She leads them down one hallway to an enormous round tub with walls that go nearly to Ruti’s chest, the heat steaming the glass mirrors that line one wall and plastering sweat against Ruti’s face. “Mikuyi, put out the fire,” Kalere instructs, and a Bonded attendant hurries forward to extinguish the low flames burning beneath the tub with a wave of her hand. “I want these two bathed and presentable,” she orders. “Naima!” Another attendant steps up. “Find them new clothing. None of this will do.”
Ruti and Kimya are undressed, each of them guided into one side of the tub. The water is hot, and Ruti lets out a little hiss when it touches her skin. “Is everything all right?” Mikuyi says worriedly.
“It’s just … hot,” Ruti says. Her skin feels warm now, too. She’s never experienced a bath in anything but the cool, muddy River Somanchi, so this is a new experience. She closes her eyes, lifting a hand to slide with effort through her tangled, matted hair, and then she hears a choked gasp.
Oh. Her unmarked palm is visible to the attendants, and she bites her lip, uncertain how this will play out. Kalere speaks, her brow furrowed. “You are … does the Heir know of your … condition?”
“That we’re Markless, you mean?” Ruti says, no patience for artifice. “She certainly called me Markless scum enough times when she ordered me here.”
Kalere and the others all exchange dubious glances. Finally, Kalere straightens. “We will do as the Heir commands, of course,” she says airily. “Get to it.”
Mikuyi kneels again, reaching out to take her hand with some trepidation. Ruti shuts her eyes again, and this time, Mikuyi takes a rough, short-bristled brush and begins to scrub it along her arms. “This might hurt,” she says. “You’re … well, it’s going to take a while.” She sounds apologetic, scraping at Ruti’s shoulders and back. Kimya whimpers on the other side of the tub, and Ruti’s eyes snap open to check on her.
Instead, she catches sight of herself in the mirrors. An attendant quietly combs through her hair as well, tugging through knots and pulling out dirt and twigs. It feels as though she’s being scrubbed raw, as though every last inch of her skin is being cleaned of filth, and she turns obediently and lets the attendants work over her body without fighting it.
Her feet are massaged, the rough skin of her soles scraped with a porous stone until they’re soft as a baby’s, and attendants knead a soapy mixture that smells of pricey jasmine into her hair. By the time they’re finished, the water is brown with filth and Ruti feels fresh-faced and new, like a delicate noble instead of the Markless from the slums that she is.
One of the attendants is a Bonded with earth skills. She dips her hands into the water and swirling dirt is pulled to her fingers, chunking together into a solid orb of brown mud that she drops into a bin. The water sparkles, fresh as the River Somanchi in the morning sun, clear and cleansing. Mikuyi heats the water again, and Ruti lies back in it, finally clean.
“Come,” Kalere says briskly. She wraps Ruti and Kimya into matching brown linen, thick and warm with textured diamonds strewn across them. Kimya looks different now, her lengthy hair wound by the attendants into a mass of tight little jet-black coils that hang down her back to her waist. Ruti’s hair hasn’t been braided or wound, but it falls free in soft curls past her shoulders. She hardly recognizes herself in the mirror, with her silky skin and defined cheekbones; the color of her hair now almost amber instead of a shade of mud. They both look suddenly noble, wealthy Bonded instead of scruffy Markless, and Ruti gulps when Mikuyi brings in satin, gleaming dresses for them to wear with their golden gloves.
“We’d be robbed in an instant if we stepped back into the slums looking like this,” Ruti mutters, and Kimya giggles silently. There’s a strange feeling to sitting in this room, dressed in finery. She feels like someone else, like this is all a terrible jest at her expense.
It only gets worse when Kalere leads them into the hall of the Heir’s chambers. The Heir stands by the big window, speaking to another attendant, and Ruti catches only the tail end of the conversation. “The first prince is due to arrive next week. We can only plead with the spirits that he will be my Bonded,” she says, a wry note of irony in her voice. The attendant doesn’t catch it, nodding vigorously, and the Heir says, “And I have some—who is this?”
Her voice is sharp as she turns to face them, but her eyes are startled, and they sweep over Ruti slowly, taking in her gown and then moving up to her face. For a moment, her eyes flicker down again, a second once-over, a gleam of interest in her eyes.
Ruti says mockingly, “Have you forgotten me this quickly?” Kimya grabs her wrist in warning.
The Heir’s eyes clear and narrow as she recognizes Ruti at last. “Markless lackey,” she says, dismissive, and the spark of interest is gone, replaced by a dark tint at her high, strong cheekbones. “I see Kalere has taken care of you.”
Kimya makes a motion with her hands. Ruti says, “Not completely. We haven’t been fed.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” the Heir snaps. “Dinner is over.”
Ruti stands her ground. The Heir made them promises, and Markless can’t afford to let promises of food slide because of mere etiquette. No one is ever going to like them, so the most they can aim for is satiated, not beloved. “My assistant is hungry. You offered us food and drink.”
The Heir fixes her cold eyes on Ruti, a rumble of thunder in the distance. “Don’t make yourself difficult, Markless. I will do as I please.” But she turns, finding Kalere beside them, and she snaps, “Give them some old bread. And get this eyesore and her assistant out of my hall.”
