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I ran till I felt safe, and that meant getting out of the night market completely. I collapsed on a curb outside a drinkhouse, the scent of smoke and strong coffee drifting out into the night. Men laughed over some jangly music. A woman sang an old song I half-recognized. I figured Naji would let me have it for not getting everything on his list, but at least I hadn't spent all his money, and I had good reason.
Those gray eyes. I couldn't stop thinking about them, looming clear and steady in front of me, drawing me in. To the Otherworld. The Mists. I couldn't picture it, a world layered on top of ours, but something about the woman at the dress shop and the man at the stall wasn't human. Naji was a bit spooky, but I could see how he was a man. Those two – it wasn't just the eyes. It was the way looking at 'em made me feel like a mouse surrounded by snakes.
CHAPTER SIX
It took some time for my nerves to smooth over, but I dragged myself up to standing and worked my way back to the i
Naji was sitting on the bed when I walked in, scrawling out something on a piece of thin-pressed paper. He had his thumb and forefinger pinched against his nose, but once I closed the door he dropped his hand to the table and let out this weird, contented sigh, like he was finally sitting down after a long day's journey. I didn't much know what to make of it.
His tattoos glowed, almost enough to cast light of their own. He went back to writing.
"Did you find everything? You were gone longer than I expected."
"Everything but the swamp yirrus." My throat felt strange when I said it, dry and scratchy.
He didn't stop writing. "Why not? The waterfront night market here is supposed to be indefatigable in its supply of nefarious properties."
It took me a second to realize he was making a joke, but I wasn't in much of a joking mood.
"Well?" He lifted his head and squinted at me. "Why didn't you get the swamp yirrus?"
"I brought you your money." I reached into my pocket and pulled out the last of the pressed gold pieces and tossed them on the bed. Naji stared at them. They glimmered in the light of the lamp flickering on the bedside table. Then he looked back up at me, and I could feel him studying my face, trying to get an answer out of me that way.
I realized there wasn't no reason to lie to him. Not about this.
"The one vendor selling it had gray eyes," I said. Naji didn't react at all, just listened to me. "The same as the woman from before. The one who–"
"So you didn't want to buy from him."
I shook my head. "Gave me the creeping shivers. I'm real sorry. But if a girl don't have her intuition, she don't got anything. That's what my Papa taught me."
"Sounds like a wise man, even if he was a pirate." Naji sighed. "Did the vendor… react to you in anyway? Mutter anything? Hum?"
"Act like he was casting a spell, you mean? No." I shrugged. "He did say I seemed a long way from home, which worried me a bit. That was before I saw his eyes. In every other way he seemed normal, like I was just some customer."
Naji nodded. "You did the right thing. They certainly sent him to try to find us." He paused. "I'm glad to see you didn't take off my charm just to spite me. He would have recognized you otherwise."
My hand went up to my neck, to the strip of worn leather. I'd forgotten I was even wearing it.
"I'll take that back now, by the way," Naji said. "I'm going to make you one of your own, so you can stop borrowing mine."
I slipped the charm off my neck and the air in the room felt different, darker, like the lamp magic had started to run out. Naji slipped the charm back into his robe and went back to writing. I hated to see it disappear.
"What did you need the swamp yirrus for?" I asked. "Was it important?"
"Everything on that list was important," Naji said. His pitch quill scratched across the paper. "But I can make do."
I wanted to sit down, but it seemed weird to sit on the bed next to Naji. So I made a place for myself on the floor and watched him write. When he finished he tucked the quill back into his robes and read over the sheet one last time. Then he started rifling through the bags, pulling out the wisteria vines and the rose petals.
"You don't have to watch me do this," he said, laying everything out on the bed.
Ain't no way I was ditching the i
"I'd rather stay, if it's no trouble to you," I said.
He glanced at me. The scars made his face unreal, like a mask, but I didn't mind looking at him.
"You might find this unsettling."
I shrugged. Naji picked up the wisteria vine and started braiding the pieces together, threading in the rose petals and strips of acacia leaves. He chanted in that language of his while he worked. The room got darker and darker and his tattoos glowed brighter and brighter. I recognized some of what he was doing as dirt magic – the chanting over dead leaves and the like – but those tattoos and the darkness weren't like nothing Mama ever taught me.
Naji set the charm down on the bed. He reached into his cloak and pulled out that mean-looking knife from earlier, and then, so quick I hardly had time to realize what he was doing, he drew the knife over the palm of his hand. Blood pooled up in a line across his skin. He tilted his hand over the charm and dropped the blood a bit at a time into the twist of wisteria vines.
His tattoos glowed so bright the whole room was blue.
He stopped speaking and squeezed his palm shut. His tattoos went back to normal. Then the whole room went back to normal, though I could still smell blood, steely and sharp, hanging on the air.
He dabbed at his palm with a handkerchief, not looking at me.
The sight of blood ain't anything to get me worked up, but the idea of using blood in magic – Mama had told me it was a dark thing to do, and dangerous, though she'd made it sound like blood-magic always used someone else's blood, not the magician's. She always said it was the magic of violence.