Aliyah

“I doubt we can stay here long,” Kionah said.

Morning light crept across their warded room. Aliyah’s body felt heavy with exhaustion, even with the aid of her magic. The last several hours had hardly been conducive to restful sleep.

Laurent had drawn up wards over the wreckage of the workshop and Kionah had helped, spinning spellwork nets to drape over doorways. Silas had insisted on taking watch; Laurent had argued against it. No one had wanted to venture out, so dinner had been leftover lavender bread, dipped in milk to soften it. Kionah had complained that it tasted of soap.

Now, Kionah sat in bed scribbling figures onto a scrap of paper.

“Laurent’s only indulging us because I’m a friend of Shasta’s,” she continued, frowning down at the page of arithmetic as she weighed a coin pouch in one hand. “I doubted anything would happen in a more residential area upside, but…well. They didn’t sign up for this. Are you amenable to crashing at Shasta’s, or will I have to seek other options?”

“Does it matter what I think?” Aliyah asked. “They’re trying to abduct me. Why aren’t they going after you?” she added, trying not to sound overly fretful. “You were there too.”

“You possess a magic that I don’t,” Kionah said, tapping the end of her stylograph against her chin. “And you’re Songian-born, besides. If these faeries are the very same who attacked your kingdom, I assume they have a vested interest in people like you. Speaking of which, the next time someone tells you to move out of the way—at least try.”

“I miscalculated.” She ran a hand through her hair and frowned. “Maybe I should cut my hair.”

Kionah looked up from her sheet of numbers and raised an eyebrow. “Pardon? I think it suits you as it is.”

“I can’t cast through dead cells,” she said reluctantly. She winced at the memory of Saiphenora swinging her into the wall. “I suppose there’s no point in giving opponents a free handhold.”

Kionah looked her up and down. “Or you could just shield hard enough such that they can’t reach you. Else we’d all go about looking like Silas.”

“Right. I can’t shield that well, though.”

“Shields work better if you’re standing still.”

Aliyah scowled. “I was standing still when the faery broke it.”

“So practice,” Kionah said, setting her paper aside. She scooped a handful of coins from her pouch and headed for the door. “Be back in a minute. Have to convince Laurent to send a pigeon to Luxon’s.”

Aliyah watched her go and sighed into the empty room.

Voices drifted in from the hallway in an indistinct blur. She wondered if Saiphenora was still out there, with arrows in wait. Hopefully not, if that hemolymphatic hemorrhage had been anything to go by.

She stood and stretched her arms. There was nothing physically amiss. Even her magic had replenished itself overnight. But a certain tiredness lingered about her skull, drove furrows below her eyes and a phantom tension into her sinuses. It was a weariness that came with being on too-high-alert. She’d played the fight over and over before drifting off to sleep, put it through a dozen permutations of maybe this could have happened if you’d reacted sooner.

She raised her hands, planted her feet into the floorboards, and summoned a shield.

The familiar golden dome snapped into existence around her, awash with a faint, oily film. The barrier wasn’t as clear as Kionah’s, she noted, nor as smooth. There were inconsistencies in the shape, sections which dipped and thinned away. She wondered why Kionah had cause to be so good at shielding, came to several discomfiting conclusions, and carefully put them out of her mind for the time being.

She’d probably been better at this as a child, when it had been first taught to her. There was something bitter about that notion, the sense that her skill had been slowly siphoned out of her by maidwork drudgery. The kingdom had forged her into someone who was good at flying needles and sweeping floors and getting bloodstains out of clothes and really not much else.

Learning to fix cuts and sprains had felt like clambering out of a mile-deep pit of helplessness. Pity then, that the helplessness was still there: her foundations were cracked and unsteady, evident in every dimple over the surface of her shield.

Kionah stepped back into the room, the coins gone from her hand.

“I’ve sent for a decent lunch as well,” she said as she dropped back onto her bed. “Hey, that doesn’t look too terrible. It’ll save you getting punched by the average pissed-off citizen.”

Aliyah frowned uneasily. “Are Glisterian people quick to anger?”

“Only if you get caught.”

“Caught?” She thought of nimble fingers plucking food from shopfronts, sleight of hand put to use with the faery’s potion vial. “Oh. I see.” She dropped the shield. “I think the faeries are stronger than usual folk, though.”

“The ones they let out of the Hive are,” Kionah said. “These random schismatists hunting you down, I think you’ll be fine once that’s gone.” She jerked her chin towards her arm, where the tracker-mark lay hidden beneath her sleeve. “Glister’s a big city. Worst comes to worst, you could dip underground for a few months.”

