Home > The Theft of Sunlight (Dauntless Path #2)(6)

The Theft of Sunlight (Dauntless Path #2)(6)
Author: Intisar Khanani

I shrug, my uneven gait all the more obvious beside her steady step.

“I think you should go,” Ani says.

“Why? There’s no real need for it.” I eye her askance. “I didn’t think you would want me to leave.”

“I don’t,” she admits. “But can you tell me, truly, why you don’t want to go?”

What is it that’s holding me back? I hesitate, thinking of all I’ve heard of the court, and admit, “I don’t want anyone’s pity.”

A silence.

Ani’s arm tightens around mine. “People are stupid wherever you go. That doesn’t mean you should never leave home.”

“I know,” I concede. Yet I don’t see any reason to expose myself to more than I must.

“Good,” Ani says as we near her home. “So when do you leave?”

I let out my breath in a helpless laugh. “Are you all trying to get rid of me? And here I thought we were friends and my family loved me.”

“All true,” Ani says. “Which is why you had better tell me when you expect to leave next time we meet.”

As if it were as easy as that. I shake my head, look up at Ani’s house, the darkened window of the room she used to share with her sister. The room that is hers alone now.

“I don’t want to leave,” I say, and Ani hears the change in my tone. She pauses beside me. “I don’t want to leave you alone with your grief and go off to the palace, even if Melly would like my company.”

For a long moment, Ani stands with her head bent, her eyes on the hard-packed earth underfoot. “Perhaps you could ask someone there,” she says, the words so soft and unexpected I don’t know what to make of them. She turns her head, and her eyes are as deep and dark with grief as they were yesterday, as if there were no light left in her at all. “Tarinon is a big city. Someone there might know more about the snatchers—have an idea where the children are taken. They must know more.”

“It’s possible,” I allow. For the chance to learn what’s happened to Seri, I could easily put up with being snubbed. Melly might be able to help me find out what the guards have learned about the snatchers, what the king thinks. Though I don’t think she could influence anyone—she and Filadon are not especially high in rank.

Still, it might be worth it to simply ask the questions. To do something.

“I’ll still be here when you get back,” Ani says. “And it will be easier knowing you’re doing what I can’t.”

I nod. But will it make a difference? Couldn’t I learn the same just by writing to Melly? It’s not like I’m going to take on the snatchers myself.

“Think about it,” Ani says, and squeezes my hand.

“I will,” I say, and walk with her back into a house that will always feel a little emptier than it was.

Sometime in the middle of the night I jerk awake from a deep, heavy sleep. I sit up, muzzy headed and afraid, and realize with a sickening lurch that Niya isn’t sleeping beside me anymore. She’s gone.

No. She can’t be. She’s slipped downstairs for something. Anything. I wait, but there’s no sound of movement in the house. After a few increasingly shaky breaths, I rise and let myself out of the room. By the time I reach the stairs, I’m hobbling as fast as I can. Only about halfway down do I catch a hint of lamplight coming from the kitchen.

I make myself take a slow, deep breath. It was foolish of me, I know, that irrational, unspeakable fear. There was no reason whatsoever for Niya to leave our room and then somehow get snatched. I’ve just let myself get carried away by my own fears. I give myself a slight shake and pad down the stairs slowly and steadily, as I would normally.

In the kitchen, Niya sits on a stained old blanket, kept for dirty work, one hand resting on the stray dog’s back. If it weren’t for the utter focus of her gaze, and that a ruby pendant glitters faintly in her other hand, there’d be no indication whatsoever that she is working.

But she is. I’ve seen her work this sort of magic on our sick animals before. If her compass used the concept of flow, healing magic is primarily about patterns. Such magic is never easy, and only the best of our mages become healers, if they so wish. Niya might never have attempted it had a faerie visitor not mentioned pattern magic as his parting word of advice to her.

A healer-mage might remind a body of the pattern of unruptured flesh, using their magic to return wounded flesh as close to that pattern as possible. Or, as Niya found while accompanying my mother to our community’s local births, the body knows the pattern for a healthy birth, even if it cannot achieve it. Magic gently introduced and carefully woven can turn a child from breech to anterior facing, can remind vessels to close, muscles to squeeze tight a rupture before a woman might bleed out. I remember the brightness in Niya’s eyes the first time she came home, knowing that the secret application of her magic saved the life of the woman she and Mama had gone to help, that one more family would remain together, one more child would keep her mother.

I settle across from her on the blanket, and watch as the dog’s skin slowly—so slowly—eases toward a healthier color beneath a dried, scaly layer of old skin. Niya is reminding the skin how to fight infection, how to push out what is unwanted, and while it will take days and possibly weeks for the dog to fully heal, eventually she will.

“There,” Niya says finally, setting aside the pendant. “That should help her. And Mama can have her pendant back, now that I’ve drained it.”

I smile. “She’ll be happy to hear it.”

A gemstone can be used to hold a reserve of magic, but the act of draining the magic alters its structure somehow, so it can only be used as an amulet once. Niya has slowly worked her way through our jewelry, storing what magic she doesn’t manage to use in her daily little spells around the house—kneading birdsong and a warm spring breeze into her bread, or spilling a bit of sunshine into the laundry. Every now and then she’s able to perform a big enough working that she uses the magic at her disposal and drains an amulet as well, and then we get our jewelry back. True mages, of course, have much larger gems than we do, and their amulets can become a source of great power. I don’t think Niya particularly cares about that, though. A small gem holds more than enough for her needs.

“Couldn’t sleep?” I ask her.

“I can’t stop thinking about Seri. I can help this dog—and I’m glad of it!—but I wish I could do something for her too.” She turns to me, gray eyes intent. “There has to be something we’re missing. Children can’t just disappear. Even dead bodies can be traced.”

“I know.”

“So what do we do?”

Nothing. If Niya does something to uncover the snatchers, not only does she risk being abducted herself, but her talent could be discovered and that would destroy her in a different way. She’d be made an amulet bearer, her magic constantly drained to an amulet to be used by the mage who becomes her master. I won’t let that happen.

“I don’t know,” I say. “But I might just go to the palace to see what I can learn. The king must be doing something; perhaps there’s someone among his staff who knows more.”

Niya stares at me. The dog wiggles her shoulders beneath Niya’s hand, asking for a petting, and she automatically starts scratching. “You’d do that?” Niya asks.

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