She reaches into her cloak and tosses something at Ruti. Ruti catches it without thinking. It’s a pair of gold silken gloves, bound together, the material thick enough to conceal a mark—or lack thereof—on one’s palm. The Heir smiles, her eyes cold, and throws Ruti a second, smaller pair.
She had known that Ruti would ask to bring Kimya, had read her easily from two interactions, and a shiver passes through Ruti that has little to do with the wind that the Heir brings with her. “I will always be one step ahead of you, Markless witch,” the Heir says, and she whirls around. “Do not forget that.”
She steps from the shop, the wind racing wild through the room for another moment, and then, finally, the air is still.
“We could still run,” Ruti mutters to Kimya. Night has fallen, and their possessions are all packed up. The table and cot had gotten Ruti fewer coin than she’d wanted, but she hadn’t had time to haggle, not when they had to leave tonight.
But to where, she hadn’t decided. The Heir’s eyes follow Ruti when she thinks of hurrying to the harbor and finding a ship to smuggle herself out of Somanchi. If you flee, I will find you. Ruti knew too much now to be forgotten, and running away is no longer so simple.
She loathed the Heir for casting her into this position in the first place. For sauntering into Ruti’s shop and taking away all of her choices, for bringing Kimya into this. For having the temerity to be handed a soulbond and reject it when Markless have nothing at all.
And for Orrin, no less, a hulking brute of a fool who was going to arrive any minute. “We could just … climb onto a boat and run far away,” Ruti says wistfully. “The Heir would give up eventually. How hard is it to disappear?”
Kimya’s hands sign a familiar motion that she has taught Ruti, a question: How would we eat? The Markless aren’t prideful because they can’t afford to be prideful, because a choice between pride and food will end in death. Ruti sighs, conceding the point and bringing up another. “And what happens if I can’t sing the magic she needs?” It’s another niggling doubt, the fear of failing at this new task. “What will she do to us?”
Kimya shrugs. Better to have food now and worry later, Ruti knows. But this is a risk that she’s wary of taking. The Heir isn’t kind, and she despises Markless just as much as any noble. To step into her domain is a bad idea, especially without an exit plan.
Still, she’s just as tempted by the promise of food. If she weren’t, then she would have left for a ship hours ago instead of lingering in front of the shop, waiting for their summons.
Markless boys roam the street, spotting them and giving them a wide berth as they recognize the shop. There are others out, too, ragged Unbonded who have never found their soulbonds. Even the poorest of the Bonded won’t venture into the filth of the slums, but the Unbonded who lurk here are different. There are some Markless who have lived long enough to have children of their own, Ruti knows, children born with marks most of the time. Those Unbonded wear Markless shame and feel deep resentment toward the Markless. Few outside the slums will raise their palms to touch the palm of a Markless spawn.
Those Unbonded are the ones Ruti is most wary of. Their rage is as strong as their hunger, and they will destroy without fear of retaliation, will attack even a witch without thought of the consequences. Ruti’s eyes flicker past those with half moons unfinished on their palms. Today, she keeps to the shadows with Kimya, waiting for Orrin to return.
He appears in the distance, clomping through the streets. His lips are thinned so that they disappear beneath the scant hair under his nostrils, making him look sourer than ever. A few Markless see him from afar. They let out jeering shouts, hurtling toward him as though to attack, and Orrin raises a thick-fingered hand and blasts them away without a second thought.
For all his idiocy, he’s lethal, and the Markless boys are thrown back, shaking violently in the aftermath of the blast. They twitch on the ground, their skin blackened by the energy, and Orrin scoffs and walks past their bodies as though he’s done so a hundred times before.
“You,” he grunts, stopping in front of Ruti. “Follow me.”
Ruti and Kimya follow him silently, Ruti’s fingers fidgeting in the gloves that the Heir had given her. They’re soft and expensive, a fabric unlike any Ruti’s touched before, and they feel out of place against the coarse-spun ecru of her shirt and her mismatched, faded blue pants. Still, they’ll conceal the fact that Ruti is Markless in the palace.
Her face, though, will still be a problem. “Doesn’t the Regent want me dead?” she points out. “How are you going to hide me in the palace?”
Orrin doesn’t spare them a glance. “The Heir has private chambers in the palace where others are forbidden to enter,” he says brusquely. “You will be housed there.” He leads them to a decrepit stable where a royal animal cart is waiting. “Get in.”
“Sure you won’t catch a disease from our Markless hands touching it?” Ruti says.
Orrin gives her a dark look. “The Heir will not find your little gibes amusing,” he says, his voice low, his diction stilted. “You will find that she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”
“She seems fine with you,” Ruti retorts. Kimya tugs at her shirt in warning, but Ruti sits back, smug in her tiny defiances. Orrin won’t do a thing to her now, she knows. The Heir needs Ruti, and she won’t be forgiving if Orrin dispatches of her instead of bringing her to the palace.
Orrin sneers at her, but doesn’t attack. Instead, he hisses, “You are a filthy nothing, Markless. And I have the love of the future queen. Do you know what will become of you when I become her consort?”
“You will shower me in gratitude for making your position possible?” Ruti suggests. She wonders where his soulbond is, if the girl had died or simply fled when she’d met Orrin. Ruti wouldn’t blame her.
