Princess Dekala shudders delicately. There is a distant rumble of thunder, an uncontrolled reaction of sewa, and Ruti realizes, startled, that the Heir is Unbonded.
The guards drag Ruti closer, past a throng of royal subjects who have come to the courtyard today to watch the Regent rule. They claw at Ruti from either side of the long aisle to the Regent, throwing rocks and shouting curses at her. Ruti keeps her head down, whispering a chant so the rocks glance off of her head before they ever touch her. No one can hear her over the shouting, not even the guard who pulls her.
She is finally yanked to the space before the thrones, and Ruti peers up at the Regent in his own robes of white and gold. He wears the skin of a Spotted One on his shoulders, a sign of his spirit-gifted right to rule, and he looks down at Ruti as though she is unworthy of his gaze. “You stole from the Heir,” he hisses, wide nose flaring. “You defiled the Heir with your touch.”
Ruti looks at the Heir again. Princess Dekala is watching her, her face sculpted as though from stone. She doesn’t speak, but her eyes burn into Ruti, and Ruti feels a wind whip past her.
Beside her is a pasty-pale guard who glowers at Ruti, his eyes glowing with righteous rage. “She must be killed!” he bursts out. “She dares to—”
“Silence, Orrin!” the Regent barks. “You do not speak while I judge!” He gestures to his own guards, who take threatening steps toward the third guard. Ruti recognizes Orrin. He’d been the one to blast her with lightning. He looks at her now with pure loathing.
The Heir puts up a hand and the guards hesitate, looking from the Regent to the Heir. “Orrin is only concerned for my honor,” the Heir says. Her voice is deep, sharp, and she speaks with the same authority as the Regent. “I wish to know …” Her eyes burn into Ruti again. “… was the Markless healed before being brought here?”
Ruti feels it as all eyes turn to her, the distant sound of thunder rumbling again. No one else had noticed that her burns were gone, but the Heir has eyes that miss nothing, that look down on Ruti with the cool authority of royalty.
The guard who holds Ruti’s chain shakes her head. “No, Your Highness. She was locked away in the dungeons until her trial. No one had access to her. No one healed her.” She looks at Ruti in bewilderment.
They all watch her keenly now, eyes taking in her unblemished skin beneath the rags that had been her best clothing before she’d been burned. Ruti swallows, standing tall, and the Regent growls, “Then how has she been healed unless Orrin failed at—”
“She’s a witch!” Orrin snarls furiously, jabbing a finger at Ruti. “A filthy Markless witch!”
The guard holding Ruti’s chain takes a step back. The crowd bursts into shouts and jeers. Ruti clenches her bound fists, dirty and ragged. Afraid for her life, she feels the whisper of wind around her, the reminder that the Heir is still watching her. But the heat of the sun overhead bolsters her, carrying with its warmth the whisper of the Winged One, watching. “And what if I am?” she says boldly. She has little to lose now. “The spirits protect me. You can’t hold me here.”
“Enough!” the Regent shouts. His eyes look as though they might pop from his head in fury. “You dare to speak before me, Markless? Put her to death! Now!”
The guards snap into action, but they circle her warily, afraid of what she might do. The Bonded may have their special gifts, but witches are unpredictable. The Bonded fear the unpredictable more than they do even their Regent, and the Regent barks out again, “What are you waiting for? Kill her!”
The Heir watches as the guards drag themselves forward. Ruti looks up at her and sees something new in her eyes. It’s a glitter of interest, and Ruti shivers beneath it and in the wind that she still feels on her neck.
She is waiting to see what Ruti does next. Ruti knows it, just as she knows that there’s nothing she can do. She can’t chant herself out of this or chant herself an army to overpower the guards. The Regent is shouting for the guards to come closer, to “Kill the Markless girl, she’s only a girl!”
Ruti is not only a girl, so she clears her throat and sings.
The guards step back again, frightened by the melody of her chant, and Ruti blends two protection chants together, finding the threads of the melody in her new feeling of urgency. Her voice is throaty, her voice is light, her voice rises and falls in a plea to the spirits who have made her their protected child. The bonds that keep her wrists locked together become soft and stringy. Ruti pulls and they come apart.
The Regent is shouting, the crowd is roaring, and Princess Dekala is watching Ruti with hunger in her eyes. Ruti keeps her eyes fixed only on the princess, on the thin smile that curves the Heir’s fine mahogany cheekbones as she watches. She reminds Ruti of a Spotted One, of their lithe bodies and the muscle that lets them move fluidly through Somanchi’s forests. A Spotted One’s face means instant death, and the Heir’s face has the same cold doom written across it.
