The Demon’s Surrender (11 page)

There was another crash, like a localized windstorm. Sin suspected that it was Ivy and Iris’s wagon. She hoped the sisters had got out.

A man came toward them with his hand raised, palm up, and Nick launched himself at him, magic streaking out before his sword like his sword’s shadow made of light.

Sin stalked the perimeter of the Market, circling the clusters of wagons and pathways in between. If one magician had been wandering alone, there would be others.

There were trees on one side that protected the wagons from wind. Sin used their shadows to hide herself as she moved a little faster.

A twig ran along her face in a slow, deliberate movement, like a skeletal finger tracing a line along her skin.

Sin went very still.

The twig bit into her cheek. Her stomach turned, horror grinding on resolve, and a thin branch lashed out and curled like a whip around her arm. The tree branches rasped together and reached out for her.

The branches lifted her up off her feet. There was a sickening lurch of vertigo at the same time as the twigs stabbed into the small of her back. Wind rushed past her, and dead-leaf whispers crackled in her ears. Sin sheathed one of her knives and drew her legs up to her chest, swinging gently from the grip of those thin branches.

She reached up with her free hand to grab the branch above her, going higher up rather than trying to get down. She lifted herself up a crucial few inches and rolled in midair, onto the branches clawing to reach her.

They formed a shifting web beneath her feet, like a dozen tightropes trying to grab her and pull her down. She sidestepped, leaped, twisted through darkness and landed safe every time.

She could see the magician controlling the tree now, a dark shape down below.

He had his back to her.

He had his back to her because she was captured and helpless, not a threat. Balancing from branch to branch in the night air, Sin found herself wanting to laugh.

She threw a knife instead.

The magician went down with her knife in his back, felled by someone he hadn’t even been paying attention to: someone he’d underestimated.

The branches went still. Sin grabbed the bough above her in both hands and swung herself up, the strain on the muscles of her arms causing a slow, good burn, and then she had her knees up on the branch and her other knife out, crouched and waiting.

Down below she could see the Market spread before her like a picnic. Ivy and Iris’s wagon was the only one destroyed so far. She counted seven magicians: two already dead, three engaged by her people, one by Nick, and one approaching Sin’s wagon.

Sin sheathed her knife and jumped.

She grabbed one branch, then another as she tumbled down, making each one slow her fall without trusting her weight to any of them, and landed in a roll that ended with her on her feet with her knife back in her hand, racing for the wagon.

It wasn’t hit by wind. It exploded into fire.

Sin wasn’t even within ten paces of it when her home burst into an orange ball of flame and wreckage. Her body reacted when her mind refused to do so: She had her arm up shielding her head, fierce heat washing over the exposed skin of her arm, making the material of her shirt billow away from her back. She could smell the ends of her hair burning.

She rolled into a space between two other wagons, dark and cool, leaned her sweaty forehead against her scorched arm, and let a choking noise rip out of her smoke-filled throat.

“Shh,” said a voice beside her.

That brief, simple sound, less than a word, was so harsh and curt that Sin knew who it was, even before she looked up and saw the demon sitting in the dark with her.

The dying glow of the fire lit the white planes and angles of Nick’s face. Shadows moved across him, striping him like a tiger crouching there in the grass. Sin lowered her hand and touched Nick’s sword, lying on the ground between them. The steel was warm and slick with blood.

“They’re dead,” she whispered. Lydie hiding behind her golden hair, Toby who had been one year and nine months and four days old, which nobody in the world but she would remember because she had seen his birth. Her whole heart, lost in an instant of remorseless light.

“Mae’s alive,” Nick said.

For a moment Sin hated him for not remembering his brother first, and then hated herself for thinking of Alan at all.

“Do you think you would just know if she was dead? Why?” she asked, her voice cracking. “Because you’re in love with her?”

Nick stared at her, eyes doorways into the dark.

“I’m a demon,” he said softly. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Then how?” Sin demanded, and then she understood.

He was a demon. A demon would know if a human was alive if he’d put his mark on her. Which would mean that Nick could tell if Mae was alive, and could tell if she was in danger. He could find her and protect her.

He could kill her, possess her, and control her.

