Page 12 of This Dark Descent
“Who are you?” she asked warily.
“My name is Damien Adair,” he replied, and she stilled. Though she’d been in Veradell less than a year, she was familiar with its noble houses, and the Adairs most of all. Her home was in the Westmire District, which fell under their jurisdiction, and people here liked to talk, most of all about Damien.
The gossip about him was consistent: at twenty, he was the youngest Adair sibling and had worked for every ounce of respect he’d earned. He had a habit of finding people in tight spots and helping them out. Some called him a gentleman, others a scholar, but they all agreed on one thing: you didn’t cross Damien Adair.
Which begged the question, what was he doing here?
Everything hurt as she sat down at her workbench. Her head poundedlike a drum, her back ached, and her throat felt raw from screaming. Her hand closed again around the empty space at her collarbone, where her Saba’s necklace should have hung. She always removed it when she worked. Now those men had it, the last memento she had to remember him by.
Boom, boom, boom, beat her head. She hesitantly touched the wound at her temple; her fingertips came away wet with blood. The sight of it didn’t bother her. She’d seen so much of it already. Everything came back to blood in the end.
Grabbing her last clean cloth, she pressed it to her wound, regarding Damien silently. He stared back with the cool, impassive gaze of someone utterly in control. Something jerked inside her. She longed for that easy confidence, that infallible calm. It was intoxicating, like the way her magic flowed through her when she granted a golem new life.
“What do you want?” she asked, more brazenly than she intended. But she’d been humiliated, overpowered, and mugged—the quicker Damien explained himself, the quicker Ari could be alone again.
He seemed unperturbed. “I’d like you to enchant me an undetectable horse.”
Ari went very still, the world slamming into sharp focus: how easily he could reach his guns, his position between her and the closed shop door, and the utter lack of emotion in his beautiful face. Had she only exchanged one captor for another?
Her hand fell away from her wound, her fingers closing around the bloody cloth. “You’re mistaken,” she said carefully. “I’m just a potter.”
Damien toed an overturned basket of dead verillion stalks. “You weren’t easy to find. I’d heard rumors of a Kinnish enchanter whose creations were undetectable, but you’ve been very careful. It was a stroke of luck, really, that I tracked one to an enchant dealer off Rathsborne Street.”
Ari’s fingers crept toward a piece of shattered ceramic. She’d heard of the Kelbras buying out the debts of unlicensed enchanters rather than see them hang, forcing them into indentured servitude. Was that Damien’s intentionwith her? She’d sooner open the boy’s throat than allow it. It would be so easy with the sharp ceramic, like a fettling knife through soft clay. It would take only a moment, and—Ari recoiled against the workbench.
Where had that thought come from? She’d never even hit anyone before. She couldn’t kill someone in cold blood.
Couldn’t you, though?whispered her thoughts.You’ve done it before.
That wasn’t me.Ari clung to the words.
Damien’s gaze tracked her hand, but he didn’t stop her. “What I’m offering you is simple. Enchant me a horse for my Illinir racer, and in exchange, I will give you whatever you ask.”
It wasn’t until he was finished that she realized he’d been speaking in Kinnish. Surprise drowned everything else out. Almost. A flicker of curiosity sprang to life, but she snuffed it out. Her curiosity was a treacherous thing.
“You’re Kinnish?” she asked in the same language, considering the olive tint to his skin with new eyes.
“Dara Adair,” he said with a bow.
When Kinahara’s destruction forced thousands of Kinnish to flee into neighboring countries, it became common practice to take a non-Kinnish name for interacting with the local people, whose prejudices against them were strong at the time. For those like Damien, whose family bore the public eye, it was a means of fitting in. But to have a second, Kinnish name, his family must have remained close to their roots.
“My mother was Kinnish,” he told her. “But my father immigrated from Celair. My siblings and I bear both names.”
Ari’s hand fell away from the ceramic. “I wouldn’t have thought the Enderlish would allow a Kinnish lord.”
“They didn’t allow anything,” Damien replied. “My family took it.”
Ari studied him, from the meticulous press of his dark suit to the neat curl of his hair across his brow. With his resources, his power, he could offer her many things, but he could just as easily be her undoing. It was no light decision, getting involved with the noble houses. They played withthe threads of power like harp strings, and with a single strum, he could bring her life crashing down around her.
The barest smile graced Damien’s lips. “Tell me what it is you want, Arielle Kadar.”
Hearing her name should have set her on edge, but she was starting to understand this boy, the way he doled out information like the steps to a dance only he knew. He would not waste the hard work he’d put in to discovering her. If he’d meant her harm, he’d have put a gun to her head and forced her to enchant the horse. Instead, he gave her a choice. But what did a man like Damien Adair want so badly that he would offer her the world for it?
And more importantly, what didshewant?
It was a question she hadn’t allowed herself to ask, because the answer was something she could never have. She wanted to fall asleep in her own bed to the sound of her mother’s singing, to wake up in the morning to the scent of fresh baked challah and the rhythm of her Saba’s prayers.
She wanted to go home, and it was the one thing she could never do.
