Page 4 of The Ordeals
Spread across the entire wall to my left is a bird’s-eye view of the serpentine sprawl of our city, Dinas Tar. It glows gold, the outline of the river, of the buildings and streets all drawn in stark ebony lines. And in each of the streets and buildings are small marks thatmove.
Marks like the one I was assigned to collect today.
People the Collector follows, gleaning details about their lives that he uses to blackmail or sell for a price. And in the outline of my uncle’s antique shop, hovering near the back of the building, is a tiny black mark that appeared on his map sixteen years ago, when he extracted the blood from the pale blue vein in my inner elbow.
That tiny black mark isme. Everywhere I go in this city, the mark follows, making him aware of every movement I make.
When I was four, I signed a contract with the Collector. I stepped over the cold floorboards in stockinged feet to his office and he took out the smallest needle with a vial connected to it. ‘Sharp scratch.’
I winced as he extracted the blood from my vein. Then he poured it in a tiny inkpot, drew a pen from a drawer in his desk and slid a piece of paper across to me. It was filled with words I didn’t understand, long words in flourishes, that seemed to shimmer anddance. ‘Sign this contract and you will work for me, Sophia, and in turn, I will always protect you.’
I did as I was bid, only thinking of forming my letters correctly, spelling out my name:Sophia. And when I was finished, the shimmering words and the blood and the paper all wove together in a mesmerising whirl of glitter, disappearing for a moment. Then suddenly, they reappeared around my wrist as something else entirely. I gasped with delight, running my fingertips over the silver river of a bracelet around my left wrist, the magpie in me thrilled at the way it caught the scant light in my uncle’s office, how it fit my delicate bones so perfectly. How this pretty thing was all mine.
Then he told me he could follow me anywhere now, that I was safe. He was family, my mother’s brother, the closest thing to roots I had. That night is my earliest memory; nothing exists before the cold under my stockinged feet, the sharp scratch of that needle, the warm delight as the bracelet shimmered on my wrist.
Sixteen years ago, and that bracelet has tied me to the Collector ever since. When I came to understand what I had signed as a child, the contract I had agreed to with my uncle that night, I tried to find a way to break it.
But it was already far too late.
‘Sophia, my dear,’ my uncle says, bringing me back to the present as he leans back in his chair. ‘Come, come. Take a seat. You have it?’
I slide into the armchair across from him, the leather crackling and reshaping around my thighs as I eye the man who raised me as his own. His reading spectacles perch on his nose, almost obscuring his eyes, which I know to be green, just like mine. Not the hazel someclaimto be green, but a true, jewel colour. Apparently, I got them from my mother, although I cannot remember her, or my father. ‘I have it, Uncle.’
I slip my fingers into my pocket, drawing out the small vial of blood, smaller than my thumb that I extracted from a mark before stopping in at the Pickled Gargoyle, and place it with a quiet clink on his desk.
He angles it to the light from his desk lamp, scrutinising it carefully before placing it back on the smooth wood. ‘Any trouble?’
‘None. I know what I’m doing,’ I say stiffly. ‘If that’s all …’
‘Wait.’
My blood stills as he closes his fist around the vial of blood, the only light in the room seeming to dance around it for a moment. Then he exhales, placing the vial back on the desk, now empty of blood. I know if I turn around, scrutinise the map, I’ll find the mark I followed earlier today on it. Another person the Collector is interested in, or wants something from.
He rubs at his temples, looking to the map, his gaze lost in the frenzied motion of all the marks collected over the years. Some by me, some by others he employs. ‘I’m sending Dolly on an assignment. She leaves in a few minutes.’
My gaze snaps to his. ‘You haven’t sent Dolly on assignment in years. She can’t, she’s not—’
‘But you’ve already brought me a mark today, Sophia,’ he says with deceptive softness. ‘Surely, you’re tired. Surely you need another drink in one of those bars you’ve grown so fond of lately … perhaps the Pickled Gargoyle?’
He blinks once, features unreadable, but I hear the threat laced beneath his words. He knows where I went today, after I collected his mark. He was watching me on his map. Cold dread trickles through me, pooling in my middle. What if he knows why? What if … what if he knows why I’ve been visiting the kind of bars that scholars frequent, why I’ve been attending public lectures on magic at the Serpentine library? All I know is what he taught me. He’s aruthless observer, a strategist, and if I sense a threat, he means me to. That cold dread hardens, turning to ice … What if he somehow knows I’m about to leave, that I’ve found a way out?
‘Dolly is eighty years old,’ I say carefully, keeping my tone even as my hands slip together in my lap. ‘You can’t send her on an assignment. Send someone else, one of the others.’
He shrugs in that callous way of his, waving me away. ‘No one else available. And as you seem in such a rush to leave—’
‘I’ll go with her.’ I’m already rising from the armchair. The thought of Dolly going on assignment alone in this city, that he would send her out there to follow a mark without someone with her … it’s intolerable.
‘Excellent,’ he says, a smile playing across his mouth, the kind of smile that never reaches his eyes. ‘Banks is driving. Dolly has all the details. And, Sophia?’
‘Yes?’
I look back at him, my heart beating once, twice, the thump almost deafening in my ears as the silence stretches out between us. ‘You know I’ll always protect you.’
‘You call this protecting me?’ I bite out, temper flaring to the surface as I hold up my left hand in a fist so the bracelet catches the light between us. ‘Because if this is what you call it, you and I interpret that wordverydifferently.’
He tuts, slowly shaking his head. ‘I do. It’s for your own safety.’
Once, I believed the scant illusions I can wield would save me. That I could practise and wield an illusion to make the Collector believe I was still in the antiques shop, and the mark on his map would believe it too, so I wouldn’t be trapped in this life. So I wouldn’t have to go on his assignments ever again. But at fourteen, my theory was proven wrong. That was the first time I tried running away and I only got as far as the woodland past the outskirts ofthe city. It earned me my fifth visit to the vault and the true weight of the contract I signed became devastatingly apparent.