“You will do what the Heir orders of you,” Orrin says, his smile cold. “And you will keep that gaping maw of yours shut, or I will make sure that you languish in the dungeons until you starve to death. Markless brat.”
He turns away from her, pulling at the reins of the cart, and they ride in silence through the night.
Once at the palace, they’re brought in through a hidden entrance watched by a woman wearing a guard’s heavy black-and-silver shirt, a spear held tightly at attention. Orrin passes them each a delicate ash-colored cloak to conceal their ragged, slum-filthy clothes, and Ruti ducks her head as he says gruffly, “Private delivery for the Heir.”
The guard doesn’t examine them for more than a second, but sharp eyes flicker over them from under her heavy brow. She steps aside, allowing Orrin to walk them into the courtyard. It isn’t the courtyard where Ruti had been put on trial. Instead, it’s the courtyard behind the palace, and inside of it are the lush, spreading plants of the wet woods, insects alighting on large fronds and buzzing in front of them as they walk. They are uncultivated here, growing wild and trimmed only to create a path, and Ruti basks in the sensation of the cool mud against her bare feet.
Too soon, they’ve passed through the gardens to the inner palace, and Orrin leads them to a heavy stone door that he has to grunt to pull open. Inside, there are well-made metal pots and pans in front of her, and a fire burning in an oven just across from the door. A multitude of servants bustle through the kitchens, hands crusted with moistened flour and white clothes splotched with grease and other stains. They pay the new arrivals no heed, busy with their dinner cleanup, and Ruti’s mouth waters as she takes in the scents of freshly baked food and meat—meat—fried in oil. Ruti’s never even tasted meat before.
There’s more food than she’s ever seen. There are fresh mangoes diced into precise squares and unripe tamarinds that smell tangy and sour. A tall boy stirs coconut milk into an eggplant curry at a counter near Ruti, the smell so strong and rich that her stomach turns, overwhelmed. There are luscious pastries with warm chocolate oozing from them and fluffy, soft loaves of wheat bread with a scent that overpowers all others on their side of the kitchen. The food in this palace could feed the entire population of the slums for a day, maybe longer.
Kimya’s long-fingered hand flashes out from her cloak in a glimmer of gold to snatch a creamy pastry topped with berries from a discarded plate, and Orrin makes an irritated sound but doesn’t stop her. Happily, she eats her pastry, and Ruti wishes for the first time that she could be as careless as Kimya, as quick to brazenly steal what she wants.
They’re led from the kitchens up a staircase, and from there down a hallway to a wooden door marked with textured golden ornamentation shaped into a circle. Orrin raps on the door once, then takes a step back. “No men may enter the Heir’s chambers,” he says grudgingly. “Not until she is wed.”
Ruti says, “So we can go in but you can’t?” It’s a childish taunt, one she can’t resist, and Orrin’s glower deepens.
The door opens just in time, sparing Ruti the burning of a lifetime. “Ah,” a square-jawed woman says in a silvery voice, beaming at them and pressing a tanned, strong hand to each of their gloved right palms. “Come in! Come in! Oh, you’re a mess,” she says critically, eyeing Ruti’s grimy face and narrow build and then Kimya’s slight figure and the long, tangled hair spilling from the hood of her cloak. “And you’re just a child. How old are you?” Kimya uncurls seven spindly fingers. “Inside,” the woman says briskly, her wide violet pants swishing against the floor as she moves. “Quickly.”
She slams the door behind them, cutting off Ruti’s last sight of the outside and Orrin’s put-off face.
The woman takes them in, eyes flickering over the tattered cloth beneath their cloaks and their dirty faces while Ruti takes in the room. They are in a wide hall with a ceiling that stretches many feet higher than any she’s seen, a polished ebony table across the middle of the room, and a few gold-trimmed chairs with ornately shaped legs against the walls. The most impressive sight in the room is a window that stretches across the far wall, large and wide, offering a view of the Inner Circle and the tamed, colorful gardens of the front of the Royal Square. At the center of the window is an altar to the Spotted One, fresh with herbal offerings upon it that fill the room with the sharp scent of peppercorns and the sweetness of fig tree sap.
There are various doors on both sides of the hall that all lead to narrow corridors, but only one has a black-clad female guard standing beside it. The others are hubs of activity, guards and other women passing through them and out the door to the main hall, carrying colorful clothing and linens in expensive fabrics with shimmering highlights, or other items to be cleaned or put away.
Ruti glances back at the square-jawed woman, who cleared her throat. “I am Kalere,” she says. Her words are businesslike, her movements quick and sure, and she speaks with a confidence that lacks unkindness. “The Heir’s Master Attendant. These are the Heir’s chambers.” She points to the guarded hallway, and Ruti can see a two-doored archway just beyond it, the woodgrain dark and sleek and the knobs that meet in the center gleaming silver. “Under no circumstances may you enter that room. Otherwise, you will be confined to these chambers for the duration of your stay here.”
They are attracting stares, and for the first time, Ruti is self-conscious about how she must look: a filthy child dressed in rags, too small for her age and with the weathered meanness that the slums sharpen on every Markless’s face, with none of the finery expected in the palace. Kalere sighs, seeing her gaze wander. “We’ll have to clean you up before you see the Heir,” she says disapprovingly. “Where did she find you?”
