I drained the water, passing the chalice to Marek for more. “I have plenty of adventure.”
“I’m not talking about how many times you can kill your fig plant before it stays dead,” Sefa scoffed. “If you had simply accompanied me last week to release the roosters in Nadia’s den—”
“Nadia has permanently barred you from her shop,” Marek interjected. Brave one, cutting Sefa off in the middle of a tirade. He scooped up a blackened seed, throwing it from palm to palm to cool. “Leave Sylvia be. Adventure does not fit into a single mold.”
Sefa’s nostrils flared wide, but Marek didn’t flinch. They communicated in that strange, silent way of people who were bound together by something thicker than blood and stronger than a shared upbringing. I knew because I had witnessed hundreds of their unspoken conversations over the last five years.
“I am not killing my fig plant.” I pushed to my feet. “I’m cultivating its fighter’s spirit.”
“Stop glaring at me,” Marek said to Sefa with a sigh. “I’m sorry for interrupting.” He held out a cracked seed.
Sefa let his hand dangle in the air for forty seconds before taking the seed. “Help me hem this sleeve?”
With a sheepish grin, Marek offered his soot-covered palms. Sefa rolled her eyes.
I observed this latest exchange with bewilderment. It never failed to astound me how easily they existed around one another. Their unusual devotion had led to questions from the other wards at the keep. Marek laughed himself into stitches the first time a younger girl asked if he and Sefa planned to wed. “Sefa isn’t going to marry anyone. We love each other in a different way.”
The ward had batted her lashes, because Marek was the only boy in the keep, and he was in possession of a face consigning him to a life of wistful sighs following in his wake.
“What about you?” the ward had asked.
Sefa, who had been smiling as she knit in the corner, sobered. Only Raya and I saw the sorrowful look she shot Marek, the guilt in her brown eyes.
“I am tied to Sefa in spirit, if not in wedlock.” Marek ruffled the ward’s hair. The girl squealed, slapping at Marek. “I follow where she goes.”
To underscore their insanity, the pair had taken an instant liking to me the moment Rory dropped me off at Raya’s doorstep. I was almost feral, hardly fit for friendship, but it hadn’t deterred them. I adjusted poorly to this Omalian village, perplexed by their simplest customs. Rub the spot between your shoulders and you’ll die early. Eat with your left hand on the first day of the month; don’t cross your legs in the presence of elders; be the last person to sit at the dinner table and the first one to leave it. It didn’t help that my bronze skin was several shades darker than their typical olive. I blended in with Orbanians better, since the kingdom in the north spent most of its days under the sun. When Sefa noticed how I avoided wearing white, she’d held her darker hand next to mine and said, “They’re jealous we soaked up all their color.”
Matters weren’t much easier at home. Everyone in the keep had an ugly history haunting their sleep. I didn’t help myself any by almost slamming another ward’s nose clean off her face when she tried to hug me. Despite the two-hour lecture I endured from Raya, the incident had firmly established my aversion to touch.
For some inconceivable reason, Sefa and Marek weren’t scared off. Sefa was quite upset about her nose, though.
I hung my cloak neatly inside the wardrobe and thumbed the moth-eaten collar. It wouldn’t survive another winter, but the thought of throwing it away brought a lump to my throat. Someone in my position could afford few emotional attachments. At any moment, a sword could be pointed at me, a cry of “Jasadi” ending this identity and the life I’d built around it. I recoiled from the cloak, curling my fingers into a fist. I promptly tore out the roots of sadness before it could spread. A regular orphan from Mahair could cling to this tired cloak, the first thing she’d ever purchased with her own hard-earned coin.
A fugitive of the scorched kingdom could not.
I turned my palms up, testing the silver cuffs around my wrists. Though the cuffs were invisible to any eye but mine, it had taken a long time for my paranoia to ease whenever someone’s idle gaze lingered on my wrists. They flexed with my movement, a second skin over my own. Only my trapped magic could stir them, tightening the cuffs as it pleased.
Magic marked me as a Jasadi. As the reason Nizahl created perimeters in the woods and sent their soldiers prowling through the kingdoms. I had spent most of my life resenting my cuffs. How was it fair that Jasadis were condemned because of their magic but I couldn’t even access the thing that doomed me? My magic had been trapped behind these cuffs since my childhood. I suppose my grandparents couldn’t have anticipated dying and leaving the cuffs stuck on me forever.