Her gaze dropped to the wood beneath her hand, pocked and scarred.
Lila smiled.
She drew a kerchief from her coat with one hand, and placed the other flat on the wood. The surface was a tapestry of stains, and she doubted anyone would notice one more flaw. Still, she kept her eye on the barkeep as she called on the fire. Heat bloomed beneath her palm, a tendril of smoke curling up between her fingers, and when she took her hand away, the wood beneath had been singed black. She tipped the last drops of ale onto the scorched wood, and mixed it with the tip of her finger.
She kept the gestures slow, almost bored—a tipsy patron simply humoring herself—even though her heart was beginning to quicken the way it did right before she drew her knife, fast with the promise of action. When her fingertip came away black, she rolled the coin through the makeshift ink and then, carefully, across the kerchief.
“Son of a bitch,” she said again as the words revealed themselves in tiny strokes.
SON HELARIN RAS ? NONIS ORA
It wasn’t just a message. It was an address. And a time.
Six Helarin Way. Eleventh Hour.
Lila was already on her feet and out the door before she realized she’d forgotten to pay for her drink.
II
The dead owl perched, his pebble eyes watching, as Tes tore the spell apart.
Days and nights of hard work ruined, and she’d be lying if she said it didn’t hurt. But she knew she’d put her power to the worst kind of use, gone and done something impossible. Something forbidden. The worlds had been cleaved apart for a reason, and then she’d gone and made a bridge, crossed a boundary that had been put up centuries ago, one that was meant to keep her whole world safe.
Tes thought of the ruined magic around the old woman’s head, the dead threads hanging on the air, thought of the man who’d brought this cursed thing into her shop, the way his own magic seemed to rot, and her hands moved faster, ripping at the knots she’d so carefully made, dismantling the magic she’d worked so hard to mend.
The shop door rattled.
Tes ignored it—Haskin’s had been closed since she took the job of fixing the doormaker, and in that time, a dozen customers had tried the handle, found it locked, and gone away. She expected this one to do the same.
Only they didn’t. They rattled the handle a second time, and Tes stopped working. She looked up. The rattling stopped. She held her breath, and waited, but it didn’t start again. Instead, the lock in the door began to groan, like metal bending out of shape, and Tes had just enough sense and just enough time to sweep the remains of the cursed doormaker into a sack, and shove it beneath the counter, before the shop door swung open and a man and a woman strolled in as if they’d been invited.
“We’re closed,” said Tes, but the words had no effect. The two continued forward.
They were a mismatched pair.
She was short and sinewy, her black hair braided up into a crest. Her skin was the color of wet sand, her eyes a cold, flat grey. A metal cuff ran the length of her forearm, and her magic twisted around her, the glowing orange of molten steel. That explained the lock.
He was pale—pale hair, pale skin—and built like a butcher’s block. He had a face like one, too, the surface deeply scarred. It looked like someone had tried to hack off his nose at some point, but the blade had gotten stuck on the bridge. His magic was a dark green, by far the brightest thing about him. An earth mover, Tes thought, right before he flicked his fingers, and the door slammed shut behind them.
Working in a shop like this, she’d learned to read her customers. It wasn’t just written in their threads, but in their eyes, their gait. Tes knew bad people when she saw them.
These were bad people.
“We’re looking for Haskin,” said the woman, ambling toward the counter.
“He isn’t here.”
“But you are,” said the man, running his hand over a table.
“I’m just his apprentice,” she said.
He stopped, pausing right beside the place she’d made the door, the scar hanging in the air barely a foot from his face, though he didn’t seem to notice. She forced her gaze back to the woman, who was now standing right across the counter.
Tes watched as she produced a black ticket, the gold H stamped onto the front. She flipped it around, so the number was showing. It was, of course, the same ticket Tes had given to the sick man. The one who’d brought her the doormaker.
Tes reached for the ticket, but as soon as the slip of paper grazed her fingers, the woman caught her wrist, and slammed it down against the counter. She yelped, tried to pull free, but the woman flexed, and a sliver of metal unraveled from the cuff on her forearm and drove into the wood around each of Tes’s fingers, her hand, her wrist, pinning her there.