Page 6 of In the Ravenous Dark
A woman points and screams, “It was her! I saw her hands move! She did it, and she’s not warded!”
More people begin pointing and shouting. “An unregistered bloodmage!”
A man starts tugging at the rope still looped about the maiden’s statue. Never mind that I saved someone’s life; they’ll truss me up like a pig. My breath starts to come faster. I can smell the blood again, the smoke from the last memory of my father. Taste the fear.
Even Bethea stares at me with something like horror. “You did that? You can… You’re a…”
“Witch!” someone cries.
The more timid onlookers sidle away as if I carry the plague, leaving behind the harder sort. But there are plenty of those. An angry crowd closes in on me. They’re only a few steps away from becoming a mob.
And then Bethea steps between me and them, holding her arms out as a barrier. Her short frame and wet peplos aren’t very intimidating, but she’s doing her best. She glances back, her eyes wild. “Run,” she gasps.
Just as with my blood magic, I don’t even think. I run.
2
Idodge through the market crowd, ducking under arms that grab for me. They come so close that body odor fills my nostrils and a pin on a sleeve snags my hair. Some other people runawayfrom me, but too many are following. Far too many for Bethea to possibly halt.
One thought pounds through me in time with my beating heart:home. I have to get home. I can race back, gather what savings I have, maybe hide with the Skyllean merchant until he can smuggle me out of the city. My dream is still within reach. It’s just all the more urgent.
I can keep my promise to my father—the only part of his memory I haven’t betrayed.
I try to tuck into an alley that will wind its way to my mother’s humble storefront, but someone beats me there: a man with frightened, frightening eyes.
I want to hurl him aside with a sigil. As easy as it would be, using more blood magic will only incriminate me further. Instead, I snatch up the first thing to come to hand, lying on a nearby food stand: a wooden ladle the size of a club, meant to stir vats of who knows what. Before the man can duck, I bash him over the head with it, the force of the blow vibrating up my arm. He flies aside, crashing into a stall—but a few angry vendors take his place, probably thinking their goods are at risk. I drop the ladle and run in a different direction… only to find myself pinned between two stalls and a wall too smooth to even dream of climbing. I whip back around, my skinned palms pressing into the stone behind me.I barely notice the pain. My throat feels like it already has a noose around it as I face my pursuers.
A half-dozen men, one with the rope from the fountain, have cornered me. I’m trapped.
“Stand aside!” a voice cries, and the crowd begins to part. I hear the clatter of hooves.
I nearly sob in relief… until I see who is coming.
They tower above the crowd on their horses, their left shoulders cloaked in blood-red and black-shielded chlamyses, their heads glinting in silver helms wrought of skulls and flowers. Crimson marks run down their bare right arms and what I can see of their calves under their chitons. They look the same as the day they came for my father. And those strange, terrible shadows like living death flow in their wake.
Wards and their guardians. At least a half dozen of each. They often watch the agora on market days—to keep the peace, supposedly, but also to keep an eye out for any unsanctioned magic.
I haven’t drawn this close to them since the day they killed my father. I raise my hands in surrender, because that’s all I can do until I can try to convince them I’m not a bloodmage.
But then someone screams, “She’s going to cast her magic again!”
The horses pull up short, and the warded man in the lead slashes his arm through the air at me.
My world goes dark.
A light slap on the cheek brings me to semiconsciousness. I groan. The ground I lie on has the chilly smoothness of marble, and my hands are bound tightly behind my back. There’s a hush around me, but I can hear the scuffing of quite a few pairs of boots, the clop of shifting hooves, and the thrum of the city in the distance, muted as if by tall buildings, taller than I’m used to.
I open my eyes to see the blue-green, veil-covered sky shimmering alongside an inexplicable explosion of flowers. But then someone looms over me and shoves something between my lips, pinching my jaw open in a firm grip. It’s a skin of wine. I never object to wine, and so I take a pull without protesting. But when I try to stop there, they hold it against my mouth, tipping it back, until I choke and sputter and drink a good deal more than evenIwould want to.
I cough as soon as I’m freed. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Not sick,” a man says. “Just too muddled to do much of anything. Can’t be too careful, now can we?”
“I’m already muddled after what I had last night.” But then I taste it in the back of my throat: a sweetness too overpowering for any wine alone. The dizziness hits me a moment later.
“Why wake me up just to drug me?” I mutter. Rough hands haul me to my feet. For a moment, the world is too bright and fuzzy to make out.
“Because you need to walk now that the horses have gone as far as they can. You also need to answer questions—a lot of questions—but not use magic,” the man says, and I realize I’m speaking to the leader of the wards who found me, the one who knocked me out with a sigil in the market.
