Lodestone

by Katherine Forrister

Melaine was glad she didn’t have to fight her way through the crowded pub every time she came and went. Privacy was a necessity in her business; her riff-raff clients couldn’t know where she lived. She didn’t want to wake up with a knife or the rare stolen wand at her throat, nor did she want the less violent banging and whining at her door each day and night, begging for handouts.

  Melaine did not run a charity. Each lodestone got her no more than a tuppence at most, a few small coins that could buy a half-loaf of bread or a chunk of soap. On a rare day, she could save up enough to buy an Insight, but after her discussion with Vintor, it seemed her only chance to learn from more Insights had been swept away before it had even begun.

  The rest, and vast majority, of her earnings went toward her rent, due once a month on Summons Day. While the rich congregated on that day to shower their excessive wealth upon the overseers, done voluntarily to gain favor with the politicians, Melaine scraped up what little she had just to survive.

  She reached into her spell-enlarged pocket and summoned a key to her fingers, focusing on the act more than she normally would. Even that minuscule use of magic made her sway. She had made three lodestones that day with only two-hour breaks in between. Days like this were common and necessary, but all she wanted to do now was pass out.

  She shoved open the door with her shoulder and caved into her room. Her spotty vision took in the sight of a sleeping pallet, a wooden washbasin, and a dingy chamber pot. All three items were pushed close together, as they wouldn’t have fit otherwise. Melaine stooped beneath the diagonal angle of the pub’s rough thatched roof and squatted beside the washbasin.

  That morning she had filled the basin with well water by hand and used a purifying spell to cleanse it of both disease and residual magic that would inevitably leak into the water. She’d known she would be too sapped of magic to cast the spell by evening and that her exhaustion would make it too difficult to resist the temptation to drink the tepid well water as it was.

  She looked down at her hands. Even when she was alone, she felt a biting sense of shame when she had to take off her gloves. She only ever did so in public when she had to make a sale. She despised stripping off her glove in front of a buyer, baring her palm to expose her magic in the humiliating form of a black gem with a purple sheen—her signature color—unique as a fingerprint.

  One naïve customer had remarked that her stones were beautiful. They weren’t beautiful. They were pieces of Melaine. They were her magic. Her magic. But she would hold out her palm and offer it to anyone who could pay the price.

  As much as she hated it, she couldn’t risk making the stones ahead of time, in private. If they were stolen from her pocket on the streets, she would miss a sale. A customer would be angry, and some customers were dangerous when they were angry. Even the rare understanding buyer wouldn’t pay for rent or supper.

  Melaine tugged at the glove on her left hand and pulled it free. She laid it flat on her pallet, spreading the empty fingers like petals, and started taking off her other glove. She frowned at the hole near her wrist. It was even bigger than before, treading too close to her palm for comfort.

  But Melaine felt a small bit of comfort as she remembered the Insight in her pocket. Anger rumbled in her belly as she thought of the man who had tried to steal it. The devastating conversation with Vintor threatened to replay, but she forced herself to focus only on the good aspects of the Insight for now.

  Vintor had said it held a mending spell, but a better mending spell than any Melaine already knew. It wasn’t a simple spell to stitch a tear on its own without a needle. This spell was supposed to spin more fabric. That’s what Vintor had said.

  Her heart gave an excited patter, but she would have to wait to find out if Vintor was right. As much as she wanted to inhale the knowledge, she knew her body, her mind, her abysmally low magic reserves, would never be able to handle it. Not without a night’s rest first.

  Besides, she desperately needed a wash.

  She finished taking off the glove and laid it next to its partner. Then she slipped her hands into the washbasin and splashed water on her face. Its icy bite startled her senses. She reached for a nub of soap and sprinkled it with water, then rubbed it in circles over her bony features—a pointed nose, thin lips, hollowed cheekbones.

  She scrubbed hardest on her ears and neck, the places that had been the focus of her revolting assailant’s foul lips and breath. Her cheap flannel corset was so frayed and worn that she was able to slip her hands under its cracked bones to wash her torso. She took the extra time to hike up her dress and wash her legs where the man’s hand—and worse—had touched her. Who knew what diseases he was carrying?

