I reached the row of trees marked with the Nizahl raven. It was against the rules to cross the line without explicit permission. Nobody sane would risk trespassing and giving the bored and bloodthirsty soldiers an excuse to cut them down.
The raven stared at me. Discomfort trickled in my belly. I was suddenly acutely aware of the silence of the woods. The impenetrable darkness.
If I hadn’t spent five years of my life living in these woods, I might have turned around and run straight back to Mahair.
“You think you are the most frightening creature in these woods, but you’re not,” I said to the raven. “I am.”
Tightening my grip on the basket, I crossed the line of Nizahl-marked trees and continued walking. This trip—and my trespass—was necessary. I lived against the will of those who would see me dead for the magic in my veins. Never mind that my veins were the only place my magic existed. The cuffs meant I could not so much as squash a mosquito with my powers, let alone use it to defend myself.
I glanced at my wrists. The cuffs glimmered an overly smug silver.
When I took a step around a patch of wet moss, my foot failed to land. A shriek rose and died at my lips as the ground gave way.
“Ugh.” I lifted my dripping sandal out of the mud. The ravine was still another three miles ahead. Sighing, I moved the basket to my other arm. I would have to hurry if I wanted to get back before Raya did her morning bed checks.
As I walked deeper in the woods, my muscles began to relax. The lines in my brow and the tight curl of my lips eased. These woods… they knew me as I knew them. The branches overhead seemed to wave in greeting. A gang of white lizards scuttled over my foot and up the side of a tree. The slight smell of rot lingered in the mist, underscoring the warmer notes of wood and dew.
I hummed a jaunty Lukubi tune I’d overheard in the duqan and reviewed my tasks for the next day. Preparations for the waleema had spun Mahair into a frenzy. Celebrating the Alcalah was no small affair. I shuddered, thinking of the influx of strangers that flooded the village during the last waleema three years ago. Restraint alone had prevented me from running into the woods until it ended.
A splash caught my ankle as a sesame-seed candy tumbled out of the basket and into a puddle. Kapastra’s twisted horns, these candies were a curse. I bent down, wrinkling my nose against the scent of excrement and rain. Maybe I could leave the flies to enjoy this one.
I straightened, reaching for the basket—and found myself face-to-face with the Nizahl soldier from Zeinab’s street.
My heart slowed. Each beat thundered in my ears.
“Sylvia, apprentice to the chemist Rory, healer of poor elderly Aya. Did I get it right?”
For a split second, as the safety of the woods and the terror of discovery shattered together, I thought: Who is Sylvia?
A smirk played on his lips. He was waiting for me to lie. My physical appearance wasn’t enough to condemn me as a Jasadi. He’d needed more, and I had crawled through a hole in the wall and given it to him. Now he wanted to be entertained by a fumbled excuse for why I had ventured past the raven-marked trees in the middle of the night, basket of food in tow.
The resolve, once it settled, was soothing. The fear retreated. It had been a long time since I’d killed anything bigger than a frog in these woods.
I straightened to my full height, standing eye to eye with the soldier. “Not a coward, then.”
He blinked. “What did you say?”
I adopted a light, conversational approach. “I wasn’t sure. The one decent thing I can say of your ilk is that you die early. Yet here you stand, your age written into the lines of your skin. You were either a coward or too clever for your own good.” As I spoke, I untied the clasp of my cloak. I folded it carefully and set it atop the basket. “You watched me. Followed me far enough that nobody would hear me scream.”
The Nizahl soldier remained unperturbed. “Even if they could hear you scream, they would not come to your aid. Nobody cares for the whimpers of Jasadi scum.”
I closed my eyes briefly. With two words, the soldier had eliminated any chance of him leaving these woods alive. Feigning innocence did not matter now. As soon as the accusation of Jasadi was leveled, only a Nizahlan court could absolve it. This soldier would put me in the back of a wagon and drag me to Nizahl, where I needed zero hands to count the number of Jasadis who survived the trial. I’d learned over the years most did not even survive the journey. The detained died in convenient accidents or in retaliation against “unprovoked” attacks.
The soldier’s hand hadn’t budged from the hilt of his blade. “You will not even try to deny it?”