Unlikely

by Frances Pauli

The standing stone blazed like a torch. The old symbols didn’t simply glow, they danced and writhed and whispered their secrets to Satina. She reached for them, pointed one finger like an arrow and followed the curves and slashes as if drawing them. Where had Vision gone? She examined every symbol, every twisting line looking for the one mark that would let her see again.

  A scream tore through the night. She looked up, away from the brilliant sigils to a black sky and the body falling toward her. Its wings thrashed and dripped blood. Huge cat-eyes bored into her as the fiend fell and fell.

  Satina sat up, gasping for breath, shoulders heaving. Sweat drenched her nightshift, making the thin fabric cling to her in a twisted sheath. Her room had grown warm, suggesting Hajda had a good fire burning. The sky through the tiny strip window in the cottage’s rear wall was midnight blue and clear enough of clouds for a few stars to twinkle through. The storm had ended, and the hour was late.

  The dream hazed over rapidly, and she grasped at it, sure some detail had offered significant information. It hadn’t felt like an ordinary dream at all. The fiend’s bloody wings fluttering, casting shadowy patterns over the old sigils. Of course, the pockets didn’t align like that in the waking world. The stone stood half way across the courtyard from the suspended rift. She chewed on the images. The glow of old magic, the fiend’s wounds, her body bursting from the pocket in mid-air.

  A pocket in mid-air. Could they use that? An idea whispered to her, but it flitted away quickly in the sound of thumping on the cottage door. Satina held her breath. Her hands grabbed the thick quilt and tucked it up under her chin. Hadja’s steps pattered to the door, her voice grumbled at the visitor. Had Marten come late for dinner? She strained to hear the voice that might confirm it.

  Instead, Hadja’s words sharpened. The woman’s steps thudded to the curtain, far more loudly than she usually moved. Her voice screeched as well, unnaturally high in pitch. It carried easily through the curtain. “She’s sleeping.”

  Satina heard the warning there. She fell back to her mattress and held perfectly still. The blanket covered her to the shoulders, and her hair fell over the side of the bed. She tried to relax, to make her breathing rhythmic, but inside her chest, her heart pounded.

  The curtain rustled aside. A second passed, and another, before it dropped back into place. From the other side, she heard Vane’s voice. The gang leader spoke in a low tone, a soft thunder that filtered and lost words through the curtain barrier. “Business with you,” she heard that much, and strained for more. The voices hushed, however, and she was left with only mumbling and the sound of footsteps to sort out the scene.

  The front door opened and shut. Satina wanted to sit up, to rush out and question her host, but something held her in place. A coil of fear lodged in her chest and she waited and listened. Soft steps outside the window, the sound of the root cellar door clanging against the ground. Hadja. Which meant the steps pacing across the floorboards belonged to Vane.

  The curtain pulled back, not softly. The noise required a response, and Satina moaned softly and shifted farther onto her side. The gang leader stood in her doorway. The sound of his breathing reached her only a few feet away. Her pulse thrummed, and outside, the cellar door banged closed. The curtain fell again, but she was still too terrified to breathe. She waited while her lungs tightened until the cottage door opened again. It thumped hard against the wall, and Hadja tramped inside.

  “This should do the trick,” she said. “But it can be traced. I wouldn’t—”

  “I didn’t ask what you would.”

  “Of course.”

  They spoke in louder voices now, and she knew one meant to wake her and the other to warn her not to budge.

  “You’ll tell the goodmother I was here.”

  “Just as soon as she’s up. Poor thing. She’s been on the road so long I doubt we could rouse her now.”

  “No. Of course. Let her sleep for now.” The door creaked open yet again. “Do make sure you let her know I want to speak with her.” He raised his voice again, ridiculous, obviously fully aware that she listened now. “I’m quite certain she’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

  “I’m sure she will,” Hadja answered. Even through the curtain, Satina could hear the defeat in her words. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to move from the bed. The idea of facing Vane now, when he knew she’d been listening, pretending to sleep, made her cheeks burn.

  She remained there, frozen, after Vane had gone. She counted, tried to imagine his long steps on the path, and guess how far he’d gone with each breath. Hadja walked softer again, she moved to the fire and back twice, then something clanged softly and the front door creaked. Steps in the back yard moved her at last. Her counting put Vane well past the stables by now, and she guessed Hadja returned what she’d brought him to the cellar.