  Melaine splashed water over her skin to rinse, and then she brought the last of it to her lips, not to waste a drop. She tossed the soap to the floor with a thump and slumped back onto her pallet. She stared at the ceiling, looking at each little pinprick of thatch, one by one. She traced the spiraling grains of the wooden beam that sloped over her head. She closed her eyes.

  “No,” she said, and opened them. She pushed herself up and reached into her pocket. She pulled out the crust of bread, but she wasn’t as famished as she should have been. She fished into her pocket again and found the little wooden coin Vintor had given her.

  “Why not do it now?” she asked. She made the best lodestones in Centara. Her magic was…something. She could push it a little harder. She had to.

  Because she couldn’t be stuck in Stakeside forever.

  Melaine enclosed the coin in her palm and focused on its smooth wooden surface. She felt its fine gloss and then pushed deeper. She felt the tiny spirals of the wood grain, lithe as a thumbprint. She burrowed deeper and almost smelled the sweet wood.

  And then she tasted it. The magic within.

  She summoned her own magic with care, as if testing out a twisted ankle. She felt the energy in the pockets of her marrow and coaxed it to pass through the hard casing of bone. From there, the dregs seeped through her veins, but she drew on her last reserves. With a dull ache coursing through her arms, she shoved her remaining magic into her hands and entered the wooden Insight. She smiled as her magic began to mingle with the magic that the simple wooden coin contained.

  And then its magic pulsed into her. It was a brief flare of foreign power, racing up her veins at an exhilarating pace. Instead of implanting itself in her marrow, it shot straight up her spine and penetrated her brain.

  Melaine gasped as the mending spell hit her mind. The Insights she had used before were made by untrained hands in Stakeside, from people who had never had formal education in creating them. The knowledge they passed on was useful and enlightening to anyone like Melaine who hadn’t known the spells they contained before. But their level of knowledge and the force with which that knowledge filled Melaine’s head was nothing compared to the sudden, encompassing force that Melaine now felt from this nation-regulated Insight.

  Every minute detail of the new spell wove its way into Melaine’s mind. She envisioned a cascade of stacked fabric bolts unfurling across a tailor’s shop, and every single type of fabric on display entered her realm of knowledge. Cloths of colors and textures she’d never seen were now under her expertise—not just what they were called but how they were made and how to make more.

  She saw silk being woven by tiny worms in a faraway place. She saw cotton and flax being picked and sheep being sheared in a barn. She saw hand-spinners dangling from foreign women’s hands, enormous looms standing in large rooms. She saw tiny needles with thread stitching patterns of delicate lace and embroidered pictures and words. She saw enormous vats of dye soaking fabrics with color. She even saw flowers and berries and minerals and tiny shells of creatures being pounded and cured and treated in all manner of ways to procure rich and excellent dyes.

  And then she felt her fingers tingle as all of that knowledge flooded down from her brain, through her veins, and into her hands. Then the magic retreated into her spongy marrow, where
both magic and knowledge would remain as an integral part of her body. Even if she never used the spell, it would endure, waiting to be tapped into, never to be forgotten.

  Melaine let out a breath as the burst of magic faded. She leaned on her hands and stared at the unpolished wood floor to stave off dizziness. When the world stopped spinning, she laughed with happiness, a hoarse sound that was practically foreign to her ears, it happened so rarely. She sat up on her knees and reached for her gloves at the foot of her pallet. She grabbed the one with the hole near its palm.

  She could summon a little more magic, surely. Unlike some of the brilliant, rich fabrics she had witnessed in her head, her gloves were made of simple homespun cloth, rough and brown, a color chosen because it would hide the inevitable dirt it would collect. She brushed the hole with her fingertip and brought the spell to the surface of her mind and the tip of her finger. With silent thought, she told the cloth to expand.

