Amanda Downum - The Drowning City

Finally she rolled out of bed, groping for her clothes. Adam stirred, eyes flashing in the dark.

“I’m going out,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

After a moment his breathing deepened again. She tugged on vest and trousers, stomped into her boots. Sandals would be cooler and less conspicuous, but she liked having a place for extra blades.

She leaned against the handle to keep the door from squeaking. Moisture warped the wood till nothing opened or closed smoothly. She turned her key in the lock and slunk down the shadow-thick hall.

She’d hoped-ancestors, how she’d hoped-but the witch’s contact was nothing but a foolish child. Didn’t want bloodshed. Xinai snorted softly. There was nothing without bloodshed, let alone tearing down the Khas and casting out the Assari conquerors. Freedom was measured in blood.

She pitied the poor dead woman, trapped now, forever cut off from her family and her homeland. She hadn’t had the heart to ask what would happen to her spirit once the witch returned to Erisín. An ugly fate.

But no worse than her own family had known. Did their ghosts linger still, haunting the jungles or the mines?

The night was heavy in her lungs as she slipped out the servants’ entrance to the street and turned toward the docks. But after a few streets she halted, frowning. She needed more than drunken complaints and rumors. She knew where she needed to go; she’d avoided it long enough.

Xinai turned and made her way to Straylight, and the Street of Salt.

Easy for the mageling to keep her idealism. No Laii ever lived in a tilting hovel that flooded with the rains, ever sent their children to the mines or fields to keep the lease on such a hovel. Easy for the mages to look down from their mountain and call Symir a jewel, when they were too far away to see the flaws at its heart.

She smiled at the missing signs and Sivahran writing, tried to imagine the whole city like that. No use. The city was Assari, from wooden pilings beneath the water to the rooftop tiles, even if it had been paid for with native blood. Perhaps it could be reclaimed, made Sivahri, but the jungle was her true home. She should go into the hills, find her family’s banyan tree. If it still stood. The spirit might have withered with no one to tend it.

She touched one of the charms around her neck, the oldest. The last of her mother’s work, containing bones and ashes of generations of Lins. She should have worn her mother’s bones in that pouch, but they were lost.

A pack of young men loitered on the corner, lounging against crumbling walls. Prides, they called themselves, like hunting cats. Clanless children who banded together for safety, formed families just as tight as blood-kin. She had feared them when she was young, but now she understood. She nodded acknowledgment as she passed and the leader nodded back.

The smell of herbs and witchery washed over her as she walked down the street and her eyes burned. Time pulled away like the tide, leaving a different Xinai standing on the pitted stones. Young and scared, torn and bloody.

She stopped in front of a narrow shop-front, swallowing the taste of tears. The sign was nearly the same as it had been twelve years ago, faded now and weathered. Lamplight flickered through the windows. Too much to hope…But she climbed the worn stairs and knocked.

For a moment she thought no one would answer, but finally the door creaked open. A stooped woman stood silhouetted in the doorway, her face cast in shadow.

“What do you want?” she asked. A familiar voice, like a cold blade in her heart.

“Selei?” The name cracked in her mouth, nearly shattered.

Silence stretched. Finally the old woman moved, let the light fall through the door.

“Xinai? Xinai Lin?” Her wrinkled brown face broke into a wondering smile. “Oh, child-” And she stepped forward to clasp Xinai in her arms, and pulled her into the shop.

The room was much the same as she remembered, clean but crowded, walls warped and water-stained. Fragrant herbal smoke drowned the mold-musk that lingered in older buildings. The last time Xinai had crossed the threshold she’d been barely fifteen, desperate and alone, her back bloody and slick with grease to keep her shirt from sticking to open wounds.

Selei had paid for her passage on a smuggler’s ship, sent her away before hate and grief poisoned her. It had saved her life.

The witch locked the door behind them and turned to study Xinai. Age clouded one eye milk-blue, but the other was dark and sharp as ever. Not blood-kin, but a friend of the Lin clan since before she was born, the closest thing to family she had left in Sivahra.

Selei’s gaze took in her jewelry, the blades at her hips. One bird-light hand caught Xinai’s, turned it over to trace the calluses. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

Xinai nodded, throat tight.

“But you came home.” Not quite a question, but her forehead creased in curiosity. Braids the color of steel and ashes rattled as she moved, woven through with feathers and bone beads.

Xinai felt the weight of age and experience in the woman’s mismatched gaze, felt herself being measured. She nodded again and found her voice.

“I’ve come back to help.”

Waiting was always the worst part.

Isyllt sat in Vasilios’s kitchen, sipping bitter green tea and resisting the urge to pace while stripes of sunlight moved slowly across the blue and orange tiles. She and Adam had left the inn this morning and settled into the mage’s home. For all her flippancy about spending money, she still needed to fill out expense reports when she returned, and the Crown’s accountants didn’t believe in luxurious or glamorous spying.

Nothing to do now but wait for Zhirin to arrange a meeting, or for Xinai to uncover something else of use, some other faction in case Jabbor’s people couldn’t help them. Isyllt didn’t remember the mercenary being so tense on the ship, spine stiff and brow creased. It hadn’t, she guessed, been a happy homecoming.

Her parents had fled civil war in Vallorn when she was seven, but she had only vague memories of her parents’ worry, her mother’s tears in the night and their hasty descent from the mountains. Memories of their home were vaguer still. And after her parents died in the plague sixteen years ago, she’d moved from one shelter to another until Kiril found her. Until Kiril and the Arcanost, home was any tenement she could afford or anywhere she could hide, anything better than an alley. Nothing worth fighting for, or dying for.

She tried to picture it, foreign soldiers in the streets of Erisín, the house of Alexios cast out of the palace. Even though she’d spied and schemed and killed for Selafai-for Kiril-she couldn’t imagine how Xinai felt, how the ghost of Deilin Xian felt.

She drew a breath sweet with spices and flowers in the garden. Across the kitchen, the housekeeper kneaded bread dough, gnarled brown hands slapping and shaping with practiced ease. Flour dusted her apron, smudged the scarf that held back her iron-gray braids. She was the only servant Isyllt had seen; the peace in the house was nearly soporific.

But still her nerves sang, like a child first sent to bazaar alone. Ridiculous.

Or not, perhaps. Her other assignments had been paltry things compared to this-an ear in the shadows, a knife in the dark. Nothing so grand as revolution.

Footsteps distracted her, light and uneven. She glanced up as Vasilios came in, his limp not quite hidden beneath his robes.

“I always did hate the waiting most of all,” he said with a wry smile, pulling out a chair. “Kiril was the patient one. I always wanted to be doing something-it nearly got me killed a time or two.”