“Right. Still, the silver faery—Saiphenora something, she was strong.”

“You’re a little biased,” Kionah said, “on account of having been shot.”

Aliyah winced. “Very funny.”

“No, I’m serious.” Kionah took something from her pocket and held it out: the potion vial from last night, sloshing with golden liquid. “She wouldn’t’ve been such a problem if it weren’t for this. And neither would the rest of them, I suspect.”

“A potion?” she asked doubtfully. Most of the formulary she’d seen at market hadn’t been anything special, never mind giving one the ability to shoot walls of arrows.

“Something like that. Word on the street is they usually get this stuff in the Hive, boosts them up a bit. But schismatists have to make do with their own brew—which makes them…worse.”

“Right. Well, even if it’s not intrinsic to their physiology I can’t take it away from them. Unless…” She frowned. “How quickly is it absorbed? I doubt I could force it out of their bloodstream, or make them metabolise it faster. Potions are mostly magic, right? There’s no naturally-occurring antagonist substance, I don’t think…ugh.” She scratched reflexively at the tracker-mark on her arm. “Maybe if the pretender-Magician hadn’t broken those keys…”

“I have no idea,” Kionah said, pocketing the vial with a shrug. “But getting a bit better at shielding can’t hurt. I’m out of practice myself.”

“You held off the faeries back with the pretender-Magician,” Aliyah pointed out. And that had been with a concussion too, hadn’t it? She wondered how badly she lagged in comparison to normal mages her age. But then again, she reminded herself, Kionah was a hardened criminal—even if she didn’t look like one.

Kionah sighed and inspected her nails. “I could have done more than hold them back if I hadn’t spent the last year lounging around. Eating sugared dates and listening for secrets is all very well and good, but it was hardly optimal for keeping in shape. Say, try that shield again.”

“Why?”

“You want help, don’t you?”

Aliyah summoned the shield. Kionah stepped forwards and peered at it, so close that her nose almost grazed its surface.

“Who taught you this? Not Saar-Salai, I assume.”

“I learned most of my spellwork from a tutor. In the lowborn school.”

“You’re not pulling the magic evenly,” Kionah said with a click of her tongue. She leaned back and summoned a shield of her own. “Best steady when you’re standing still, see? Maybe try it slow first.”

Privately, Aliyah thought the advice rather unhelpful. Shielding had a different shape to it than targeted impulses like breakage and vasodilation, a sense of stasis rather than change.

“Is there no secret beyond practice?”

Kionah snorted and dropped her example of a far superior shield. “Is there ever?”

Aliyah thought of books crammed full of text, diagrams of arteries and veins, afternoons spent hunched over tomes. “No,” she said. “Not really.”

Some of her dismay must have shown, because Kionah shot her a sympathetic look. “Hey, now. We’ve got a spare couple of hours before Luxon pays you a visit. Why don’t I throw some knives at you?”

“What?” Aliyah asked, alarmed. Her shield flickered with the lapse in focus.

“See, that there you do not want,” Kionah said with a shake of her head. “You have to train yourself to reflexively boost instead of drop, eh? At least, that was what I did.”

“I’m sorry,” Aliyah said, “but knives?”

“Daggers,” Kionah clarified. She bent over her luggage and retrieved a pair of long, slender, and most saliently, Aliyah thought, sharp blades. “And not ‘throw’, so much as slice. See what your shield can handle.”

“Those will cut me if the shield doesn’t hold.”

“So?” Kionah asked. She twirled one of the knives in an appraising manner. “You’re a Healer, aren’t you?”

“I uh, I still feel pain, you know.”

Kionah blinked. “Can’t you block it out if you know it’s coming?”

“Pain isn’t the only problem,” she said, cringing at the thought of a dagger-point gouging into her eyeball. “And no, it doesn’t work like you think. Targeting takes time, focus—if it’s a fight, I can’t just put a total block on nerve signals, because—”

Kionah sighed. “Damn. I was hoping I could play with these.”

People underestimated knives, Aliyah thought gloomily. Sure, there were tales of old lords surviving assassinations wrought with dozens of stabs, but more often than not, a person with a knife was going to do enough damage for healing it to be complicated, or if not complicated, then at least irritating.

“Why do you have those, anyway?” she asked.

Kionah shrugged and placed the daggers back into her luggage. “I like them. Good for tricks. Good in a pinch. Haven’t used them for real fighting; Shasta assures me it’s no fun.”