  A surge of pride and satisfaction shot through her as she watched the coarse weave of the homespun fabric, elongating it thread by thread. The fibers twisted together as if being strung by an invisible spinner. Then the new strands slipped over and under one another through the warp and weft of a tiny, unseen loom. The fibers wove themselves all the way to the other side of the hole, where they began to knit themselves into the existing fabric.

  She watched the threads undulate like waves as her mind, and her vision, started to unravel. Her head bobbed as the room turned black, but she smiled as the hole mended within seconds as if it had never been. She lay back on her pallet and inspected the blurry glove through narrowed eyes, pulling it from both ends to stretch the fabric. The newly spun threads didn’t split, and their fresh weave didn’t loosen.

  Melaine clutched the glove to her breast. A new wave of exhaustion swelled stronger than the last, but her sense of power from learning a new spell was far more acute. A satisfied smile was her last conscious act before her spent body finally gave in to sleep.

  Chapter 2

  Melaine grunted as she sat up sooner than she would have liked. The shouts of wives from window to window alerted her that it was morning as they threw the night’s piss pots into the gutters. That and the fresh, recharged magic buzzing in her bones and humming in her veins after her night’s rest. She snapped her fingers and sparked a purple lightning bolt to the thatch ceiling. A single straw sizzled within seconds and with ease. The bliss of morning magic.

  The baker’s voice came from around the corner near the Greasy Goat’s front entrance. Amond wasn’t really a baker—he was only a delivery man who pandered bread he’d nicked from the real baker closer to the Stakeside Wall. But he was good at his nicking, grabbing the previous night’s leftovers before they reached the butcher’s pigs. The pigs were looking thinner these days.

  Every morning, he would stop by the Greasy Goat. Salma was one of his prime customers—one of the only customers in Stakeside who could afford to buy bread as fresh as Amond’s. The pub Salma ran was the best in lower Stakeside. Her liquors were watered down a little less than the others, and her fires were stoked a little higher in the winter. She was a good cook, too. Salma could turn even nearly rancid meat and overripe vegetables into a decent stew. Melaine suspected the matron had gotten ahold of a valuable Insight at some point in her fifty years to aid her cooking, but she knew Salma would never admit to that.

  Salma’s voice joined Amond’s outside, just like every morning, a signal that it was past time for Melaine to get out of bed. Fortunately, Melaine didn’t have any clients lined up until late morning, but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t try for an unplanned sale around the pub while she waited.

  She reached for one glove on her thin blanket but realized the other was crushed under her hand. She lifted it and noticed the glaring hole near its cuff was gone. She glanced at the floor and saw the now-empty wooden Insight resting beside her pallet. She twitched her nose and hurried to put both gloves back on. She snatched a scrap of old newspaper from a little pile by her chamber pot and grabbed the spent Insight through the paper, wrapping up the coin so she wouldn’t have to touch the thing.

  Even through the newspaper, she could feel the grating gristle of residual magic that clung to the used Insight. People would describe the sensation as a stench, a horrid reek, though it wasn’t an olfactory quality, not really. It was more physical, like taking a grinder to teeth or somersaulting a stomach. Residual magic lingered on all spent magical objects after their use, and the effects it had on the human body were acute. Residual magic didn’t belong in humans. It was not intended to mix with the fresh magic each person maintained in their bones. Touching, breathing, or magically interacting with residual magic was enough to make a person ill, just as rotten food, blood, excrement, or sex could ruin a person.

  Unfortunately, Stakeside was full of all such refuse, and sickness of all kinds ran rampant in the streets. Melaine had always been careful to avoid the obvious risks. The reek of residual magic had never bothered her as much as it seemed to bother other people—not since she’d gotten sick from it once as a child. But she was still careful to properly dispose of any waste.

  Last night, she’d been too tired to get rid of the Insight. She’d been breathing the taint of residual magic all night. She grimaced but told herself it would be all right. It had been years since the last and only time she’d gotten the “res,” as people called it. Years since she’d stumbled down the street in a vomiting heap, shaking with the sweats, desperate for the sickness to pass. She had recovered, but every fresh year, many weak, old, and young res victims would succumb to its effects that ravaged through their bones.