Sin closed her eyes. “Oh, Mae.” Her eyes snapped open. “But she’s alive. So the others…”

Even if Mae was alive, that was no guarantee the others were. Maybe Mae had left the wagon as soon as she’d made her calls.

“I don’t know!” Nick snarled at her.

Sin bowed her head and swallowed. She didn’t know what to do with hope, any more than she had known how to speak of misery.

A shot cracked through the air, not quite like the sound of a bough breaking.

Sin spun, on her feet with joy coursing through her as if there was lightning in her veins, burning and brilliant. It hurt.

“It could be anyone,” she said before it could hurt too much. “Carl has guns.”

She hadn’t heard Nick move, but suddenly he was pushing past her, blade in hand, running toward the sound of the gun. Sin hesitated and then ran after him, through the pathways around the wagons to the other side of the hill. She was pulled up short by the dead body at her feet.

Nick was already kneeling by the body, his hand against its chest. He looked from that dead thing up at Sin, and he smiled a wild smile that made him look handsomer than she’d ever seen him.

“You can’t be sure it was Alan.”

“A shot in the dark, through the heart?” Nick asked. “I’m sure.”

With some people it was a voice they would recognize, with some people a step in the hall. Sin guessed it was fitting that Nick could look at a corpse and see his brother’s skill.

If Alan had got out, surely Toby and Lydie were safe. But she had put Lydie under the bed herself. She had told her,
Stay down there
.

Nick rose. “Where—”

He was looking at the night beyond them, not the wagons behind them, and Sin knew failing to look both ways wasn’t safe. She glanced around and saw two magicians walking toward them with their hands full of light, ready to hurl.

She launched herself at Nick, tumbling him down into the night-cool grass with hot fire scything through her hair. Nick was breathing hard underneath her, muscles coiled, ready to attack. He didn’t thank her for saving him, just gripped her arm in one hand and his sword in the other.

“If Alan hadn’t asked me to cut my power in half,” he ground out, “in less than half, I could have killed them all.”

And Toby and Lydie would have been safe, Alan would have been safe.

“Why did you give it up?”

“I’m not very bright,” Nick said, and tipped her over into the grass, his body covering hers, pinning her down for a minute. He lifted his free arm, and a bright bolt of magic flew through the air, as if he’d had a knife in his hand when he hadn’t. He grinned down at her in the magic light. “Lucky I’m so pretty.”

Sin shoved Nick off her with a knee against his chest. She rose to her feet, missing her second knife, left in the back of that first magician.

There were two magicians, both men: Nick went for the older-looking one, so Sin went at the younger. He retreated as she rushed at him, and as she drew closer to him and he drew closer to the wagons she saw he was even younger than she’d thought, about her own age. He had dark hair and green eyes with dilated pupils. He looked terrified.

“Listen,” he whispered, low and urgent. “Listen, I don’t want to hurt you.”

Sin smiled her most gorgeous smile at him. “That’s wonderful news! Can you tip your head back just so and expose your jugular?”

The boy magician’s mouth opened. “No! Look, we’ve met.”

“I don’t recall,” Sin snapped. “Maybe it’s the shock of seeing my home set on fire. Perhaps that induced temporary amnesia.”

She slid the tip of her knife up along the boy’s stomach. She felt a twinge of panic at the thought that she might have to kill someone who wasn’t fighting back.

“Sin,” he said. “Where’s Mae? Is she all right?”

A woman’s voice sliced through the air. “What are you doing, Seb?”

“She has a knife,” Seb said quickly, stepping away. He didn’t stay to help either of them, backing into the shadows instead, and Sin made sure to keep watching him out of the corner of her eye even as she turned to face the real threat.

The woman was tall and lean, muscled in a way Sin would like to be one day, when she had more time to work on her routines. She came toward Sin in a series of spare, efficient movements, a sword burning magic in each hand.

“Got a knife, have you?” she asked. “I’m armed myself.”

The reach of those swords was going to be a real problem. Sin looked at her knife, measured her chances, and feinted. When the woman checked herself and looked for a knife that wasn’t coming, Sin threw the knife from a different angle.