Aliyah thought of Shasta’s scars, a not-insignificant amount even with the presumable ability to shield. “I can’t imagine it would be,” she said. “Do you tend to get in a lot of fights?”

“I don’t tend to start them,” Kionah said, which both was and wasn’t an answer.

“Okay,” she said carefully. “Okay, so. Is there anything you can test against the shield that won’t seriously injure me?”

“Hm,” Kionah said, and threw something at her.

A dark shape blurred through the air. Aliyah yelped and bolstered her shield; the thing thwacked against it and tumbled off the side.

“…Really?” she asked, when her gaze refocused. “Your jacket?”

“You’ve got to start somewhere, don’t you?” Kionah asked. She grabbed the pillow off her bed and hefted it in her hand with a self-satisfied grin. “Let’s go.”

Pillow, jacket, duvet, water-flask, they all came at her in quick, blinding succession. She bolstered her shield and it held, until Kionah herself lunged, knuckles glowing with spell-light. She struck, and the shield crumbled. Aliyah yelped and veered sideways, not fast enough. Kionah’s fist clipped a glancing blow across her cheek.

“Ow,” she said.

“Sorry!” Kionah raised her hands, palms-out in a conciliatory manner. “My apologies, I ah, I assumed your shield could take it. You held up against the faery, after all.”

Aliyah passed her hand over her cheek and healed what little damage there was, soothed it away as if it had never been. She could do that, at least. She rubbed at her temples and sighed. “I saw the faery coming.”

Kionah shrugged, almost apologetically. “Lucky you did.”

“Fine,” she said. “Again.”

Kionah hit her shield, harder this time. Aliyah dug her heels in and grit her teeth; it held. Kionah flexed her fingers and stepped around her, became a looming presence at her back. When she turned her head instinctively, Kionah took another step to keep out of her line of sight.

“This is hardly going to work if you can anticipate everything,” Kionah said.

Aliyah poured more magic into her shield. “Uh, just so you know, head injuries are really quite dangerous.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll just aim at your back—”

Kionah cast mid-sentence. The jolt of magic crashed into her shield, a spell with a tunneling, piercing form—and two more, seemingly specialised for breaking barriers, that almost made it through.

“Better,” Kionah said, and struck again. And again. And again.

The attacking spells varied in shape, testing the bounds of her shield. Kionah would feint every now and again, letting a trail of magic whisper over one side of the shield-dome before hitting the other. She poured liquid magic over the shield’s surface, burrowed into the gap between shield and floor, fired lances of hissing light that looped round to strike from the front. It was almost infuriating. And yet, if this was how she had to prepare herself for survival in this sideways-city, then she would do all that she could—to a reasonable extent. They stopped when she was on the cusp of a bleeding nose.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Kionah said when she announced as such. “Why does that even happen to you? You’re a Healer; surely you can make it stop.”

“Not worth it,” she replied, shaking her head. She could still feel the imprint of a shield-holding on her hands, like a muscle tensed for too long. “I could heal and vasoconstrict for a while, yeah, but I’d have to focus. And it’d just come back, as soon as I stop focusing.”

“But the worse effects?” Kionah asked skeptically. “Wouldn’t it be worth preventing those?”

“Worse?” She frowned. “You mean, fainting? If it gets to that point, I won’t have enough magic to prevent it.”

“Oh,” said Kionah. “You don’t often overextend yourself? Short history of total drainage? Hm. Well, I suppose you were a maidservant. I see.”

Aliyah frowned. “I don’t. You mean, there are worse effects that come with habit?”

“Yes.” Kionah sighed. “It’s why I’m careful not to, nowadays. And why you should do the same.”

“Wait, wait. What sort of worse effects do you mean?”

Her words were met with a grimace. “Oh, it’s not pretty. Go too hard too many times and, ah, all your old wounds start to unravel, that sort of thing. Muscles go squishy. Teeth coming loose.”

“That happened to you?” Aliyah asked, alarmed. Kionah certainly looked well but then again, she’d been in the company of a princess and her Healers until rather recently.

Kionah raised her hand and tilted it back and forth, a vague gesture. “A little. Not the worst.” She hesitated, and her voice took on a more distant tone. “I saw the nastier bits happen to others. Some of the witches, the old generation…it’s like they start to unravel. Start losing control. Can’t come back from it.”

“That sounds awful.” She swallowed at the memory of old pain, clawing tissue, broken flesh—that had been bad enough in itself. She resolved to keep a hold of her strength; best not to court further consequences.

“It is.” Kionah shook her head, strode over to her bed, and started rummaging through her luggage. “In any case, you’d better rest. Little time before Luxon gets here.”

