Janice Hardy - The Pain Merchants

I took a step forward, but something large blocked my escape. Heclar! He swung at my head and I ducked, but not fast enough.

Pain slammed into my temple and I thudded back to the ground. Heclar floated in the silver flecks dancing around my eyes, a blue-black pynvium club in his hand.

That cleared me straight. I was lucky he was so cheap he only hit me with it instead of flashing it at me. The weapon was too black to be pure pynvium, but blue enough to hold a lot of pain. I didn’t want it flashed in my direction any more than I wanted to go to prison.

He scoffed and pointed the club at me. “Bunch of thieves, both of you.”

I grabbed the night guard’s shin and drew , knitting bone and yanking every hurt, every sting, every wince from his ankle. His pain ran down my arm, seared my leg and chewed around my own ankle. Yep. Definitely broken. My stomach rolled, but there was nothing in it to throw up.

I seized Heclar’s leg with my free hand and pushed . The agony the night guard hadn’t revealed raced up my other side and poured out of my tingling fingers into Heclar. I almost gave him the knuckleburn, but that would make his hands clench and a hard, sudden grip on the pynvium club might be the enchantment’s trigger. Be just my luck to accidentally set it off.

Heclar screamed loud enough to wake the Saints. To be truthful it was worse than he deserved, but sending me to prison for eggs I hadn’t yet stolen was worse than I deserved. The Saints are funny that way.

I left both men lying in chicken feed and feathers and sprinted for safety. Just five paces to the exit, then another five to Farm-Market Bridge. Once I crossed the bridge, I’d be off the isle and in the market district on Geveg’s main island where it was easier to hide. If I didn’t pass out first.

At the foot of the bridge, two boys in Healers’ League green were staring at me in wonder. I skidded to a stop and glanced over my shoulder. I had a clear view of the night guard and the blubbering rancher. The boys had seen me shift for sure.

“How did you do that?” one boy asked. Tall and skinny, but with hard eyes for a boy so young. Too young to be an apprentice. A ward then. The war had left Geveg with plenty of us orphans about.

“I didn’t…do anything.” Breathing took more effort than I had. I held my side as I edged past them, checking for mentors or escorts that stuck to wards like reed sap. If either had seen me shift pain…I shuddered.

“Yes, you did!” The other boy nodded his head and his red hair fell into his eyes. He shoved it back with a freckled hand. “You shifted pain. We saw you!”

“No I didn’t…I stabbed him in the foot…with a nail.” I leaned forward, hands on my knees. The silver flecks were back at the edge of my vision, sneaking up on me from the sides. “If you look close…you can still see the blood.”

“Elder Len said shifting pain was just a myth, but you really did it, didn’t you?”

I wasn’t sure which Saint covered luck, but I must’ve snubbed her big time at some point in my fifteen years. “You boys better get back to the League…before the Luminary discovers you sneaked out.”

Both paled when I mentioned the Luminary. We got a new one every three years, like some rite of passage the Duke’s Healers had to go through to prove their worth. The new Luminary was Baseeri of course, and like all Baseeri who held positions that should have been held by Gevegians, no one liked him. He ran the League without compassion, and if you crossed him, you didn’t stand a chance of getting healed if you needed it. You or your family.

“You don’t want to get into trouble, do you?”

“No!”

I placed a finger to my lips and shushed. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

They nodded hard enough to bounce their eyeballs out of their heads, but boys that age couldn’t keep a secret. By morning, the whole League would know about this.

Tali was going to kill me.

“Oh, Nya, how could you?”

Tali used Mama’s disappointed face. Chin tucked in, her wide brown eyes all puppylike, lips pursed and frowning at the same time. Mama had done it better.

“Would you rather I’d gone to prison?”

“Of course not.”

“Then sink it. What’s done is done and—”

“—I can’t change it none,” she finished for me.

I had three years on her, which usually gave me implied authority, but since she’d joined the League she’d been forgetting who the big sister was. Hard to do with only the two of us left, but she managed.

“Be grateful I got away.” I flopped backwards into green floor pillows. Tali sat on the edge of her bed dressed in her Healer’s apprentice uniform, her white underdress neatly pressed and her short green vest buttoned. A sunbeam from the small window above poured over her, making the braided silver loop on her shoulder sparkle.

The door to Tali’s dorm room was shut, but not soundproof. Shuffling feet and excited giggles drifted in as the other apprentices readied for class. Morning rounds were about to start and I had work to find if I wanted to eat today. Tali sneaked some food out for me when she could, but the League rationed it and they watched the wards and apprentices carefully at mealtimes—especially if they were Gevegian. Hungry or not, I wasn’t about to let her risk her apprenticeship for me any more than I had to, and I needed a bigger favour than breakfast.

“Are you on this morning?” I asked, wiggling my toes in the sunbeam.

Tali nodded, but didn’t look at me. I think stealing the heals scared her more than stealing food, though getting caught in the dining hall was a lot more likely.

“Could you?” I lifted my aching hands. The pain from the night guard’s knuckleburn made me useless for all but hauling and I couldn’t carry enough on my back to be worth the money.

“Sure, come here.”

I scooted over and she took my hands. Heat blossomed and the ache vanished, tucked safely in Tali’s knuckles. She’d keep it there until some aristocrat paid the League to get rid of their own pain, then dump both into the Slab. It was risky sneaking the pain past the League Seniors, but I couldn’t dump my pain into the Slab even if I could get to it.

The Slab wasn’t its real name, but that’s what all the apprentices and low cords called it. Its real name was something like Healing Quality High-Enchanted Pynvium, which didn’t have the same ring at all. I’d never actually seen it, not even when Mama was alive, but Tali said it was pure pynvium, ocean blue and the size of a bale of hay. I could eat for the rest of my life with what the Luminary must’ve paid the enchanters for it.

Tali flexed her fingers and winced. “You could have sold that to the pain merchants, you know.”

I scoffed. The pain merchants weren’t quite thieves, but they paid so little for pain it was practically stealing it. Before I was born, they used to charge people for healing just like the League did, but they’d discovered they got more pain if they offered to pay for it. They made their money now from using that pain to enchant their trinkets and weapons, which they then sold to Baseeri aristocrats for a lot more than they’d got by healing folks.

Of course, there were drawbacks to this.

Since the pain merchants didn’t hire trained healers any more, you could never be sure you’d actually get healed if you went to them. Some of their Takers just took your pain and left what was wrong if they didn’t know how to heal it. Only folks with no other choice went to them now and I’d seen my share of “mysterious deaths” among the poor and desperate. There were as many limps and crippled limbs from bad merchant healing as there were from war wounds.