The Mage Heir

by Kathryn Sommerlot

  His whole body was on high alert as they waited for Jotin to finish his conversation, but he never saw anything out of the ordinary in the people milling throughout the market. Minute by minute, the fire trickled out of his blood, leaving him tired and slightly trembling.

  Jotin had no luck with the first merchant, nor the second, but the third took more time than any others so far. Standing around and waiting for it to conclude, whether the outcome was good or bad, seemed to make all of them anxious. Alesh moved between several closer stalls to crane her head in and see what they were selling, and Yudai crossed his arms over his chest, an immovable weight. Tatsu tried to close his eyes several times and will his body to relax, but he never had much success with it.

  “Where’s Ral?” he asked after he opened his eyes the second time and couldn’t find her in the crowd.

  “She found a fortune teller a few stalls back,” Alesh said. She turned to point to the tent in question. “I told her she could stay there and wait for us. I think she was getting bored.”

  “I’m going to go check on her.”

  Alesh frowned. “She’ll be fine in the tent; we’re still nearby. Is something wrong?”

  “No,” Tatsu said but didn’t wholly believe it. “Stay here in case Jotin needs you to identify something used.”

  On his journey towards the stall Alesh had identified, he almost ran into a Joesarian man wearing corded leather, and then he did run into a woman wearing a long cape-like dress that curved up and over her head. The smell of meat cooking over coals invaded his senses for a moment, distracting him.

  It didn’t take long to get where he was going: a steeply pitched tent that was made of silks so light Tatsu could see partway through them, the material shimmering beneath the flickering candlelight of the mounted wax spread in rings around the site. Tatsu ducked beneath the arch of candles and pushed the silks aside to slip in.

  Inside was a small, old Joesarian woman with long black hair that fell in sheets over her linen-wrapped shoulders. Ral was kneeling in front of her, and she turned with a wide smile when Tatsu entered.

  “Tatsu!”

  “Ah, you have come,” the Joesarian woman said in Common. “I have been waiting for you.”

  “How did you know I was coming?” Tatsu asked. There were no wares on display on the low table, which seemed odd in a marketplace devoted to moving goods. “What exactly are you peddling here?”

  “My sight,” the woman told him with a smile.

  Tatsu felt out of place as he fidgeted, glancing out the sheer tent and wishing he could see more of what was going on outside.

  “I sell secrets of the future,” she continued. “My name is Soom, and I have been waiting for your arrival for many seasons.”

  “Tatsu, sit!” Ral said.

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, and against his better judgment, Tatsu was drawn to Soom. He took a wide step and then sank down beside Ral while keeping his gaze on the fortune teller in front of him.

  “You see the future?” he asked.

  Soom leveled him with a gaze that saw too much. In lieu of an answer, she held out her hands palms up on the wooden table, clearly expecting him to follow.

  Tatsu, unable to stop himself, put his good hand on top of hers.

  “I see everything,” Soom said. Her fingertips poked at Tatsu’s palm, and the air inside the tent was quiet and heavy for a long time. The material separating them from the rest of the Raydrau wasn’t thick, but somehow it muffled the constant sounds from outside. Seated within the too-warm circle, it seemed like they’d been transported somewhere else entirely.

  After a while, Soom looked up again. “You have much fear inside you.”

  “Is that bad?” Tatsu asked.

  “Not always. And not all of it is for you.”

  Tatsu tried to pull his hand away, but her gnarled fingers gripped it tighter.

  “You carry your past with you,” she continued. “You should learn to let it go—it only holds you back from your way forward.”

  “What’s my way forward?”

  Soom’s face broke out into a wide smile that pulled creases in her dark skin. “My dear, you already have it. Have you not realized yet?”

  Finally, Tatsu succeeded in getting his hand back. He knew she hadn’t done anything to him, but still, his skin stung. He balled his fingers into a fist close to his shirt.

  “Well, this has been wonderful and all, but we should go,” he said. “The others are waiting for us.”

  “Tatsu came,” Ral said.

  Soom looked to Ral with a kind expression. “Yes, my child, he did. Your arrival means the winds of change have finally begun.”

