Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (4 page)

We rise early to gain ground on any pursuers, but my village is on the southern edge of the city-state Amaranth, surrounded by pastoral ranges. The marauders have, at minimum, half a day’s head start on any backup sent from the main city. No one follows us.

The air grows cooler the closer we get to the western coast, and the troop finally stops once sea salt flavors the air. For a moment I hope we’re to be brought aship, which might give me a chance to flee or dive as we’re moved from land to sea, but the marauders stay clear of the beach. We camp and wait until more of their kind arrive with carts lined with bars. They loose us from the horses and corral us without unsheathing our wrists. To my relief, I’m the last one shoved into the cart that contains Cleric Tuck. Once the horses begin moving, I worm my way to the back of the cart, careful to avoid the gaze of the marauders who ride to either side of it. There is little room to sit, though some of the captives do. Cleric Tuck leans in the nook where the wall of bars meets the wall of wood that separates us from the cart’s driver.

The wheels hit a bump in the road, jostling us. A man knocks into me, and I sail forward into Cleric Tuck, who grasps me by the elbows with hands that are too cold.

“Maire,” he whispers, so quiet it could be the wind. He doesn’t look at me, but at the bandit riding nearest to us. He adjusts, putting more of his back to the man. “Are you all right?”

I nod, though none of us are. I don’t speak for fear of being heard.

Cleric Tuck licks his lips, which sport several cracks. “They’ll sell us.”

I nod, too weary to cry at the unwelcome reminder. The marauder near us quickens his mount’s trot, eyeing me, and I pull away from Cleric Tuck’s hands. The last thing I want is to be put into a different cart.

Cleric Tuck notices as well and eyes me with what I can only assume is exasperation, as though the attention on us is my fault. I grit my teeth and stare past a few other prisoners to another set of bars and the passing landscape. After what must be an hour, Cleric Tuck grasps my thumb and doesn’t let go.

We travel north. Most of the marauders who attacked our village don’t attend us. When attention leaves the cart for an argument up ahead, I test each bar of the wagon, the floorboards, and the lock, ignoring Cleric Tuck’s gestures for me to remain still. They’re all sound. Rubbing my hands over the rusting bars, I try to encourage them to enlighten us, try to usher love and peace into them as I do my cakes, but the jostling of the wagon makes it hard to grasp fond memories, and the iron bars remain as unsympathetic as they are unyielding.

CHAPTER 3

When we arrive to the marauders’ destination, they transport us into cages—little more than animal pens with high walls. I grasp the gate of my enclosure and will sweetness into it, but it remains rigid and uncompromising. It will not bend to my desires as my confections do.

I rest my forehead against the gate. It’s level with my height, just short enough to climb over were I to shed my shoes, but a new shackle encases my right foot and tethers me to the floor with others from my village. I stare at the harsh crescent moons encircling the bases of both hands. The marauders followed the coast until we reached the city-state of Aureolin. At least, I believe this is Aureolin. I’ve never traveled so far from Carmine. Not that I can remember, at least.

I touch the tender scabs about my wrists and close my eyes, releasing a slow breath through my nose. I try to remember the world beyond Carmine, traveling
to
Carmine. I find only darkness. My earliest memory, still, is Arrice.

Footsteps call my attention. A bald, heavyset man, peach skinned like the marauders, eyes me and one of the men sharing my cage as he walks by. I meet his eyes, trying to see beyond them. I can’t understand how he can ogle me like that, like I’m a goat or a cow in the market. Like I’m something less than human.

Stepping away from the bars, I try again to think of love, try to grasp on to good feelings that will alleviate the embers scalding me between every bone. Something to plug the beads of cold sweat that run down my back each time another pair of eyes finds me. But all I can think about is the ashes of the lavender cake left in the oven, as if they were an omen of things to come.

A woman tethered to the opposite side of the pen lies too still against the earth, but the marauder thieves are watching. If I try to console her, their whips will be against both of our backs. Beside her is Cleric Tuck, the chain around his ankle pulled taut in my direction. If I pull toward him, our fingertips can touch. I look at him, studying his dark eyes for some sort of solace, but he closes them in concentration, wrapping himself once more in silent prayer.

I don’t think Strellis hears him.

I squat down until my chest presses against my knees and hug myself, squeezing my eyes shut until my vision is an uneven swirl of red and black. Despite my efforts, a few tears prick my eyelids. I blink them back into my eyes. I heard what the marauders did to the girl who wouldn’t stop crying.
I’ll give you something to cry about
, he had said in his clipped, northern dialect as he untied her from her horse and lugged her into his tent. She screamed and screamed but stopped crying after that. She’s been silent as stone ever since.

