Markless, p.10
Markless, page 10
“You’ve met another witch?” the Heir says, her eyes suddenly focused on Ruti again. “You never mentioned him before.”
Ruti shrugs. “He’s dead, I assume. It’s been years, and he was old even when I saw him. He taught me my first song.”
The Heir is undeterred. “Take me to him.”
“I haven’t seen him since,” Ruti protests. “I have no idea where he is, let alone if he can actually help you … and you want to go to the slums? You? The princess? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”
“I’ve been there before,” the Heir points out. “Orrin searched for you and then brought me to you. And I can hold my own.”
Ruti scoffs. “With a stick, maybe. The Markless kids in the slums aren’t competing to see how skilled they are. Plenty of us can’t afford to give up the chance to steal some coin. And the biggest ones—the ones who’ve survived long enough to help us find that man—they aren’t going to hesitate.”
The Heir rises, drawing her gown around her. “I can hold my own,” she repeats. “I will have an animal cart prepared for us. If my uncle asks, we will tell him that we’re journeying to the river for a brief excursion.” She glides from the room without waiting for Ruti’s response.
Ruti glares into the cabinet. “She’s unbearable,” she mutters. Kimya signs a denial, and Ruti turns her glare on the other girl instead.
Yet again, the Heir has decided what will be done next, but this time, Ruti knows the Heir will regret it. One journey into the slums and out again is nothing compared to spending a lengthy period of time there, surrounded by Markless and misery. Ruti knows the slums as well as any Markless who’s lived until eighteen, and she still isn’t fool enough to stride through them now as though she owns them.
The slums are unpredictable, and Kimya scowls and protests but ultimately stays behind as Ruti and the Heir ride together toward them. “You’ll need to purchase a new cloak,” Ruti says, peering over at the Heir in the seat beside her. The Heir is wearing blue today instead of the royal white and gold, but they both stand out regardless. “We look rich. No one rich makes it out of the slums with their possessions intact.”
The animal cart only goes as far as the Merchants’ Circle, where Ruti finds a pair of roughspun brown cloaks. “This is a rag,” the Heir says, scowling. “You paid coin for this?”
“Not very much, don’t worry,” Ruti says wryly. The Heir drapes it around her shoulders, somehow managing to wear it like royal robes. Ruti reaches over to rearrange it, letting it fall haphazardly around her.
“What about a cloak for Orrin?” the Heir asks, nodding to the bodyguard behind them.
Ruti shrugs. “I don’t care if he gets robbed,” she says. Orrin glowers at her.
The Heir lets out a little puff of laughter. “He will be my consort one day,” she says. “Must you provoke us both?”
“This is provoking?” Ruti wrinkles her brow. “I thought we were getting along.”
The Heir flicks a finger against Ruti’s shoulder. Outside the Royal Square, she veers from wary to light, still cold but less domineering. She smiles more, is quicker to laugh at Ruti—the only way Ruti can ever get her to laugh—and she offers more information. “I came out to the Merchants’ Circle the first time because I thought my uncle was lying to me,” she says. “He claimed that the people were starving in Zidesh and we needed a strong ruler to bring them back to order.”
“The only people starving in Somanchi are Markless,” Ruti says grimly. Somanchi is built on the convergence of river and forest, the most bountiful of places in the land, and all that is needed for someone to flourish is a mark on their palm.
“So I saw.” The Heir purchases a third cloak for Orrin and arranges it on his shoulders with care, mimicking the way that Ruti wears it. It looks awkward on him—he is too boxy and well built to look like a beggar, and Ruti watches the Heir as she takes care with the cloak, offering Orrin a smile as she helps him.
Something unpleasant thrums in Ruti’s stomach, and she turns away with a pang of uncertain melancholy. “We should hurry if we want to have a chance of finding the witch before nightfall,” she says abruptly. “Keep up.”
She strides through the Merchants’ Circle, paying no attention to the Heir or Orrin. She might not care for either of them, but Orrin in particular is so distasteful. She can’t comprehend the Heir’s fascination with him, and she says so when the Heir strides forward to catch up to her. “What does he have that the princes courting you don’t?” she demands. Orrin is keeping pace with them, a few feet back. “Why is he worth fighting the spirits for?”
