“About what?” said Fletcher, raising a thick brow.
“’Bout you.” The boy’s gaze went to the markings around Fletcher’s wrists. The limiters circled both his hands like cuffs, scarred into flesh and something deeper. “Can I see them?”
“Ah, these?” asked Fletcher, holding up his hands.
The markings were a punishment, given only to those who defied the golden rule of magic.
“Thou shalt not use thy power to control another,” he recited, flashing a cold and crooked grin. For such a crime, the crown showed little mercy. The guilty were bound, branded with limiters designed to tourniquet their power.
But Fletcher’s were broken. The marks on the inside of his wrists were marred, obscured, like fractured links in a metal chain. He had gone to the ends of the world to break those binds, had traded blood and soul and years of life, but here he was. Free again. Of a sort. He was still bound to the shop and the illusion of impotence—an illusion he maintained lest the guards learn of his recovery and return to claim more than his magic. It helped, of course, that he’d bought favor with a few of them. Everyone—even the rich and the proud and the royal—wanted things they shouldn’t have. And those things were Fletcher’s specialty.
The boy was still staring at the marks, wide-eyed and pale. “Tac.” Fletcher brought his arms back to rest on the counter. “Time for looking’s over. You going to buy something or not?”
The boy scurried out, empty-handed, and Fletcher sighed and tugged a pipe from his back pocket. He snapped his fingers, and a small blue flame danced on the end of his thumb, which he used to light the leaves pressed into the bowl. And then he drew something from his shirt pocket and set it on the wooden counter.
It was a chess piece. A small, white rook to be exact. A marker of a debt he’d yet to pay but would.
The rook had once belonged to the young Antari whelp, Kell, but it had come to Fletcher’s shop several years before as part of the pot in a round of Sanct.
Sanct was the kind of game that grew. A mix of strategy and luck and a fair bit of cheating, it could be over in minutes or last for hours. And the final hand of the night had been going on for nearly two. They were the last players, Fletcher and Kell, and as the night had grown, so had the pot. They weren’t playing for coins, of course. The table was piled high with tokens and trinkets and rare magic. A vial of hope sand. A water blade. A coat that concealed an infinite number of sides.
Fletcher had played every card but three: a pair of kings with a saint among them. He was sure he’d won. And then Kell played three saints. The problem was, there were only three saints in the whole deck, and Fletcher had one in his hand. But as Kell laid out his hand, the card in Fletcher’s shimmered and changed from a saint to a servant, the lowest card in the deck.
Fletcher turned red as he watched it. The royal brat had slipped an enchanted card into the set and played Fletcher as well as the game. And that was the best and worst thing about Sanct. Nothing was off-limits. You didn’t have to win fair. You only had to win.
Fletcher had no choice but to lay out his ruined hand, and the room broke into raucous comments and jeers. Kell only smiled and shrugged and got to his feet. He plucked a trinket from the top of the pile—a chess piece from another London—and tossed it to Fletcher.
“No hard feelings,” he said with a wink before he took the lot and left.
No hard feelings.
Fletcher’s fingers tightened on the small stone statue. The bell at the front of the shop rang as another customer stepped in, a tall, thin man with a greying beard and a hungry glint in his eye. Fletcher pocketed the rook and managed a grim smile.
“Erase es ferase?” he asked.
Coming or going?
III
Kell could feel the stone in Lila’s pocket as they walked.
There had been a moment when his fingers closed over hers and his skin had brushed the talisman, when all he wanted was to take it from her. It felt like everything would be all right if he could simply hold it. Which was an absurd notion. Nothing would be all right so long as the stone existed. Still, it pulled at his senses, and he shivered and tried not to think about it as he led Lila through Red London, away from the noise and toward the Ruby Fields.
Rhy’s celebrations would last all day, drawing the majority of the city—its people and its guard—to the banks of the river and the red palace.
Guilt rolled through him. He should have been a part of the procession, should have ridden in the open carriage with the royal family, should have been there to tease and chide his brother for the way he relished the attention.