Page 10 of This Dark Descent
Her clients sought her for a reason: her animals lacked the telltale gold flecks that identified enchants. They wouldn’t recognize them as golems, only too happy to take the advantage it gave them with no questions asked.It made her services highly coveted, but at the end of the day, she was unlicensed, and Lady Belda knew it.
Those few who were born with magic were plucked from their families upon the discovery of their powers and sent to the royal enchanter academy, but for some reason her parents had hidden her abilities. Their warnings whispered through her head, an ever-present refrain.Be silent. Be careful. Don’t give them any reason to see you.
“No problem,” she said without a hint of irritation.
“No problem, my lady,” Lady Belda corrected her, and waited.
Ari clamped her jaw shut. Something stirred inside her. Something cold and hard and unfamiliar.
Lady Belda’s hand began to withdraw. Ari half lurched after the coins, swallowing against the refusal rising in her throat. She forced the words out: “No problem, my lady.”
The woman smiled in satisfaction. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it? Remember that the next time you try to swindle your betters.” She tossed the pouch to Ari’s feet, coins flying from its open mouth and scattering along the dirt. Ari didn’t move, even as her instincts screamed at her to snatch up the coins before she could lose even one.
Lady Belda looked down at the list. Her lips twisted as though swallowing a slice of lemon before she butchered the Kinnish word for “follow.” Still, the golem rose and trailed after her into her enchanted coach. The guards climbed into the box seat, and the vehicle trundled forward of its own accord.
The moment they turned the corner, Ari dropped to her knees and gathered the coins. Hugging them to her stomach, she retreated inside and slammed the door shut with one foot, her heart pumping fire through her veins.
It could have been worse.
After the Heretics’ magic made Kinahara uninhabitable in the Cataclysm, thousands of Kinnish resettled in Enderlain, but after over a century of living alongside each other, they were still reviled. She’d been spat on and derided, tossed out of shops by suspicious owners and denied entrance to others altogether. Lady Belda was nothing in comparison.
Grumbling a string of Kinnish curses, she dumped the coins onto her workbench and counted them. Ten silver and fifty copper marks. A third of the agreed-upon price. She looked wearily from the coins to the stale challah on her counter. With the price of verillion rising as the war effort faltered, less and less was sold on the underground market, and without a license, she couldn’t purchase it from legal establishments. What little made it to the underground would be too expensive to afford, especially when they upped the prices on her.
How she could be treated as both inexorably cheap and wealthy enough to be taken advantage of in the same city, she didn’t know.
She swept the coins into a purse containing payment from two other golems she recently made. A hunting dog charmed for speed and a falcon with enhanced eyesight.
It wasn’t enough.
Every month she sent coin home to her family in Aversheen on the coast of Enderlain, and every month it was met with silence. No letter of thanks. No inquiry after her health. Nothing.
She expected nothing more. Shedeservednothing more.
Not after what she had done.
Monsters rarely look like monsters.
The first time her Saba had said that, she’d asked him if that was why their kind-faced Kinnish neighbors always looked at them so strangely.
“They don’t like us because we are monsters?” she’d asked.
“No, Ari,” he’d replied in his familiar, patient tone. “They don’t understand us, so they fear us, and it is fear that creates monsters.”
Ari hadn’t known what fear her Saba meant. How could anyone be afraid of her gentle mother and kind father? How could they look upon the wizened face of her Saba and be scared? Her parents weren’t devout, and Ari and her sister might have known little of their town’s customs and prayers, but they were still Kinnish. Something more than their isolation made them different. Something that led to whispered warnings in the dark.
Don’t draw attention. Don’t give them any reason to fear you.
It wasn’t until she’d gotten older that she’d realized it wasn’t her family they feared—it was her. All their lives, her younger sister had railed against their parents’ rules, but Ari had embodied them. For eighteen years, she’d been the perfect daughter. Careful. Quiet. Controlled. Yet people had still looked at her as if she were a sheyd wearing a child’s skin.
A demon.
Her Saba had lifted a thin chain from about his neck, a gold cast lion’s fang dangling from the end, and placed it about her own. “Promise me you will never let your fear control you. Promise me you will be fearless, a’huvati.”
My love, he’d called her, and she’d promised, cradling the fang in her small fingers.
Would he still call her that if he could see her now, exploiting their people’s magic for those who’d once tried to destroy it? Would he still see the fearless granddaughter he’d once held on his lap by the fire, telling stories late into the night, or would he see the young woman she’d become? The one who had broken so many promises, and whose heart had grown full of fear, no matter how she tried to control it.
The monster that made monsters.