The Heir says, “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“He’s devoted to you,” Ruti says, moving faster. “But any soulbond would be devoted to you. He isn’t particularly wise or strong or any other trait that might make him a good ruler. Why would you fall in love with him?” A thought strikes her. “Is it that he is the only man you know well who isn’t your uncle? Because you have much better prospects than Orrin.”
The Heir’s voice is sharp now. “Bite your tongue, Markless girl,” she snaps. “Remember whom you address. My choices are my own, and they are right.”
“By virtue of what, Your Highness?”
Wind slams into Ruti’s face. “By virtue of the fact that I am your queen,” the Heir hisses. “I will treat you as a companion if you wish. I will allow you to fail and fail again and withhold punishment. But you will not question my decisions. I have my limits, even for you.”
There is danger in her voice, a warning that sends a chill through Ruti, but she refuses to answer and concede the point. Instead, she stalks away from the Heir, leading the way toward the slums without looking back.
She knows that Orrin has fallen into step with the Heir. Of course he has. The Heir has given him no reason not to.
*
Ruti’s shop is already gone. The two rooms where she’d once squatted have been taken over by a group of Markless adults who come to the door with knives when Ruti tries to come inside. “Stay back,” one barks out. “This is ours.”
Ruti steps back, feeling oddly forlorn. The shop had been the only place that was hers, a shelter when she’d never had one before. Now it’s been possessed and remade in an instant, someone else’s dwelling with no sign that she’d ever been there. In the slums, no one leaves a mark on the world, and all are forgotten as soon as they disappear. She just hadn’t expected it to happen to her, too, at least so quickly.
The Heir is watching her, and Ruti looks away, afraid of what emotion she might have revealed to her. “Wait,” she says, staring at the men. They are a group, old and powerful enough that they will have had the run of the slums instead of hiding in the closest shadows. “I’m looking for someone. An old man.”
“In the slums?” one says incredulously. “No one grows old here.”
“That’s not true,” one of the other men calls out. “I saw an old man once, out by the Wastelands. Decrepit old coot. Claimed he was a witch.” They laugh raucously, and the man says, “Never saw him again.”
“He was probably our age,” another calls out. “Just ugly.” More laughter, and the man at the door gives Ruti an assessing glance. “You look pretty well off for a Markless,” he says, eyeing her bare palm. She’d slipped the gloves off once they’d reached the slums.
Ruti ignores him. “Where in the Wastelands did you see him?” she calls out, but there is no answer from the men inside. Instead, their eyes run over Ruti, calculating and hungry, and Ruti stands steady and tall. To flinch back now is to tell these Markless that she’s an easy target. She might not like them, but she knows that Orrin is waiting for the opportunity to blast them with his lightning.
No one deserves Orrin.
After a few moments assessing Ruti, the men relent, slamming the door to their home shut. Ruti sighs, turning around, and the Heir and Orrin melt out of the shadows. “We’ll need to search the Wastelands,” she says.
The Wastelands are at the edge of the city, near where Somanchi hits forest, in the worst part of the slums. The land is so miserable there that no trees will grow. Instead, there is only wreckage and dry, cracked land, ravaged by people who don’t have a next generation to worry about. They say that even the spirits won’t roam free there, in a land too desolate to rest in. Ruti has never spent much time in the Wastelands, where only the most desperate of Markless hide.
She leads the Heir down the road, past little Markless children who stretch out their hands as Ruti walks by. The Heir looks perturbed as she watches them. “I thought my father opened orphanages here.”
“He did.” Ruti avoids the eyes of the beggars, conscious of her own weakness when it comes to little ones. “But the orphanages need coin to provide food. They make for safe shelter at night for the little ones, but children still have to find their own food to survive out here.”
“All for being Markless,” the Heir murmurs. She crouches suddenly, her gown and cloak sweeping against the grimy ground, and drops a coin into the hands of one of the Markless children. The others clamor, rushing to her with their hands outstretched, tugging at her cloak and her arms with desperate need.