The swordswoman was just a hair too fast. She got a sword up to deflect the knife. Sin had thrown hard, and the sword flew from the woman’s hand, but that left her with one weapon and Sin with none.

None that this magician knew about. Sin wasn’t about to tip the woman off about the knife at her ankle.

She waited for a chance to duck and make it look natural, which meant standing there empty-handed as the woman advanced on her.

“Cynthia Davies, I think? My name is Helen,” the woman said. “The Market’s in your hands, in the absence”—her lip curled—“of your leader. Care to surrender it to me?”

“Come and take it,” Sin told her.

Helen ran at her and Sin waited, waited, and threw herself to the ground, curled up in a ball with her hand finally at her ankle as the sword came hurtling down toward her head and—

Stopped.

Sin grasped her knife, and only then looked up.

There was an orange line over her head, drawn on the night sky like a line beneath a sentence. The sword had hit it and stopped.

Helen was staring at a point beyond Sin. Sin followed her line of sight, expecting to see that boy Seb.

Instead she saw her sister. Lydie, running into the fray with both her hands thrown up as if she had a shield in them.

Alan was behind her, limping far more obviously than he usually did, trying to catch up with her. He had Toby in the crook of one arm and his gun trained on Helen. Helen wasn’t looking at him. She had her eyes on Lydie and she was retreating, lowering her sword.

It was the worst possible thing she could have done.

There were a dozen Market people and pipers coming up behind her, Mae and Matthias among them, and all of them saw what Helen was doing.

They saw the magician refuse to fight one of her own kind.

Helen surveyed the new opposition over her shoulder, and then looked back to see Nick appear at Alan’s side. There was fresh blood running down his sword.

“Time to go,” Helen called out.

Matthias’s bow was already strung. He let fly an arrow directly at Helen, who turned with a sweep of her sword and disappeared in a wash of shimmering light, as if she was only the reflection of a woman in a pool and someone had drawn a hand through the water.

The magicians gone, they were left standing and staring at one another. The air was full of smoke and the smell of blood.

“So,” said Phyllis, drawing her dressing gown shut. “There’s a magician among us.”

Matthias had not put his bow away.

Sin backed up, knife in hand, until she bumped up against Lydie, felt Lydie’s small, frantic hands clinging to Sin’s belt loops.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Sin. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, baby,” Sin told her, then lifted her voice and spun her knife so that the Market people could not mistake her meaning. “Don’t come any closer.”

“Sin,” said Carl, who was draped with half the weapons from his stall, a broadsword in each hand. “She’s a magician.”

“She’s mine.”

“Think a little, Cynthia,” Carl said, coaxing. “If she can do that at seven, what’ll she do at sixteen when the power really comes in? You know what she’ll do. You know she’ll be one of them.”

Sin saw Mae make a small, angry movement, but there was nothing Mae could say: The whole Goblin Market had seen her brother join the magicians. They always went to their own kind, in the end.

“The issue could be shelved until she is sixteen,” Alan said softly behind Sin. “Now is hardly the time to fight among ourselves.”

“Now is hardly the time for divided loyalties!” Phyllis said, her voice crackling like old wood in a fire. “Iris is dead! We’re not keeping a magician in the nest. It’s not like this is the first time Sin has failed us. She would’ve sacrificed us all for the sake of that baby, last time. It’s not like we don’t have another choice.”

Everyone looked at Mae. Mae lifted her chin, glaring back at them.

“My brother’s a magician too.”

“A lot of us have magicians in the family,” Phyllis said. “And the magicians all left.”

Mae took a deep breath. “I don’t want the leadership like this.”

“But you would step up and take it if you had to,” Phyllis said. “You wouldn’t abandon the Market. That’s what we’re saying. It’s Sin’s duty to send the child away.”

Phyllis had known Sin and Lydie since they were born. Carl too. These were her people, the Market people, closer than an ordinary family, bound together by danger and a common cause.

Sin was amazed by how little that seemed to matter.

She was even more amazed when Matthias the piper, who she had never liked much or trusted for anything but a song at sunset, unstrung his bow with an abrupt motion and said, “Sin’s not abandoning the Market. Throwing ourselves into the arms of a girl we’ve known a couple of months is insane.”