  Satina needed to see what that was.

  She pushed the quilt away and knelt on the bed, holding to the window sill and peering out and down toward the privy. Hadja already stood in front of the root cellar. She cradled something in the crook of one arm, but bent down and set it in the grass before wrestling with the heavy door. The woman’s old frame hunched even more under the weight of the wooden panel. She struggled to lift it, reaching far over her head to swing it fully open. Satina should have rushed to help her, should have felt the slightest urge at least.

  Instead she sat paralyzed, her eyes fixed on the clay jar Hadja had left in the grass, the one she’d brought for Vane. What had she said? It can be traced. Satina dug her fingernails into the window sill and read the sign printed on the jar’s side. Death.

  The door landed with a thump, and Hadja bent and retrieved the jar. She carried it down the steps into the dark. Death, and she’d given some to Vane. Satina would have bet on it. Whose death, however, she couldn’t begin to guess. She didn’t want to.

  When Hadja emerged from the hole in her yard, when she wrestled the door back into place and padded her way back around the house, Satina didn’t move from the window. She didn’t get up. She didn’t leave her bedroom, and eventually the living room fell quiet, the woman went to bed, and she was left to stare out at the dark sky and worry.

  ☼

  “Can you think what he might want with you? Have you spoken to him at all?”

  “No.” Satina poked her spoon into the bowl of mush and shrugged. “I don’t know what he wants.”

  Hadja just made a thoughtful noise and continued her pacing. She pulled things from the cupboards, bits of cloth and herbal packets, a jar of something dried that looked like it might have been an animal once. All these she piled into a stumpy basket sitting on the table. They’d only spoken in fits and starts since Satina had crawled from the safety of the little back room. Now, Hadja covered the basket with another square of cloth and nodded her satisfaction.

  “There. You can just run that up to your Skinner when you’re done.”

  “What?” She stared at her gruel and debated actually eating, just to postpone the task. At least it shifted the topic from Vane, but she wanted to talk about Marten even less. “I’m not sure he’s interested in seeing me today.”

  “Had a wee spat, did we?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “No matter. I’m sure it’ll all blow over with the new day.” The flippant comment didn’t soothe her worry. In fact, her dread congealed into a wad of nerves. What if Marten had been Vane’s target? Did she have time to warn him?

  “I’ll go now,” she said. “My stomach isn’t quite ready for food again.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Satina already had the basket handle looped over her forearm. She nodded, not quite looking her host in the eye, and darted out the front door. She took huge sucking breaths along the path, inhaling as much of Hadja’s herbal defenses as she could before hitting the dirt track and turning left.

  She nearly tripped over Maera. The blacksmith’s daughter waited in the road for her, right outside Had
ja’s field. She grinned when Satina burst from the weeds, ducked aside to avoid being trampled and then fell in step beside her.

  “Good morning, goodmother,” she said. The words came out as a sing-song greeting. The girl’s steps bounced.

  “Good morning, Maera. Your spirits are high today.” She checked the girl’s face, still bruised and purple around her left eye. The injury didn’t dim the smile one bit.

  “Oh yes.” She fell silent as they passed her father’s smithy. The hour was early enough that no blue-booted customers crowded the shed. Maera’s father labored at the forge under the roof alone and with great puffs of steam and heat wafting out into the street. When they’d taken three steps beyond his site, the girl continued, “Satina?”

  “Hmm?” She scanned the roadside. More tags marked the end of the alley she’d fled through. An oily, gray cat sat on a stone block just inside the mouth. Someone had tied a blue ribbon round the poor thing’s neck.

  “Will you grant me a wish?”

  She stopped walking, stopped frowning at the cat and turned. Maera gleamed up at her, wide-eyed and overflowing with hope. “You want my help?” She had to be certain. The girl would need to understand the consequences of running, the hardship. She focused on the purple mark and nodded. It would be hard to get her away from the father, but she’d do it, if Maera asked her.

  “Yes.”

  Satina put a hand under Maera’s chin and tilted the girls faced to the light. She squinted at the bruise. “Your father?”

  Maera shrugged. “It’s not that.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I’m in love, Satina!”

  Her hopes crumbled. A fearful tremor replaced them. She had a feeling she knew what was coming. She’d seen Maera spying in the grass, and the scene took on a completely different meaning. “Who, Maera?”