  Melaine stood up from her pallet, newspaper-wrapped Insight in hand. Her boots weren’t even unlaced from the night before, which wasn’t unusual. It seemed every other night she was too exhausted to bother taking anything off. She was glad she hadn’t yet removed them as she hurried to open the door.

  The first rays of sunlight pushed away the morning chill and smoothed the goosebumps on her arms. The alley outside her little room looked different during the day. The mere trickle of the streetlamp’s glow had shrouded the lichen-covered stone wall, splattered with old vomit and piss from drunken passersby. The night had hidden the excess trash by the waste crates that Salma tried so carefully to maintain.

  A man would come every so often to empty the crates. By the time he came, the last scraps of useful rubbish would have been picked through by beggars. So, he would empty the crates’ contents into a basket that he’d pop onto his back with straps. Then he would use his considerable skill to climb up the lichen-crusted wall to dump the trash over the other side.

  The wall wasn’t the Stakeside wall, of course. Dumping debris onto the well-maintained streets of the higher classes would have resulted in a quick arrest. Rather, this wall was a part of the outer wall that existed behind Melaine’s rented room—the wall that surrounded the whole of Centara. The wall was high and thick, with battlements and watchtowers from the old days before the war. No guards patrolled the outer wall now. Why would they? No foreign kingdoms had attacked Dramore, and certainly not Centara, in twenty years. Not since the Overlord conquered all of Dramore from the old ruler, King Malik. Melaine had heard that the Shields still patrolled the wall in the better parts of the city, but that was probably just for show.

  The true protection of Dramore, and the Centara palace itself, fell to the Overlord’s elite force of battlemages: the renowned Followers.

  But no one cared about the population in Stakeside. The poorest residents of the city were, in and of themselves, protection for the rest of the populace. They would be the first slaughtered if an enemy army ever did breach the unmanned section of the wall. And the Stakeside wall would provide a second barrier to protect the rest of the city. The time it would take for an enemy to massacre the poor would be all the time the Centara Shields needed to amass their own force and repel the enemy back.

  Melaine looked away from the wall as she to
ssed the used Insight into the waste crate. There was no point in staring at the wall. To most, it was an unscalable barrier, and even for those who could climb it, what was the purpose of going over when no opportunities lay beyond? Farms and small villages were scattered around Centara, but they were full-up, and crops had been slim lately, so no fresh work for new field hands was likely. Beyond the cultivated lands prowled the Wilds, a vast tangle of dark forest that everyone in Stakeside knew to be cursed. Sordid stories abounded, telling of the creatures and evil forces lurking in those trees. They must be true, everyone said, because why else would all five competing kingdoms avoid it?

  Melaine brushed her hands on her dress and stepped away from the wall. She’d considered going over it before, but logic had always stopped her. No, the only way out of Stakeside was to somehow fight her way through the impassible class system.

  Her heart plummeted as the previous day’s events reentered her memory. Her one viable chance to get past the Stakeside wall was over. Vintor had stripped it from her.

  No. The Luxians had stripped it from her.

  She knew their teachings. The ones that mattered. They claimed that eons ago, a sleeping entity in the core of the world awoke. The immaterial entity was called Lux, and Lux had awoken to see the first humans of creation in their infancy. He had seen how weak humans were, without the protections of fur or claws or scales or sharp teeth like other animals. He had felt pity for them and decided that humans deserved a trait that would make them not only survivors but conquerors of their world.

  So, Lux had given humans a gift. He made them a lodestone containing his own magic—magic that was tapped from the underground marrow of the world’s core. When humans inhaled his magic from the lodestone, the marrow of their bones was replaced by the same magic held in the core of the world. Some humans bonded more naturally with the influx of magic than others, and it was from their bloodlines that the strongest of humans descended. The Luxians preferred to teach that the traditional rulers of the five kingdoms and all noble families carried the traits of stronger magic in their bodies. The Overlord was not included in that list.