The Heir stumbles back, overwhelmed, and Orrin charges forward. Ruti moves before she can think it through, stepping between Orrin and the crowd of children with her eyes flashing. “Out of the way, Markless,” Orrin grits out.
“Lay a hand on them and I’ll kill you,” Ruti snaps back. The Heir is still beset by children, but she’s passing out coin to them, her brow knit as she takes them in. Few of these children will survive for long, Ruti knows. Fewer still will make it somewhere they can use their new coin. “Go,” Ruti orders them. “Run and find food before the older boys take your coin.”
The little ones understand that, even if they’ll never understand who it was who just fed them for a week, and they scatter. The Heir tucks away her purse, still looking deeply perturbed, and Orrin mutters, “It’s a waste of coin.” Ruti might have thought the same thing, but she glowers at Orrin nonetheless.
“When I am queen,” the Heir says abruptly, and raises her chin. “The slums are a blight on Zidesh and its capital city. The only solution is to fund the orphanages.”
“I agree,” Ruti says, but she’s startled—both at the unexpected humanity from the Heir, and from the unexpected humanity toward the Markless.
The Heir turns to look at her, Orrin ignored, and her eyes are sharp. “Kimya was on this line once,” the Heir murmurs.
“How did you—”
“She told me.” The Heir motions with her hands, a lazy gesture that is Kimya’s exact sign for collecting. Ruti gapes at her. Somehow, in all the free time that Kimya’s spent wandering around the Heir’s apartments and after all the chocolate that Kimya has been sneaking into their room, it had never occurred to her that Kimya had been teaching the Heir her speech. “Would she have survived here?”
“No,” Ruti says immediately, then reconsiders. “Maybe. She was good at surviving. I think she might have made it past seven.”
“And how much longer after that?” the Heir asks, and Ruti has no answer for her.
They continue their long walk down the Beggars’ Road and slowly, rickety little shops begin to grow more and more sparse, replaced with old wreckage and fallen buildings that have never been rebuilt. They reach the edge of the Wastelands, and Ruti shivers and glances around.
It is nearly dusk, and she has the sense already of haunted eyes fixed on them. The Wastelands are different than the rest of the slums. Everywhere else, there are people surviving, struggling to get through the impossible just to live another day. But there is no food in the Wastelands, no shops with coin to steal, nothing to strive for. There are no threats in the Wastelands, either, because anyone who still has the desire to live is far outside of them.
Markless come to the Wastelands to die.
“I thought about coming here once,” Ruti whispers. The Wastelands are too quiet to speak aloud. “When I was very little. There was no food and nowhere to go, and it seemed … this seemed the most peaceful way to starve to death.”
The Heir is silent for a moment. “What changed your mind?” she murmurs. Her eyes flicker over the devastation of the Wastelands with wariness, and Ruti knows that she must feel the same haunted gazes on them.
Ruti shrugs. “Stubbornness, I guess. I wanted to live. So I did.” It isn’t so simple, but she doesn’t think the Heir would understand the gnawing hunger she’d once known, the instinctual desperation to eat, stronger than any other conscious thought. She had thought about food for so long that the Wastelands had felt like an impossible sacrifice. Setting a single foot into the Wastelands alone would have been a surrender to starvation that Ruti hadn’t been capable of.
The Heir shakes her head, and for the first time she looks just as haunted as Ruti feels. “If my uncle had wanted to frighten me into bonding, he should have shown me this,” she mutters. There are tiny Markless here, little things who might be as old as Ruti scampering away into the shadows like mice. Next to them, the hungry wanderers of the rest of the slums look fat and sated. Everyone here is starved, and the sky is grey as though the sun never quite reaches this land.
Even Orrin looks uneasy. “Dekala, are you sure you want to—”
“Look,” the Heir says, and points off to the distance, into the dusk.
Beneath the grey skies, so deep in the Wastelands that Ruti isn’t quite sure that they’re even in Somanchi anymore, a little hut still stands. It’s just a bit higher than the wreckage around it, but it stands out by virtue of two things: the roof, a curved marvel in this dead place; and the vines of greenery that wind around it. It looks as though the vines are bleeding at first, but Ruti knows immediately what it is.