  “He’s so beautiful.”

  “Oh, Maera, who?”

  “Vane.” She sighed the name, stretched it out into one ominous exhale.

  “Oh, Maera. No.” She dropped her hands to the girl’s shoulders and tried to make her voice as gentle as she could. “Not Vane.”

  “Why not?” Maera stiffened. She pulled away and scowled. “Why not him? He’s lovely, and strong and has all those people following him.”

  “He’s a gang leader. You understand that?”

  “I don’t understand. I thought you helped people.”

  “I do, but fixing you up with Vane would not be helping you.”

  “How do you know? I love him. He makes me feel…he looks at me and…”

  “Exactly. It’s not love, honey. It’s something else.” Satina smiled, but she let a stern edge enter her warning. “This gang is trouble, Maera. Trust me. I’ve seen them at work before.”

  “You don’t know Vane. Maybe he’s different.”

  “He’s not. They all work the same way. The Shades down in the ports, the Starlights, all of them. They’ll be nice up front, make a good show. They can be very convincing, Maera, but falling in with them is a path you don’t want to start down.”

  “How would you know?” The girl sniffed and crossed her arms. She looked away toward town.

  “Because I’ve helped people get away from them.” That got the effect she’d intended. It snapped Maera’s attention back to her. The girl’s eyes narrowed.

  “When?”

  “Before I came here. There was a boy around your age who’d joined the Shades. He had a crush on a girl who worked in the market. He thought it would get her attention, maybe impress her.”

  “Didn’t it?”

  “Not exactly.” Impressed or not, the girl’s parents had packed her into a wagon and moved on long before the young man’s apprenticeship had ended. She skipped that part and focused on the message. “The point is, they wouldn’t have let him have the girl anyway, would they? Unless she’d joined up as well. They made him do things, Maera, not nice things. He lost his friends, his family. They isolated him from all of that because, once you’ve joined a gang, they are everything and the only thing allowed in your life.”

  “But if the one you love is in the gang, then who would mind?”

  “You don’t want that.”

  “So you won’t do anything for me? You won’t even talk to him?”

  “Oh, I’ll talk to him.”

  Maera squeaked. She took the statement completely the wrong way, slapped her hands over her mouth and spun in the middle of the street. “Thank you! I knew it. I knew you’d help.”

  “Wait!” Too late. Maera skittered away like an insect back toward the smithy. “Damn.” She’d seen that swoony look on more than one young woman’s face, and it usually meant trouble. To someone like Maera, someone whose family life was unpleasant to begin with, a gang often seemed like a romantic, adventurous alternative. She should have known the girl would be susceptible. She should have paid closer attention.

  As Maera’s skirts vanished into the smoky shed, Satina bit her lip and turned away. She rounded the corner into town with a stamp in her steps and a whole list of complaints to bring against the Starlight leader. Vane—the bastard, the same egomaniacal, megalomaniac, vicious, town-destroying bastard that headed every gang chapter—with slightly different hair.

  She snarled out loud at the tag glowing over the chapel doorway. The fountain splattered ahead, and Satina stormed down the street, swinging her basket wildly and cursing Vane with each step. When she saw the state of Marten’s shop, however, her curses shifted into thoughts of murder.

  They’d shattered his lovely window. The shelves bore half the goods they’d carried the day she’d first come to town. Whether the gang requisitioned his inventory, or the broken window had left him vulnerable to thieves, she couldn’t say, but she felt the sting of tears just looking at the glass crystals spread in a fan across the paving stones. They gleamed in the morning light, some still in smooth slivers, and many others ground to dust under the tread of blue boots. The hooks from which his tools had dangled lined up empty and swinging in the swirls of air coming off the fountain.

  Had he struggled? She ground her teeth together and jogged around the fountain, taking the shop stairs in a single leap and pushing the door open. The bells still jangled from the knob, announcing her arrival in the debris that had once been an orderly shop.

  Satina threw the basket to the floorboards and pushed the shelf blocking her way back upright. Broken goods littered the floor. Jewelry flashed in a swath beside a second overturned shelf. Someone had swept the fixed shelving along one wall so that all the items piled at the base of the empty boards. Where was Marten? Her eyes followed the furnishings up and down, searched the heaps and finally landed at the counter that, miraculously, stood unscathed.