  “How did Ral know to come find you here?” Tatsu asked.

  “She is like me. Surely you must have figured that out by now. She can see things before they happen.”

  “But that’s magic,” Tatsu said, feeling uneasy. It had been awhile since he worried about Ral’s abilities—if anyone else knew, she’d become a target.

  “No,” Soom said, frowning, “and yes. It is a different sort of magic, older than the sand itself. It is not like those who control the life of this world.”

  “Magic,” Ral repeated. She put both hands up, palms towards the sky, and stared down at them for a second before lifting her gaze back up to Soom. “Help. Help magic. Help Tatsu.”

  Soom closed her fingers around Ral’s again. “Yes, child. We are helping him.”

  “Stop,” Tatsu pleaded, rubbing his good hand across his brow. “If Ral has magic, are people going to go after her?”

  “No,” Soom said.

  Ral’s smile returned, softer somehow. “Tatsu worries.”

  “What did you mean you’re helping?” Tatsu said. “Do you know who we need to talk to in order to get the tonics? Do you know how to fix Yudai’s magic?”

  “No.”

  Tatsu looked around the room as his blood started to heat beneath his skin. “You sell the future. You said you sell your sight. Couldn’t you see where we need to get the antidotes?”

  “There are no antidotes for your prince here.”

  Time stopped around them as Tatsu’s whole body froze. It was one thing to think those thoughts at the darkest part of the night, but another to hear them from someone else. As he wrestled with the aches blooming out through his limbs, Soom’s expression softened across the table.

  “I am sorry. That was not what you wished to hear.”

  “I… we came here to find something.” Tatsu’s lips stumbled around the words. “And… if we can’t, if there’s nothing…”

  He pressed both hands against his eyes as if he could block everything out. He’d known, deep down, but hadn’t wanted to believe it. He’d known they wouldn’t find anything in the Moswar markets.

  “Will he die?” he choked out and couldn’t look at her, afraid of what he’d see on her face.

  “That is your fear,” she said. “You are more afraid of losing your prince than anything else.”

  “He’s not my prince.”

  He let his hands fall away from his face and found Soom smiling at him. “Isn’t he?”

  Laughter, acidic and angry, forced Tatsu’s mouth open. “What help are you? You can’t even answer my question. We came here to heal him!”

  “Yudai pain,” Ral said to Soom, and the old woman’s weathered fingers rubbed over the back of Ral’s palms. “Bad pain.”

  “You did not come here to heal him,” Soom said. Her gaze stayed on Ral’s kneeling form in front of her. “You came here for your next step.”

  “What is that if it’s not to fix him?” Tatsu countered.

  Soom’s expression shifted—her eyes lowered and her mouth puckered, and after a moment, she started to slowly shake her head from side to side. She suddenly looked even older. “I know you want answers, but I cannot give them to you. It is not my role.”

  “Then what is your role? What are you doing?”

  As the old woman
held his gaze, the world around them slowed again. There were several seconds of nothingness before the weight of everything crashed down against his senses, and then, in a snap, the rush of the world came roaring back. Tatsu’s whole body began to shake, all the way down through his useless arm; he knew what she was doing. She was distracting him.

  She was distracting him.

  “No,” Tatsu whispered. Without being asked, his legs propelled him up and forward, away from Soom and her vague predictions offered across the low table.

  He stumbled out of the sheer tent into the mass of people, disoriented and unable to fill his lungs with enough air. As he stood there, spinning, he wasn’t sure where he was or the direction he had initially taken. He didn’t know where Jotin had moved on to, or where Yudai and Alesh were. He sucked in a breath that rattled down through his ribs, burning in hot flashes. The sick feeling of being betrayed was quickly overpowered by the wild bursts of terror.

  And then he saw the flash of shadow, darting low between slow-walking bodies in the Raydrau. He was after it immediately, his good shoulder bumping into nearly every person he tried to push his way through.

