Her jaw unhinges. “Wait, what?”
Under normal conditions I’d probably laugh at her gawking. I drop my hand and even the leftover embarrassment evaporates. Five silvers. “We can talk later. Right now, I need to speak with Basu.”
I step into Basu’s shop, and though I’m not trying to be quiet, it’s unusually soundless. Nice new purple door. Hardwood floors. He doesn’t have bells hanging over the threshold or even fabric cloaking the doorway. Both are normal precautions against thieves shrouded by black camouflaging spells. I watch him as he frantically grabs orbs out of my bags. He inspects, places, inspects, places each ball of light into boxes. Greed gleams in his eyes. How had I never seen it before?
“What’s going on, Basu?”
“Oh, Lady Adraa! So glad you have returned. Did you catch that thief?” He extends one hand, waiting.
“Sorry, too fast,” I say, my tone biting.
“Huh, well, you do look worn, my dear.”
“Don’t call me ‘dear.’ ”
“Oh, my apologies, Lady.” He continues his task. Inspect. Place. Inspect. Place.
This isn’t working; in fact, this process is boiling the anger, cooking it. If he didn’t hear the edge in my voice the first time, I need to make it sharper. “What’s going on, Basu?”
“What, my d—” He restarts after a long look at my face. “Have I done something to offend you?”
“If not you, then someone you work with.” I might not be able to cast ice spells, but my voice drips frost.
Basu stops his inspection. “I don’t quite follow.”
“I know, Basu. Five silvers for the firelight. My firelight.”
“I sell them for three coppers, like you ask.” He lifts his hands in one of those open shrugs. “Nothing funny.”
“Basu.”
“I have been a friend of the Belwars for two generations. I wouldn’t dare tarnish—”
I grab his kurta and push him against the wall. Empty orb canisters clatter. My left arm flames red and his collar singes. So does my sleeve, but it won’t hurt me like it will him.
“Adraa! Calm down,” Riya warns. But she doesn’t know how often I do this, how I’ve perfected it.
“He’s responsible, Riya. Let me deal with this.” Sometimes I wish I could control my anger better. I’m suffocating, the lump in my throat making it difficult to say the next words, but I can’t stop. The girl I pretend to be at night emerges. Five bloody silvers, Vencrin, betrayal—each detail pumps through me. “I know it’s you.” There is literally no one else in the East Village I distribute to, which kind of narrows down the suspects. “So talk,” I command.
“It’s supply and demand, Adraa. Even if you worked all night and all day you couldn’t supply the entire country or, blood, the entire continent. It’s a cute experiment for Belwar. But this is commerce and profit.”
I shake him against the wall when he doesn’t continue. “You disrupted an entire market; you cannot control something like that. The rest of the world wants to see in the dark too.”
I give him a cold, hard stare, and the flames on my arm jolt.
“Okay, okay, there is this one distributor. Said he would pay triple for half of my firelight supply. I have a family same as everyone.”
“Name the distributor.”
“I don’t know the man in charge, just the guy, practically a boy, who picks them up.”
“Name. Now.”
“Goes by Nightcaster, obviously a cage-casting name, but I didn’t ask. The money…it was more than I had ever been offered for anything. Please.”
“Nightcaster?” I drop Basu and he tumbles against the counter. He really is working with the Vencrin, then.
Riya gives me a look of wide-eyed confusion. “Who is Nightcaster?” she asks.
I deflate into stumbling surprise. I know the name all too well. Once a sport, cage casting has turned into an illegal fighting ring where wizards and witches battle and the audience gambles and soaks up the violence. The biggest ring in the country, the one run by the Vencrin, is only a few blocks from here. It’s called the Underground, not the most creative name given its whereabouts, but Nightcaster is one of its prime contenders.
I know because I am too.
“You bloody bitch.” Basu pats down the sparks on his kurta. The skin around his neckline is no more than sunburned. I’ll show him how bitchy I can—
Riya grabs my arm. “Rani, don’t.” She’s using the Rani talk on me? I glance between her and Basu. In both their eyes I must look enraged, a fire needing to be extinguished. I relax, and behind me, Riya sighs.
“You won’t sell to them ever again,” I command.
“I can’t do that. They expect—”
“You seem to think I care about what the Vencrin expect.”
“V-V-Vencrin?” Basu stammers.
“You don’t even realize who you are selling to?” Pathetic, just pathetic.
“Please, Rani.” Basu steps around the last saddlebag of firelight, protective and fatherly. Fatherly protection only looks nice when it’s a living being; any inanimate object and one just looks absurd. That’s Basu, greedy and ridiculous to try to plead for something that is not his. I’m firelight’s mother.
He continues, oblivious. “Give me this batch and then I can work something out with them. I need time. I need this shipment.”
“I’m stopping this now.”
“Expensive firelight is better than no firelight. You would be destroying the East Village if you take it. They count on my supplies, my deliveries.”
“They count on me. You are the one who has failed them.”
My left arm extends and before I can think about the spell, I cast. “Yatana Agni Tviserif,” I chant over and over until the first word spills into the last. I don’t know exactly what I expect to happen, but when the orbs start to quiver, I chant a little louder, a little angrier. Maybe I could make them defective or something. But in my head I imagine it: the firelight leaving their containers and Basu’s control and coming back to me.
“What are you doing? Stop!” Basu shouts.
Then it isn’t just the orbs vibrating but also the magic inside them. An orb-filled box crashes to the ground. The clattering drowns out Basu’s cries. Even Riya tries to yell into the rattle of noise. The orbs, my magic, they are obeying me, trying desperately to reconnect. It’s only a few at first, but with another chant, hundreds burst from the orbs or ghost through the sphere’s seams and fly toward my left hand. The fire turns into red smoke as it amasses and slithers up my arm. So much power! I’ve never tasted such strength. This came from…me?