Aldus Fletcher was not an honest man.
He ran a pawnshop in an alley by the docks, and each day, men came off the boats, some with things they wanted, others with things they wanted to be rid of. Fletcher provided for both. And for the locals, too. It was a truth widely known in the darker corners of Red London that Fletcher’s shop was the place for anything you shouldn’t have.
Now and again honest folk wandered in, of course, wanting to find or dispose of smoking pipes and instruments, scrying boards and rune stones and candlesticks, and Fletcher didn’t mind padding the shop with their wares as well, in case the royal guard came to inspect. But his true trade lay in risk and rarity.
A smooth stone panel hung on the wall beside the counter, big as a window but black as pitch. On its surface, white smoke shifted and shimmered and spread itself like chalk, announcing the full itinerary of the prince’s birthday celebrations. An echo of Rhy’s smiling face ghosted itself on the scrying board above the notice. He beamed and winked as beneath his throat the message hovered:
The king and queen invite you to celebrate the prince’s
twentieth year on the palace steps following the annual parade.
After a few seconds, the message and the prince’s face both dissolved and, for a moment, the scrying board went dark, then came back to life and began to cycle through a handful of other announcements.
“Erase es ferase?” rumbled Fletcher in his deep voice. Coming or going?
The question was lobbed at a boy—and he was a boy, the stumble of his first beard growing patchily in—who stood considering a table of trinkets by the door. Coming meant a buyer, going meant a seller.
“Neither,” murmured the boy. Fletcher kept an eye on the youth’s wandering hands, but he wasn’t too worried; the shop was warded against
thieving. It was a slow day, and Fletcher almost wished the boy would try. He could use a little entertainment. “Just looking,” he added nervously.
Fletcher’s shop didn’t usually get lookers. People came with a purpose. And they had to make that purpose known. Whatever the boy was after, he didn’t want it badly enough to say.
“You let me know,” said Fletcher, “if you can’t find what it is you’re looking for.”
The boy nodded, but kept cheating glances at Fletcher. Or rather, at Fletcher’s arms, which were resting on the counter. The air outside was heavy for a morning so late in the harvest season (one might have thought that, given his clientele, the shop would run thieves’ hours, dusk till dawn, but Fletcher had found that the best crooks knew how to play off crime as casual), and Fletcher had his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, exposing a variety of marks and scars on his sun-browned forearms. Fletcher’s skin was a map of his life. And a hard-lived life at that.
“S’true what they say?” the boy finally asked. “About what?” said Fletcher, raising a thick brow.
“ ’Bout you.” The boy’s gaze went to the markings around Fletcher’s wrists. The limiters circled both his hands like cuffs, scarred into flesh and something deeper. “Can I see them?”
“Ah, these?” asked Fletcher, holding up his hands.
The markings were a punishment, given only to those who defied the golden rule of magic.
“Thou shalt not use thy power to control another,” he recited, flashing a cold and crooked grin. For such a crime, the crown showed little mercy. The guilty were bound, branded with limiters designed to tourniquet their power.
But Fletcher’s were broken. The marks on the inside of his wrists were marred, obscured, like fractured links in a metal chain. He had gone to the ends of the world to break those binds, had traded blood and soul and years of life, but here he was. Free again. Of a sort. He was still bound to the shop and the illusion of impotence—an illusion he maintained lest the guards learn of his recovery and return to claim more than his magic. It helped, of course, that he’d bought favor with a few of them. Everyone—even the rich and the proud and the royal—wanted things they shouldn’t have. And those things were Fletcher’s specialty.
The boy was still staring at the marks, wide-eyed and pale. “Tac.” Fletcher brought his arms back to rest on the counter. “Time for looking’s over. You going to buy something or not?”
The boy scurried out, empty-handed, and Fletcher sighed and tugged a pipe from his back pocket. He snapped his fingers, and a small blue flame danced
on the end of his thumb, which he used to light the leaves pressed into the bowl. And then he drew something from his shirt pocket and set it on the wooden counter.
It was a chess piece. A small, white rook to be exact. A marker of a debt he’d yet to pay but would.
The rook had once belonged to the young Antari whelp, Kell, but it had come to Fletcher’s shop several years before as part of the pot in a round of Sanct.
Sanct was the kind of game that grew. A mix of strategy and luck and a fair bit of cheating, it could be over in minutes or last for hours. And the final hand of the night had been going on for nearly two. They were the last players, Fletcher and Kell, and as the night had grown, so had the pot. They weren’t playing for coins, of course. The table was piled high with tokens and trinkets and rare magic. A vial of hope sand. A water blade. A coat that concealed an infinite number of sides.
Fletcher had played every card but three: a pair of kings with a saint among them. He was sure he’d won. And then Kell played three saints. The problem was, there were only three saints in the whole deck, and Fletcher had one in his hand. But as Kell laid out his hand, the card in Fletcher’s shimmered and changed from a saint to a servant, the lowest card in the deck.
Fletcher turned red as he watched it. The royal brat had slipped an enchanted card into the set and played Fletcher as well as the game. And that was the best and worst thing about Sanct. Nothing was off-limits. You didn’t have to win fair. You only had to win.
Fletcher had no choice but to lay out his ruined hand, and the room broke into raucous comments and jeers. Kell only smiled and shrugged and got to his feet. He plucked a trinket from the top of the pile—a chess piece from another London—and tossed it to Fletcher.
“No hard feelings,” he said with a wink before he took the lot and left.
No hard feelings.
Fletcher’s fingers tightened on the small stone statue. The bell at the front of the shop rang as another customer stepped in, a tall, thin man with a greying beard and a hungry glint in his eye. Fletcher pocketed the rook and managed a grim smile.
“Erase es ferase?” he asked.
Coming or going?