  Tatsu almost fell twice and somehow managed to keep himself upright as he ran after the figure. The shadow had the advantage of surprise, but Tatsu had spent his life chasing after game in his father’s woods, and he knew how to keep pace. When the dashing figure took a wide turn around a small cluster of people, Tatsu slipped through two of the stalls to cut it off. He caught a skinny arm with his good hand just as they reached the stand that Jotin and Alesh were waiting in front of.

  With a savage cry, he jerked the person he’d captured backwards and was caught off-guard when there was much less resistance than he’d expected. Tatsu found himself staring down at a crumpled mess of thin limbs and wide, startled eyes.

  “What?” he breathed, and beneath his grasp, the Joesarian child shivered. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old and looked like he’d never seen a full meal in his life. He carried no visible weapons in his worn clothing. In fact, nothing about him betrayed any sort of danger.

  “A street urchin?” Jotin asked, moving up beside Tatsu and his catch. “He was following us?”

  “No, that doesn’t make sense,” Tatsu said. The child began to squirm and kick his leather-clad feet against the dirt. “I knew someone had been watching us, but the fortune teller said—”

  “The fortune teller?” Alesh interrupted. “Is Ral still there? Why isn’t she with you?”

  Jotin leaned down, pushing his face close to the child’s. “What are you doing here? Why were you following us?”

  “Please,” the child cried, and two fat tears fell from his dark eyes to run down his cheeks, leaving shimmering tracts behind them. “Please.”

  “This can’t be what she was talking about,” Tatsu continued, aware that he was babbling nonsense. He was light-headed from the receding fire in his veins and the pounding of his heart. The sounds around him seemed to get louder and louder, drowning out everything except the thundering echo of his heartbeat. “This can’t have been it.”

  “Please,” the child said again, with more tears pooling in the corners of his eyes. “He said—”

  “Who is he?” Jotin cut him off, and that was when it all clicked into place.

  Tatsu spun around, still dizzy, and it took moments too long to locate Yudai, standing behind them near one of the other carts. He was still hunched over on himself, his arms wrapped around his chest in a miserable ball, but his back was facing Tatsu as he looked over the meat pies in a nearby trade stall.

  “Yudai!” Tatsu cried, and Yudai turned towards the sound of Tatsu’s voice just as the thick-cloaked man beside him sprang forward. There was only enough time for Tatsu to see the glint of the knife held in his hand and to suck in a pained lungful of air before the man struck—a wide arc that would have done much more damage had he managed to hit Yudai’s back.

  There was a sharp cry of pain, and then the world around Tatsu exploded as Yudai’s magic erupted.

  The force of it blew Tatsu backwards. His good shoulder hit the ground before the rest of his weight, sending shocks of pain through his back. For a moment, there was nothing but a heart-wrenching silence, and then all the sound in the market was replaced with the barrage of winds whipping around his head. He scrambled to his feet as the intensity of Yudai’s magic ripped through carts and tents alike. Torn apart, the debris caught in the wind and began to swirl above their heads.

  “Yudai!” he tried to yell, but the wind stole his voice too. With his good arm held in front of his face, Tatsu took a step towards Yudai’s kneeling form and was nearly impaled by a splintered tent pole that hurled through the air like a javelin. On the ground to his left, Alesh lay on her stomach with both hands curled around the back of her neck.

  Tatsu could see Yudai’s outline against the beige of the ground, but it was so obscured and warbled by the winds and the pieces of market swirling around him that the image blinked in and out of existence. Staring into the wind, Tatsu’s eyes began to water and burn; tears leaked out as he dropped his gaze and started forward, praying that nothing hit him.

  The leather of a tent was pulled free and snapped through the air, wrapping itself around a cart rocking back and forth with the magical pull. Tatsu sidestepped, falling more than walking, to get himself safely around the whole of a wooden tabletop. The sound of the wind was deafening, but he pushed himself through it, hurling his weight towards Yudai.

  And then all of a sudden, the magic stopped, and all the debris held aloft by the wind dropped down to the ground with an echoed series of earth-shattering crashes.