A pit is growing inside of me, hard and rough.
Hate, hate, hate.
The most bitter thing to taste, but I stomach it better than sorrow. I try desperately not to think of Arrice and Franc. I can only nurture a small, veiled hope that their hiding places were better than my own. For a moment I wonder if it’s a lingering effect of the lavender cake, but my body would have digested that days ago.

The earth around my feet, which are shod with worn shoes, lifts up in careful spoonfuls until it covers my toes. I study it. Touch my fingers to it. Just earth, but this is the third time I’ve seen it move. I’ve never witnessed such a strange phenomenon before the marauders came to Carmine. Is this another secret lost to the void of my memory?

I ignore a gasp to my right, but when the gate bars rattle I jerk upward and trip, my tether tightening around my ankle. Cleric Tuck jolts from his prayer and reaches for me, but we’re too far apart for him to help.

Before me stands a tall, terrifying man, gripping the iron bars from the other side with tight, trembling hands. His wiry, curling hair is the color of unearthed carrots and protrudes from either side of his head as though trying to escape his ears. His skin is unlike any I’ve seen before—pale and chalky, almost blue in hue. Predawn on a winter morning. His bright chartreuse eyes, different in size, hover under thick brows. They’re wide as they study me, and his thin lips spread to reveal a large smile of even teeth. Like the ghost in the woods, he’s dressed in apparel I don’t recognize, but it isn’t of the same make. His is violet and patched and long, too heavy for this warm weather. He is two-thirds coat and one-third trousers that do not fit his legs. A tall hat pinches his scalp, barely holding on.

“You, you,” he says. “I knoooow you. Yes. Your hands, let me see your hands!”

I pull as far away from him as my tether will allow, but his crazed words prickle my breast. “You know me?”

Surely,
surely
, I would never have forgotten a man such as this. He looks at me with a wide and hungry gaze.

He rattles the gate. “Your hands! Now
now
!”

One of the slave traders lifts his head at the noise and starts walking our way. I hurriedly show the man my hands, palms up.

He laughs, a suffocated giggle too high in pitch to match his appearance. He releases the gate and claps.

“Maire!” Cleric Tuck hisses behind me. “Don’t—”

“Her!” The orange-haired man shouts to no one in particular, but the trader quickens his stride. “Her, I want
her
!”

“Please, sir, this is a mistake,” I whisper, rushing the words before the salesman can hear them. “I’m not a slave! I’ve been stolen—”

He doesn’t hear me, or perhaps he’s simply not listening. He turns to the trader and claps again before pointing a long, crooked finger my way. “Her, her, her,” he says again. He pulls a pouch of money from his strange coat and shoves it at the man. “Take it, take it, give me
her
!”

“No!” Cleric Tuck shouts, his voice matching the volume of the buyer’s. I turn around to face him, frantic that he’ll be caught, yet desperate for him to save me.

“Tuck,” I cry.

He reaches for me, his chain taut. I do the same, pulling the iron links to their limit. Our fingertips touch.

The trader calls others over to help. A clamor of footsteps and keys tickles my ears as I yank at my tether until the shackle cuts into my ankle. The other slaves in our pen are stirring, curious, watching. Silent.

The gate opens, and men—none of whom are the bandits who ransacked my home—surround me. They grab my arms and hips before I can even attempt to struggle, and one pulls a sour-smelling burlap sack over my face, as though I’m a scared bird. I hear a muffled cry and that all-too-familiar sound of weight striking flesh. I cry out for Cleric Tuck as my captors wrench my arms back to bind them. I kick off the ground, throwing myself against the chest of the man holding me.

My fingers touch a warm, metal ring, and a sensation like vinegar rushes up my arm and into my blood.

“Hold her!” barks one of the men. I struggle against the chain around my ankle and slam back into the captor again, not hard enough to move him, just enough to distract him. My sweating hand grasps for that key ring and tugs. It resists.

A club beats into my shoulder. I cry out and drop to my knees, but the weight of my fall tugs the keys loose. Despite the throbbing radiating down my shoulder blade and up my neck, I flail on the dirt, trying to kick up as much dust as possible before I throw the keys in Cleric Tuck’s direction, praying—even to Strellis—that he sees them, and the others don’t.

Then I’m pinned. The men slam my face into the ground, and I cut my lip on my front teeth. Using rough rope, they bind first my elbows, then my wrists. It digs into the wounds left by the iron cuffs, and I grit my teeth and weep. They yank me upright when they’re finished, unhook my ankle, and shove me forward without removing the bag from my head.