  “Marten!”

  She stepped over the items on the floor, down the aisle that she’d made by shifting the shelving aside. She had to walk sideways. Her heart raced. The counter was unmanned. The door to the back room was shut. A groan came from behind the counter.

  “Marten?”

  “We’re closed.” A hand reached up and slapped the top of the counter. His fingers flexed, and pulled the rest of him into view. “For repairs.”

  His hair stuck up in places, and his right cheek had a darker gray cast that could have been a bruise. He looked groggy, like he’d slept there behind the counter, and he leaned against it in a way that suggested he wasn’t ready to stand on his own.

  “It’s you.” His chin lifted and he stood a bit taller. “I thought I told you to leave town.”

  “Did you sleep here? On the floor?”

  “Not so much slept as passed out, my dear.” He shrugged, and the movement threw him off balance. He listed to one side and slipped, only remaining upright by wedging a shoulder against the counter.

  “Are you injured?” She pushed the last few feet to the counter and worked her way around the end.

  “A bit.” His head wobbled back and forth. “Mostly cold.” He didn�
�t resist when she slid under his arm. She eased some of his weight onto her shoulders and helped him sit again. His legs didn’t want to hold much weight, and after the kick she’d witnessed, she couldn’t blame them. She had a feeling it had only been the first of many.

  “I can fix cold,” she said. “Just you wait.”

  He leaned his back against the counter and stared at her. Satina ignored the look and rummaged under her cloak.

  “You didn’t leave.” He made it an accusation.

  “No. Look.” She pulled out her warmer and watched his curiosity war with his temper. He wanted to scold her some more. She could see it in his eyes. Instead he nodded at the spindle.

  “What is that?”

  “My trinket.” Without dirt to stick the spindle in, however, she needed to get creative. The debris around the counter produced her spool of thistledown. Perfect. She placed it on the floor in front of him and slid the spindle end into the center hole. “Now watch, because I want you to be properly impressed here.” She flicked the lower disk, then the top one in the opposite direction. “The enchantments are opposites, and the counter action—”

  “Makes heat.” He grinned. “You made this?”

  “I did.” The warmth flowed immediately from the device, removing the chill from their part of the shop and spreading out in a wave. “Now that you’ve seen how clever I am, I’ll go and fetch Hadja’s basket.” She felt certain it would hold something that could help him. Hadja had a different, alien sort of power, and Satina both admired and feared it.

  She reached the shop front and glared through the broken window at the town square. The fountain drew the children like flies. Without a stranger perched there, the town’s youngest members hung around the water, splashed feet, hands and each other in the spray. The cats vanished from the streets. The play was innocent enough. She’d seen similar scenes, certainly. But overnight, the games had adopted an insidious addition.

  The children all wore something blue. A kerchief, a shirt, a scrap of cloth torn from the hem of someone’s dress when no eyes were looking—today Westwood’s children played at being Starlights.

  Satina plucked the basket from the rubble and turned her back on the town. She picked her way back to Marten and found him examining the disks on her warmer. He’d stopped the spinning, but the whole store was warm enough by now, and the effect would last for a few minutes before dispersing. She let him finish the inspection, squatted beside him and poked through the contents of Hadja’s basket.

  “Well?” She questioned him when he’d set the spindle back into the spool. “What do you think?”

  “The broach was an allurement charm.”

  “Something like that, for certain.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I dug it up.” She hadn’t expected that particular question, or the slightly accusing tone. “Hadja sent you some salve, a bandage, and what looks like a dried newt.” She held up the desiccated thing.

  “I think that one’s a joke,” he said. “You do much digging?”

  “From time to time.”

  “You know you owe me a story still.”

  It wasn’t all she owed him, and it didn’t look like he’d be open for business anytime soon. “Yes, I do.”

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  “Can you walk on that leg?”

  “Sure. It’s just a bit sore.” He patted it and winced, but his eyes glinted at her and his smile curled, back to normal and full of wicked humor. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “Yes.” She handed him the salve and put the newt back in the basket. “Once you’re fixed up a bit.”

  “Where?”

  She grinned. It was her turn to be cryptic. Something about the way his eyes squinted told her he didn’t mind. She unrolled a bandage and answered with more mystery, “To the nearest pocket.”

  Chapter Eleven