  Tatsu stumbled forward and only barely managed to keep himself upright when the resistance he was fighting against disappeared. The loss of the roar against his ears was almost worse than the actual sound had been—he took a shuddering breath, and then another, and then a wail started up somewhere to his left behind a cart that was completely smashed in. The screams that started up, a cacophony of misery, froze Tatsu’s blood cold. People were hurt. People were dead.

  “Yudai,” he said, gasping, and somehow he got his feet to carry him towards the man kneeling on the dirt. He moved to grab Yudai’s arm and paused when he saw Yudai’s shoulders shaking. Yudai was holding his right arm, palm facing the sky, and there was a splash of darkness across his layered clothes.

  It took Tatsu a moment to realize that it was Yudai’s own blood splattered on the linen, because it wasn’t red at all—it was black, like the midnight sky, ink still wet and glittering.

  Yudai raised his eyes, wide and betrayed, to Tatsu’s.

  “What is this?” he whispered, both voice and body trembling. “What have they done to me?”

  Seven

  Tatsu knelt down in front of Yudai and tried to ignore the shouts and cries rising up in anguish around them. He reached forward with his good arm to brush against the still-wet blood, but his fingers came away black. He stared at the streaky liquid that slowly ran down towards his palm for a few seconds as he tried to swallow down the hot burst of fiery bile. Above their heads, the sky was lightening—morning had burst through the clouds once again, bringing with it the slow-building heat of the day.

  “Don’t panic,” Tatsu said instinctively to both of them and then leaned in to inspect the wound itself. The assassin had gotten a good amount of skin with his knife, but Yudai’s movement had kept the majority of the injury superficial. There was a long cut across his forearm that continued to his torso where the blade had sliced through both layers of cloth and left a harsh line across Yudai’s abdomen. The bulk of the blood seemed to be coming from the arm wound, so Tatsu focused on that. He pressed his hand against it to stop the flow after pushing shreds of fabric aside. It was all he could to hope the blackness was from the knife itself rather than Yudai; he hoped so fiercely that it almost hurt to suck in another lungful of air.

  When he removed his hand again, more of the black blood bubb
led up from the cut.

  “Gods,” Yudai gasped, and his expression crumpled. “Gods, this is going to kill me. I’m going to die. They’ve poisoned me, and I’m going to die.”

  “You’re not going to die,” Tatsu said. But even as he moved in to cover the cut with his hand once more, his blood thudded the opposite with each agonizing heartbeat. He didn’t know how they had gone so long without an opportunity to see the aftereffect of the toxins—it was either luck or doom that had kept such a terrible repercussion hidden from them both. His mind whirled with thoughts of Yudai withering and drying before his very eyes, consumed from within as his own poisoned blood betrayed and devoured his body.

  The man in front of him was still very much alive, though terrified and in a fair amount of pain. It took considerable effort for Tatsu to refocus his thoughts to the reality instead of his own dread.

  “It’s not bleeding too bad,” Tatsu said and was surprised at how steady his voice sounded. Was his courage for himself or Yudai? “If we wrap it, it’ll clot and seal itself within the next ten minutes or so.”

  Yudai just stared at him, breathing hard, looking as if he had given up entirely, and it was too difficult to wrap the man’s arm with only one hand. As if she’d read Tatsu’s mind, Alesh moved in and pulled off her linen headscarf. She wrapped the fabric around Yudai’s elbow to stop most of the blood flow and then swept it down and around the injured flesh. The cut continuing along his belly had already stopped its bleeding. Tatsu checked it again, but he was satisfied it would heal on its own. The blood-blackened clothes, however, were a lost cause, and heavy with the still-wet remains.

  It was only after he stood, content that Yudai was not in any immediate danger of dying, that Tatsu had the courage to look at the Raydrau around them—or at least what was left of it.

  Very little of the market near them had been spared. The tents were gone and ripped away, leaving behind broken splinters of poles still sticking up from the ground. Most of the carts had been smashed, and two of them had toppled and flipped completely with all their wares strewn around them. Each step taken produced a wince-inducing shatter of glass as the bottles and vials littered the pathway in pieces, their tonics already soaked into the ground.