Her voice had taken a turn, forced into faux-cheeriness. Aliyah sensed a buried current there, something best not to touch. She picked up her half-finished book and watched Kionah out of the corner of her eye; the former spymaster twirled a dagger almost wistfully in her hands.

Here was another thing to think about: what a violent history might Kionah have, that she was not even through with half her second decade but had burnt her magic down to ashes enough times to fear losing it entirely? Aliyah supposed that her own youth had been if not pleasant, then at least sheltered in comparison.

Lunch came quickly: warm soup, bread for dipping, and a cupful each of that orange brine-pudding. Kionah gave Silas a curt, grateful nod and a pair of coins exchanged hands.

“Market food,” Kionah had explained over the rim of her bowl. Her lips twisted into a wry smile. “I told him it would be cheaper if he stole it, but he didn’t seem to agree.”

===

“My goodness! What happened here? It’s positively ghastly.”

Luxon swept through the tattered workshop in a swish of brocade dress and beaded coat. Her wings were folded down, hiding their shimmer—but the rest of her outfit more than made up for it. Ribbons trailed from her bejeweled sleeves, and a lovers eye brooch winked up at them from her collar. Aliyah eyed the carpet bag she carried and scratched absently at her forearm.

“Rogue faeries,” Silas replied, crossing his arms. “Laurent tried sending a missive to the Hive before he set off this morning. No reply yet.” He scowled faintly, before turning his attention to the book splayed open in his lap. “Wards got cracked and yet, no news. Wonder why—they’re usually good about this sort of thing, or so I hear.”

Luxon tilted her head and gave a nervous little titter. A pair of cut-emerald pendants swung from where they hooked into her face-spines, perfectly matched to her faceted eyes. They had the unfortunate effect of making her seem as if she had an additional eyeball floating on either side of her face.

“Good about…? Oh, yes. They are! I’m sure they’ll send someone to help, once a few things are sorted out. Very…busy, at the moment, or so I’ve been told.”

“Busy?” Kionah asked, frowning. She snapped her fingers. “Right! I bet you’ve got a new queen, yeah? Titania, or successor, or something along those lines? Just now?”

“Something like that,” Luxon said. Her tail swished in what Aliyah thought might be an agitated manner. “I’m really not the best person to speak with regarding Hive matters. Anyhow. I came with your cure!” She stepped closer and brandished the carpet bag. “Hold out your arm for me, if you would?”

Aliyah did. The tesseracts gleamed mockingly up at her. Perhaps it was the light, but they seemed especially sinister-looking today; the lines shone faintly, as if they had been brushed on with fresh ink. Luxon pulled a small potion bottle from the depths of her bag, filled with a dull blue liquid. It fizzled and wisped off into strings of smoke as Luxon popped the cork and poured it over the mark; the smoke sank into her skin and tingled something fierce. The tesseracts shimmered—and stayed.

“Um,” Aliyah said. “How long does it take to work?”

Luxon was frowning. “It is…usually instant. The only thing that could…well, I imbued it to counteract any additional syrup-effects from all the known variants, I am certain…”

“Syrup?” Kionah broke in. She fished Saiphenora’s vial out of her pocket. “You mean, like this?”

Luxon turned her head. Her spines pricked upwards and her gemstone-eyes flashed in the light. “That looks…yes, that does look very schismatist. If you would provide me the sample, I could rework the antidote. Perhaps there’s a fresh brewer about, new methods…ugh, what a bother. I do apologise.”

Aliyah watched as the vial exchanged hands and frowned. The tracker-mark stuck firmly—and perhaps, she fancied, even mockingly—on her skin. “Luxon, do you know any faeries called Saiphenora?”

Luxon tilted her head and tutted. “I’m afraid not. Perhaps someone from the Hive proper would know—”

The faint sound of breaking glass interrupted her.

“The wards,” Silas said grimly, his gaze trained on a shimmer across the pages of his book. He placed it carefully atop a bench before he stood, sparks of spellfire wound around his knuckles and the faintest surge of shielding at his sides.

“What—” Kionah started, but he was already striding into the shopfront.

Aliyah hesitated. Saiphenora’s words flared in her mind: keep an eye when you shelter away from a roof and four walls, mageling. She was almost glad when Luxon took the lead and swished through to the shopfront; Kionah followed a fraction of a moment after, and Aliyah hurried half a step behind.

The shopfront was in a slightly better state than the workshop, but there was a distinct scorchmark on the countertop and several display cases sported cracks. The sign at the door had been flipped around such that the outward-facing side stated the shop was closed. An arrow had punched through its very center, marring the words; the glass panel on the door lay shattered at their feet.