To my relief, my buyer does not grab me by my bindings and worsen my injuries, but places one clammy hand on the back of my neck and the other on my chest, though not in a lecherous manner. He guides me this way through the narrow passageways between the slave cells and beyond. I’m not sure where we’re going; I can see only a sliver of rusty earth at the base of the bag. I stumble several times, but my buyer’s pace does not slow, nor do his cold hands move.

My buyer. My captor. Not my master. I’ll
never
call him master.

I wonder if we’ll get far enough for me to run. Could I outrun this tall, awkward man?

“Here, here, get in,” he says after a quarter hour of walking. My stomach bumps against the bed of a narrow wagon. “Step up!”

It’s nearly impossible to do this without the use of my arms, but he pushes me forward nonetheless. I manage to get a knee up onto the wagon’s lip, and he shoves me indelicately. I roll and feel splinters dig into my arms where sleeves don’t cover me. The sliver of sight the bag allows me widens ever so slightly.

The wagon shifts as he mounts the driver’s seat, and a donkey brays and jerks us forward. The smell of moldy straw seeps between the network of burlap covering my face. I wiggle back and forth, trying to shift the bag off my head, but the space is so cramped and the ride so jarring, I can’t find easy purchase. Sometime into our journey, I give up and lie there, resting. I consider jumping over the side of the wagon, but the way I’m bound—my shoulders stretched out behind me—I’m certain to cause injury. And what if the motion doesn’t knock free my blindfold?

I don’t know this man. Will he hurt me like the marauders hurt the other women? Will he do worse?

I remember his words.

“Please!” I shout over the sound of the wagon and donkey. “You said you knew me. Did you speak truth? Please, I must know!”

If this bizarre man, cruel enough to keep slaves, knows my face, my name, and my history, I will let him drag me the length of Dī and back. I would cut off my hands to know who I am and where I come from.

“Please!” I beg, but he doesn’t answer. He
must
hear me.

I call out again and again, but the wagon doesn’t slow, and I hear nothing but the occasional complaints of the donkey. Sighing, my chest trying to pull away from itself, I lay my head back on the hard wood of the wagon and stare at the dots of sky seeping through the burlap sack.

It’s a long ride. Long enough that, despite the roughness of the wagon bed and the pain throbbing in my arms, I manage to sleep. For how long, I’m not sure. It’s in and out.

We stop after nightfall. My buyer grabs me by my feet and hauls me to the edge of the wagon, barely keeping me upright when I tip over the lip and stumble. He guides me over loose dirt and up a creaking porch step. The building we enter is darker than the outdoors, but he lights two lamps, sits me on a wicker footstool, and pulls the bag off my head.

I blink several times to clear my vision. Pieces of my short hair have glued themselves to my forehead and cheeks with perspiration. One tickles the corner of my mouth. My new owner sees this and brushes the strands back, looking at me excitedly with those brilliant and terrifying eyes.

“I’m not a slave,” I say, raspy. My throat is dry, and my stomach wrings itself with hunger. My shoulders have gone numb.

“I know you’re not,” he says, and he pulls a small knife from his pocket. I cringe, but he merely steps behind me and begins sawing through my binds.

Trying to work up enough spit to swallow, I take a look at his house. It
is
a house—I can see into a small kitchen from where I sit—but it’s sparsely furnished. It could belong to anyone. There’s no personality on the walls, other than places where the wood has been bitten into by a whittling knife, maybe fingernails, over and over, seemingly at random. There are only two pieces of furniture in the room, both chairs, neither matching. One, like the footrest I’m on, is wicker; the other appears to be cotton, its striped blue pattern worn to whiteness across the back and seat.

My binds come loose, and my shoulders scream as they relax back into their normal position. Biting my lip, I lean forward and breathe sharp breaths. My hands tingle as blood rushes back into them. My fingertips throb.

I try to ignore the pain and focus on the man’s words. “Then you’ll let me go?”

He laughs, that same high-pitched, girlish laugh. “Of course not! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. For a long, long time. I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

Ants crawl through my veins as I watch him sit on the chair diagonal to me. My heart is thumping, making me light-headed.

The lamplight makes his face look almost green. He grins widely, though neither his cheeks nor his eyes wrinkle with the effort. He crosses one leg over the other and knits his long fingers around the higher knee.

And I feel it. I can’t describe how, but studying him in this light, he looks . . .
familiar
to me. What about him is familiar, I can’t tell. I can’t even guess. Some sliver of nostalgia nags at me, but when I try to pinpoint it, the sensation slips away, and I wonder if I ever felt it at all.

“I don’t know you,” I try.

The grin fades just a little. “Of course. That’s all right. That is perfect. This will be good. Very good.”

Perhaps he has merely been looking for a woman of my make, of my appearance. Not me, precisely. Maybe he doesn’t know anything about me at all, for if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be treating me this way.