She turns around, sweeping toward the guarded hallway, her white gown moving with her. Ruti watches her for a few seconds too long, eyes tracing the curves of her body for an unconscious moment, and Kalere says, “Watch yourself, Markless.” Her clear voice isn’t harsh, only knowing, and Ruti flushes.
“I wasn’t—” She hates the Heir, and her eyes are only seeing what is on display. She can’t stop herself from seeing.
Kalere tuts. “I say it for your own good,” she says. “Not for hers.” Ruti sputters, humiliated at the very implication, and Kalere puts an arm around Kimya’s shoulders. “Come, child,” she says. “Let’s find you something as delicious as that smile of yours, shall we?”
They stroll off toward the kitchens, Ruti trailing sulkily behind them.
Kalere leaves them in a room as vast as Ruti’s entire shop in the slums, set with a sleek-topped table against one wall and two beds with springy mattresses and thick blankets that smell like they’ve been freshly washed. Ruti takes one bed, motioning for Kimya to take the other. Kimya shudders and vigorously shakes her head, curling up against Ruti on the bed beside the window. She’s asleep in moments, a lump beneath warm blankets, and Ruti lies back on the soft bed and struggles to sleep.
It’s hard, harder than she’d have imagined. Everything about this new world she’s been thrust into is dizzying, most of all the Heir at whose beck and call she seems to be. In the slums, at least she’d been her own master.
She’d been only eleven when she stumbled across a grey-eyed man who had sung a vine to bloom, little red fruits blossoming and growing before her eyes. He’d offered her one, but she’d been even hungrier for the song. In it, she had heard power, and power meant survival.
He must have seen something in her eyes that made him think she might have the skill for it. He taught her the song that day, helped her modulate the key and chant until she’d been able to feel the spirits responding to her call. Her chanting is only a cry to them, and she has learned, bit by bit, the highs and lows that each song needs to offer the spirits, how each chant might work or might not. The spirits need nothing from the Bonded that they endow with their magic. They have everything except for song, and Ruti’s voice is something that they crave enough to reward her for.
She has never been very good at chanting food into being, not like the old man. Her vines grow, but they rarely bloom. Instead, her first composition had been for the paint. She’d learned how to paint half marks and full marks on her palm, and the song had held one in place for a long time. For weeks she traipsed out to the elaborate estates and the horse-drawn carriages of the Inner Circle, wandered through the color and shouts of the Merchants’ Circle, and even glimpsed the multicolored flower beds of the Royal Square. A family found her and she lied, told them that she was an orphan, and they took her in without question.
She lived that lie for almost a week, basked in their care and their love and pretended that her endhi sign was too muted to express itself uncontrollably, and then one morning, her mark had been smudged. She’d been thrown from the house, watching affection turn to disgust, and she swore never to paint herself again with that chant.
There had been other chants since: protection chants that grow deeper and louder like thunder as they progress; healing chants that follow a gentle, flowing melody; and other songs that have brought people to her shop. Occasionally, she even got a few nobles, people who looked furtively around before whispering to her for a bright little chant for luck, a guttural and raw chant for children, or a song whose tones matched the cadences of the supplicant’s voice for finding their soulbond. She’d been able to find the song for each one, calling to the spirits and offering them poultices of herbs that they might require in a more demanding song.
The Heir doesn’t understand this magic, knows only the easy magic that the spirits present to the Bonded without conditions. What the Heir wants is something far beyond anything she’s done before. It’s a spell that will have to undo the very magic of soulbinding somehow, that will take away a power beyond any human comprehension. Soulbinding is a gift from the spirits, and they will not take well to her plea to be free of it. Ruti doesn’t know how she can sing that request; which threads, colorations, modalities, or rhythms it might take; and what offerings might satisfy the spirits.
She shudders to imagine the Heir’s wrath if Ruti proves useless. The Heir sees Ruti just as all the Marked see Markless—as nothing at all, as abominations that are less than human. If Ruti fails, she has no doubt that the Heir will punish her exactly as she promised. There is no mercy for the Markless. Even Kimya will suffer for Ruti’s failure.
The thought of Kimya strengthens Ruti’s resolve. She’s just going to have to succeed, somehow.
She sings in a low voice, aware that only a curtain separates her room from the other attendants’ rooms in the hallway. Slowly, she threads together a plaintive, regretful dirge of apology with a brassy chant for protection. Into that, she forms her lips into a circle to add the wistful, echoing tune that she uses to make her paints stay on a Markless palm. She reverses it gradually, changing the key from major to minor, as though to cast out the permanence of a mark instead of sealing it into the skin.
There is nothing. The slightest twitch of interest from the spirits, perhaps, but Ruti feels oddly removed from her own song in this comfortable bed high above the ground, in a room where there is no nature but a faint breeze—
A breeze. The curtain is rippling, and Ruti sits up, tugging her blanket to her. She’s no longer in the gown that Kalere had given her; instead, she and Kimya had changed into long red tunics that are worn for bed. She feels the sudden urge to hide as Kimya does, a second lump beneath the downy weight of the blanket, but she resists it.
Instead, she returns to her song, turning away from the door deliberately. She winds together a braid of offerings—wheat, goat hairs, a length of reed from the River Somanchi—and joins the ends together to make a loose circle. The melody rises and falls with the motion of her hands; but still, it isn’t quite sparking the magic that Ruti needs.
A voice cuts into her song as it wanes. “Does that work?”