Fruit. Small, red fruits, the kind that the witch had sung into being as Ruti watched them blossom with envy. “That’s him,” Ruti says, and she quickens her pace.
It feels as though the hut is right in front of them, but Ruti is running for minutes and she still hasn’t reached it. The Heir is right behind her, the Wastelands growing dark now, and Ruti fiddles in the pockets of her clothes to find a speckled feather and a vial of star anise. She douses the feather with the anise and chants to the spirits until the Horned One seizes the feather from her, letting it flutter away in the wind. In its place is a glowing ball of light in front of them to illuminate their way. Orrin looks put off by this, and he flexes his wrist so that lightning glows bright in the sky, shining down on them.
Arrogant posturing, Ruti thinks grumpily, but she continues on, moving for an eternity toward the hut until finally she is close enough to make out the fruits on the vines. She plucks one off the vine and tastes it. The Wastelands and their pervasive hunger have made her ravenous.
“Careful!” the Heir snaps, and she actually sounds worried for a moment. “They might be poisonous or cursed or—”
“They’re just food,” says a voice from the doorway. It isn’t an old man. It’s a boy, not much older than Ruti, and he regards them with curiosity. “No one who makes it all the way out here is coming with ill will. Who are you?”
The Heir doesn’t speak. Nor does Orrin, so Ruti says, “I’m Ruti.” She raises her hand, displaying her empty palm. “I am looking for the witch.”
The boy raises his own unmarked hand. “I am Adisa,” he says. “The witch is dead.” He touches the doorpost beside him. “I stay in his home because of the magic that keeps me safe here. I don’t dare venture out into the Wastelands.”
Ruti stares at him, processing this new revelation. “Are you a witch?”
“No.” Adisa ducks his head. “I did not have the talent for it. I kept Fahim’s home while he was alive and learned from him how to make ointments and offerings to the spirits. But I can’t sing. Fahim said that he had only once met another Markless who had that skill.” He eyes Ruti for a moment. “A girl, he said. I had heard word of her in the slums, selling magic for food.”
Ruti smiles, a bittersweet pleasure filling her at the thought of the old witch knowing what she’d done with his lesson. “May we enter?” she asks.
Adisa steps back, his eyes narrowing as he takes in the rest of her entourage. “Your Highness,” he says, and bows low as they file inside.
The Heir blinks, startled. “How did you know?”
Adisa shakes his head. “No great feat,” he admits. “I only see the way you walk and the mark of sewa on your palm. A strong mark,” he murmurs, examining it. “The strokes of the mark are dark. You will be formidable when you become Bonded.”
“I will not be bonded at all,” the Heir says coldly. “We came to see if your master could help us with that.”
Adisa is taken aback. “Ah,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s … it isn’t done,” he says finally. “It’s.…”
“Unnatural,” Ruti finishes. “The spirits say it’s unnatural. They refuse to grant me this request.”
Adisa contemplates them. His hut is small, about the size of Ruti’s old shop, with shelves along one wall and a bed against the other. A table is behind him, a dozen half-finished poultices atop it, and Ruti doesn’t recognize the ingredients within them. “An unnatural request,” Adisa says slowly, “requires an unnatural offering.”
Ruti leans forward. “How can an offering be unnatural?”
“There is a place,” Adisa says, and lifts one of his poultices, inspecting the objects within. “A lake that can turn a man to stone. It is known as the Lake of the Carved Thousand, and it is deep in the south of Guder, where it meets Rurana and touches the Southern Sea. If you can bottle its water, the spirits may grant you even the most impossible of wishes.”
The Heir pounces on that promise. “May grant it? So even if we voyage there, we might still be without hope?”
Adisa looks at the Heir for a long while before he speaks. “If you seek to destroy your mark,” he says quietly, “then you are already without hope.”
The arguments begin before they make it back to the Royal Square, and they’re still squabbling over their new quest the next day in Ruti’s room. “You are not bringing Kimya,” the Heir says definitively. “She’ll be safer here.”
