the cell. “Up, Markless,” he orders. A second guard moves forward, a woman with ashto and endhi bonded on her palm. Under her command, the metal moves, bending outward to form a diamond doorway for Ruti.
“Up,” the first guard growls again, and Ruti stands unsteadily. Her knees pop, her chest aching still from the lightning attack, but she manages to stagger through the doorway to stand in front of the guards.
The woman guard says, “Hands out together.” Ruti holds out her hands, and the woman carefully places a long metal rod across Ruti’s wrists. With a motion of her hands, the rod bends, twisting to hold Ruti’s wrists together.
That’s fine. Ruti doesn’t need anything but her voice to escape.
A second metal rod is turned into a cuff for her ankle and a chain to hold it by, and the woman scowls. “I hate leading Markless slum brats,” she mutters to the man. “They always leave my metal smelling foul.”
The man grunts in acknowledgement. “A public trial for a Markless is a waste of a sword,” he says, and Ruti stiffens as she stumbles forward behind them. A public trial means she’s almost sure to be executed, but it isn’t the death warrant she’d expected. The guard echoes her thoughts. “Why bother with this for a Markless?”
“She stole a ring from the Heir,” the woman says dryly, and Ruti freezes. The woman shakes her chain, yanking her forward. “Move, Markless. I don’t have all day.”
From the Heir? Ruti remembers the girl she’d seen, dark eyes and smooth skin beneath her coverings, and feels sick. She doesn’t look much like King Adiel’s face does on Zidesh’s coin, but it must have been her. The Heir to Zidesh’s throne is never seen outside of the Inner Circle, and Ruti had never thought.…
She’s in so much trouble.
“How did anyone allow a Markless so close to the Heir?” the man mutters. “That idiot Orrin. He’ll do anything the Heir asks. If I were the Regent, I’d make him—”
“If you were the Regent, we wouldn’t be traipsing through a dungeon with some Markless dog,” the woman shoots back. She yanks the chain again, impatient. “Keep up.”
Ruti follows, quiet dread suffusing her limbs. Maybe she can call on the spirits to carry her from the dungeons. Once her trial begins, there will be no escape.
There is a door ahead of them. The woman presses her hand to it, manipulating the metal lock until it clicks open. The man extinguishes his flame and pushes the door open.
The sun beats down on them from the top of a long staircase, the light blinding. Ruti’s eyes burn and she trips, crawling up the stairs as the woman yanks her chain, squeezing her eyes shut as they adjust again to the light. “Up, dog,” the woman barks. “The Regent awaits.”
Ruti blinks, her eyes wet with tears from the light, and she scrambles behind them up the stairs. They’re in an area of Somanchi where Ruti has never been foolish enough to venture before: the Royal Square, a walled compound that houses the Heir, the Regent, and his wife.
The Royal Square is enormous and fortified on all sides with buildings meant for soldiers and guards and servants. At the center is the massive, boxy royal castle, and Ruti sees it towering above her now. The staircase emerges beyond the castle, in the courtyard where the Regent, Kornanu, judges the people.
King Adiel died when Ruti was a child, just a few days after the queen. Ruti remembers the wails and the sorrow that spread even to the slums. King Adiel had been kind, and he had opened the orphanages for the Markless. He left behind a single daughter, a girl only a few years older than Ruti. So Adiel’s brother had been named Regent.
Dekala. Ruti can see her, a figure up ahead who sits on the second throne in the courtyard. In the Royal Square, she is no longer wrapped in a cloak. She sits tall, her hair coiled in long locks and wound into a silvery headpiece. Her gown is white, intricately designed with gold along a wrapped opening across the front, and she sits straight, watching Ruti’s approach with cold eyes.
She’s just as beautiful as she’d been at first glimpse, and Ruti looks away from her, staring up at the Regent instead. Kornanu is a Bonded who has command over water, and his eyes glitter like the sea as he takes Ruti in. “This is the Markless who dared lay a hand on the Heir,” he says, sneering down at her.