Ruti sings to the Spotted One, calls for protection with a higher, lilting chant that she’s never sung before. The guards are massing again, and one raises a sharp knife as Ruti sings more desperately. She may be asking for too much, but she has more to lose right now.
And then, chaos. Even the Heir looks away from Ruti, the thunder booming in the sky behind them, and the Regent shouts, “Kill her! Kill her!” but no one is listening. Ruti follows the Heir’s gaze to the wall of the courtyard, and she sings ever more urgently, gaining new strength with a sudden arrival.
A Spotted One has leaped over the wall of the courtyard, prowling toward Ruti.
The crowd erupts in screams, royal subjects falling over each other to escape. The guards hurtle toward the Regent and the Heir, abandoning Ruti as they array themselves around their rulers. The Regent summons water from the moisture of the air to turn into arrows made of ice, which he aims at the Spotted One. But the Spotted One doesn’t seem to notice them as it runs gracefully to Ruti.
Ruti chants and chants, her heart pounding with terror and exhilaration. She’s rarely seen Spotted Ones in Somanchi proper. The slums have little shelter from wild beasts, and the Markless have nothing to offer the spirits for protection, but Spotted Ones have plenty to eat in the woods and the grassland just outside the city. They have little interest in people, and she’s never seen one wander this deep into Somanchi.
The Spotted One approaches, and Ruti holds out a hand, singing the song she’s composed for it. The song goes low now, Ruti chanting in calming tones as the Spotted One circles her and growls at any brave guards who dare come close. Ruti feels the Spotted One nuzzle her fingers.
Her heart is pounding. “I take my leave,” she says finally, her voice shaky, and she feels, again, the whisper of wind against her skin. Her eyes lock with the Heir’s gaze, the Heir unmoving as guards cluster around her. Orrin, the loud lightning guard, crouches beside her as though to comfort her, but the Heir doesn’t look at him once. Ruti feels a chill deep in her skin.
The Spotted One nuzzles Ruti again, and Ruti sings and sings and walks, unscathed, from the courtyard of the Royal Square.
The Spotted One leaves her when she stops singing, after she’s reached the slums and it’s nearly evening. “Thank you,” she whispers with a hoarse voice, touching its short, soft fur once more. It lets out a low hum that vibrates through its body to her palm, then runs off into the night. A few Markless are crouched in a corner, watching her with fearful eyes, and she turns to face them. “What’s the word from the palace?”
Only one speaks, a girl nearly her age. “They say a Markless witch got the better of the Regent,” she says boldly, eyes flickering over Ruti’s torn clothes and the chain still attached to her ankle. “The Regent has issued a call for her death.”
“I see.” Ruti should have expected it. “Are his guards in the slums?”
The girl snorts. “No one comes to the slums,” she says, running a finger over her close-cropped hair. “And everyone knows that the only thing worse than having a death warrant is living as a Markless.”
Ruti grins, humorless, and the girl grins back. “Thank you,” Ruti says, and she chants a quiet call to the spirits as she leaves, a request that this girl will find food tonight.
Kimya is home in their little shop when she arrives, gesticulating wildly as Ruti enters. She mimics the claws of a Spotted One and wraps her arms around Ruti, and Ruti says, “I guess you heard what happened.”
Kimya bobs her head. She ducks into a cabinet behind the table in the shop and returns with a sharpened knife in hand. Ruti blinks at her. “Were you going to come after me?” she asks, touched and aghast. “Kimya, no. When I’m in trouble, you stay here, understood?”
Kimya scoffs silently and kneels down beside Ruti. A few movements of the knife and the chain is cut from her ankle. “Oh,” Ruti says, feeling very foolish. “So you weren’t planning on a rescue mission.” Kimya raises her eyebrows and says nothing. Ruti squints at her suspiciously.
They sit on the bed and eat a simple meal of flattened corn cakes and a few juicy tomatoes that Kimya managed to steal on her way out of the Merchants’ Circle. Ruti devours it all, hungrier than she’s been since she first settled in the shop, and she sleeps that night with Kimya draped over her, arms around Ruti as though Ruti might run away while she sleeps. Ruti runs her fingers through Kimya’s thick hair, pulling dirt from within it. It still carries the scents of the marketplace, body sweat and cloves and coriander.
She’s home safely, but she wonders how long it will last. The Regent’s honor has been besmirched with her escape. She won’t be allowed to live.
She has to leave. But she can’t leave Kimya behind. A girl with no voice won’t survive long without a witch to protect her.
That decided, she finally sleeps.
