Page 7 of In the Ravenous Dark
The market. Where I used blood magic. And now I’m under arrest and surrounded by wards. It’s almost too much to take in, and my wool-stuffed brain isn’t helping. I still have the presence of mind to look forthem.I can only spot those horrible shadows now if I squint; they mostly blur into my strange surroundings. Nevertheless, to be near so many guardians makes me shiver.
Even if I can barely see straight, I still vividly remember how those shadows coalesced into men the day my father died. I can picture their cold, dead eyes. Hear the screams. Feel the wrongness of death walking among the living—killingthe living.
Despite my fogginess, a different kind of clarity begins to sharpen inside me:
I’m fucked.
“Where am I?” I ask. White buildings swoop in the background, marble everywhere, intricate whorls of it comprising a massive trellis that arches gracefully over the square we stand in. Trellises are usually made of wood, and something about the many-branched shape of this one disturbs me. I realize it looks like a sun-bleached rib cage, and its blossoms like lichen growths. Creepy or not, I’m in a much nicer part of the polis than I usually frequent. Horses and red-cloaked people ring me in a dizzying circle.
And then my eyes snag on the swirling white spike of the palace towering over me.
“You’re in the royal agora, about to enter the Hall of the Wards,” the man answers me. “I am Captain Marklos, and you are…?”
My heart kicks like a horse in my chest, cutting briefly though my haze. “Why are we here? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t say you did. But youarea bloodmage like me, so we just need to sort a few things out first.” He says it casually, trying to sell the friendly act, but I’m not buying.
With my fingers, I make the slicing motion of the sigil forsever, which I usually use to cut yarn. I hope I hit the ropes binding me and not my wrists. Instead, I hit… nothing. Because the sigil doesn’t do anything. When I try to feel the shape of it, the true form that’s a mold for the world, forcing reality to fit and summoning the sigil into being, it simply slips away from me. And then my feet are trying to slip out from under my body.
“Steady now, I’ve got you,” the captain says—as ifhewasn’t the one who drugged me—his grip on my arm like an iron band. He launches into motion, hauling me with him. “Isn’t this exciting?”
I can barely breathe, and not from excitement.
A wide stone building lined in white marble pillars rises up before us. Unlike the rest of the city, where stone goes mostly unadorned outside of public gardens, these columns are twined in scarlet vines in a pattern too regular and intricate to be natural. They must have been grown with magic. The decorative tops of the columns are difficult to make out through the foliage, but one with sparser growth leaves no doubt in my mind: It’s meant to look like the knobby end of a bone.
Bones, all around me, covered in blossoms. Adeath-obsessed city, my father called it. But this is the opposite of yesterday’s pageantry, where the living masqueraded as the dead. This is death dressed up as life, and it’s far more frightening.
I try to halt before we enter the building. I feel like if I go in there, I will never come back out.
“I’m not a bloodmage,” I insist, but the words slip and slur on my tongue.
“Of course you are. I pricked your finger while you were unconscious.” The captain glances back at me warily, without letting me stop. “I’ve never felt such raw power in someone’s blood before. The question is how, and more importantlywhy, you’ve hidden from us for so long. You are a citizen of this polis, and as such, you have a duty to it like everyone. Your duty is just… different. More important than most.”
“Wait.” I try to pull away on pure reflex. I’m not sure where I could run, even if my hands weren’t tied behind my back. Bound like I am, unable to use sigils, it’s hopeless.
“Rovan, don’t! Just go with them, and it’ll be okay.” Bethea’s voice.
I turn in surprise, nearly tripping. My friend is among the group just behind me and the captain. I didn’t see her before. She isn’t bound, but her face is drawn beneath her still-damp hair. Ihope she’s more afraidforme than she isofme. But then I remember how she stood in front of the mob for me, and my attention catches on her pale lips.
“She’s cold. The least you assholes could do is offer her one of your fancy cloaks.”
Most of them stare at me in shock, for my language or audacity, I’m not sure. And I don’t care, because a ward actually unpins her chlamys and drapes it over Bethea’s shoulders.
“You were the one who tried to drown her in the fountain,” Captain Marklos said. “Rovan, is it?”
He frowns when I only glower at him, then tugs me back into motion, heading between the columns into the massive entry hall. The polished marble is cool under my bare feet, smoother than anything I’ve felt before. More unnatural red vines climb the walls and pillars, enough to drape the ceiling high overhead in a leafy canopy.
I struggle to get my breath under control. I need to focus.
“What is she doing here, anyway?” I ask, tossing my head back at Bethea. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Witnesses said she was the one caught by your magic, so we took her for questioning just in case.”In caseyoudon’t want to answer our questions, is the unspoken threat. “Are you friends?”
I don’t respond. The less involved Bethea is, the better. Maybe she’s thinking the same thing, because she doesn’t answer, either. That’s wise on her part, even if it stings a little.
It shouldn’t sting. I’m the one who has chosen to never get too attached. I’ve been planning to leave Thanopolis, after all. And besides, terrible things happen to people who get too close to you, at least in this city.
And at least if you’re a bloodmage.