“Ooh,” Luxon said with a shudder. “How terribly…uncouth. More schismatists all hopped up on syrup, I gather.”

Silas leaned over the shards and plucked the arrow free; it was an ordinary arrow, formed of wood and not spellfire. From its tail trailed a substantial length of red fabric—so much that Aliyah wondered how the arrow had flown true.

“Back inside, all of you,” Silas said. “Whoever shot this is probably still around.”

They filtered back into the workshop, and Aliyah’s skin prickled at the suggestion of being watched. She tensed and readied castings of shielding and vasodilation, but the tracker-mark lay calm and dormant—the suggestion of an itch was so faint that it could have well been her imagination alone. She felt her face twist into a frown as the fabric rustled in Silas’s grasp. It looked—could it be a coincidence…?

“There is a note attached,” Silas said with a frown. He fished a small scroll from out behind the folds of fabric. “Are your enemies in habit of leaving such correspondence, Sadrava? Crowear poking their nose into schismatist business recently?”

Kionah shook her head as Silas passed the scroll to her. “I’m a friend of Shasta’s, not an employee—”

“Whatever you say.”

“Excuse me,” Aliyah said as an unpleasant sense of certainty bloomed in the pit of her stomach. “Silas, could you pass me that that fabric?”

Silas unknotted the end from the arrow and tossed it her way. Her mouth went dry the moment it landed in her hands.

How had faeries gotten their hands on Healer weave?

Beside her, Kionah had unrolled the scroll; Luxon was peering interestedly, not even hiding the fact that she was reading over Kionah’s shoulder.

“Hey, uh,” Kionah said. “Aliyah. I think this is for you.”

Aliyah took a breath and steadied her hands, trying not to clutch too panickedly at the weave in her grasp. “What does it say?”

Kionah cleared her throat. “It says,” she said, and hesitated before forging ahead. “That the writers are ‘in possession of an individual known as Zahir Saar-Salai’ and that they ‘wish to meet down by Saltstone Wharf at sunset to further discuss this.’”

“Saltstone?” Luxon murmured. “Those ghastly abandoned dockyards?”

“A…ransom?” Aliyah asked. She gripped the Healer cloth tighter. Something sharp bit into her palm through the folds. She yanked her fingers back and reached around to uncrease the fabric—and her blood ran cold as the item toppled out from where it had been tucked.

“Sounds like bullshit to me,” Kionah said. “Looks like someone’s got friends in the kingdom—first a Magician, and now this.”

Aliyah stared down at the badge pinned into the fabric, silver and shaped to resemble an open hand. Her pulse was coming too fast, singing the beginnings of a panicked song.

“How—” she started, and shook her head. “Wait, this is his, isn’t it? The cloak, maybe, but—there are…there are no spare badges…we…we have to…”

“No,” Kionah said sharply, frowning down at the badge. “Aliyah, think. This has the look of bait all about it. It’s not necessarily Saar-Salai, is it? That could be from any Healer’s cloak. Besides, those docks are abandoned and a veritable graveyard of rust-bucket death-traps. I’ll bet they want to ‘talk’ aboard one of the moored hulks, eh? And what if they don’t have a Healer as prisoner? What if they have one as an ally?”

But then, Aliyah thought, how would they know his name? If that name had been chosen specifically to goad her into seeking it out, then wouldn’t the Magician have known who she was? Information floated adrift, not quite adding up…

Silas muttered something vaguely uncomplimentary under his breath before clearing his throat. “Sadrava, what more trouble have you dragged here?”

“Nothing to concern yourself with,” Kionah replied with an unhappy twist of her mouth. “We’ll be moving along shortly. Perhaps I can arrange something with Shasta…”

“Speak of the prodigal son,” Silas said.

Half a heartbeat later, knocking came at the door.

“Goodness,” Luxon said with a chirrupy, faerie snicker. “You really set up a ward-signal for one pers—”

“Yes,” Silas said flatly, though he stepped into the other room nonetheless. Aliyah heard the bottom edge of the door crunching across broken glass; the shop bell tinkled discordantly a moment later.

“Mind the mess,” Silas said from the other room.

“Not at all,” came Shasta’s voice, polite and dry.

Shasta ducked through the doorway, eyes skimming over patches of spilled ink and spell-fire scorchmarks. He held a pair of arrows in one hand, and both were fletched with red.

Aliyah hadn’t known that it was possible for her stomach to drop even lower.