Tales of Ethshar

The Bloodstone

Darranacy wrinkled her nose in disgust at the smell from Mama Kilina’s cookpot. “What is that?” she asked.

“Cabbage, mostly,” Mama Kilina replied, poking at a whitish lump. “Cabbage someone pickier than me thought was too far gone to eat.”

“Whoever it was that threw it out wouldn’t get any argument from me!” Darranacy retorted, turning away.

Kilina looked up at her. “Oh, and I suppose you’d eat it if it were fresh? Some of us don’t have your advantages, my girl! We take what we can get!”

Darranacy smiled smugly. “One of us doesn’t have to.”

Kilina glared at her for a moment, then went back to her stew. “Laugh while you can, girl,” she said. “Someday the spell will break, and when it does you’ll be in the same boat as the rest of us.”

“Or maybe someday you’ll wish it was broken,” a voice said from behind, startling Darranacy so that she jumped. She turned and found a smiling young man dressed in tattered red velvet.

“Korun!” she said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“Learn to listen, then,” he said.

Darranacy frowned slightly. “I don’t understand how you can hear so much in a place like this,” she said, waving her hand to take in all of Wall Street and the Wall Street Field, the run-down houses, the city wall, and the dozens of ragged figures huddled around campfires or under blankets in between. “It’s not as if we were out in the forest, where it’s quiet.”

“You haven’t learned to listen,” Korun said mildly.

“I do listen!” she protested.

“Do you? Then what was it I said that startled you so, just now?”

“You said I should learn to listen, of course!”

“No,” Korun corrected her, “That was the second thing I said, after I had startled you and you had told me not to sneak up on you.”

Darranacy opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again.

He was right, of course. It would hardly have made sense otherwise.

But then what had he said?

“Oh, I don’t know!” she snapped. “I was too startled to listen to the words!”

“I said,” Korun told her, “that someday you may wish that your magic spell was broken.”

“Oh, that was it.” She frowned. “But what a silly thing to say, Korun. Why would I ever wish that?” Before he could answer, she continued, “And if I did, the spell is very easy to break — the hard part is keeping it. If I let the enchanted bloodstone out of my possession, the spell will fade away, or if any food or water passes my lips, poof! The spell’s gone. I could break it right now with a single bite of Mama Kilina’s glop — if I wanted to, which I most certainly don’t.” She shuddered at the very idea. She missed the taste of food, sometimes, but that stuff didn’t really qualify.

“I have heard,” Korun said, “that it is unwise to maintain the spell for too long. Magic always has a cost, Darra. An old wizard once told me that the bloodstone spell can wear you down and damage your health.”

“Damage my health, ha!” Darranacy replied. “If I wanted to damage my health, all I would have to do is eat some of the stuff you people live on. The Spell of Sustenance can’t be any worse for me than that cabbage. I haven’t eaten a bite nor drunk a drop in four months now, and I’m just as fit as ever.”

Korun shrugged. “I say what I heard, that’s all.”

“You’re just jealous because you have to eat,” the girl said. “You spend your time scrounging for hand-outs, and any money you get goes for food and drink, and you’ll probably be here on Wall Street for the rest of your life, but I don’t need anything. I’m free!”

Mama Kilina looked up. “’Tain’t natural, living like that.”

“Of course it isn’t natural,” Darranacy answered promptly. “It’s magic!”

Mama Kilina just shook her head and went back to her cookery.

“You’re right, of course,” Korun said. “It is magic, and it gives you an advantage over the rest of us, since you don’t need to worry about your next meal. But have you done much with that advantage? It doesn’t appear to me that you have. You’re still here in the Field, and it’s been, as you say, four months since your parents died.”

“There’s no hurry,” Darranacy said defensively. “I’m still young.”

“Ah, but wouldn’t it be wise to use your advantage and get yourself out of here while you are still young?”

“I will get out of here!” Darranacy shouted. “And I’ll stay out!”

“When?”

“When I’m old enough for an apprenticeship! When I’m good and ready!”

Korun shook his head. “I don’t think,” he said, “that this is quite what old Naral had in mind when he put the spell on you.”

“Who cares what old Naral thinks?”

“You ought to, girl,” Mama Kilina snapped. “Without him, you’d be no better off than any of us. If your mother hadn’t been his apprentice once, and if he hadn’t felt guilty when one of the spells he had taught her went wrong, you’d be starving now.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Darranacy retorted, “because if Mother had never been his apprentice, she wouldn’t have had any spells to go wrong, and she’d still be alive!”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Kilina insisted, “because it wasn’t her spell that killed her, as you well know, it was the demon your father summoned. Bad luck, mixing two schools of magic in a marriage like that, that’s what I say.”

“But if she hadn’t been a wizard, she would have run, instead of trying to stop the demon from taking Daddy — if she’d ever have married a demonologist in the first place.”

Kilina shook her head. “Wizard or no, and whatever else, your mother probably wouldn’t have left your father if all the demons of Hell were after him.”

Darranacy opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She couldn’t think of any way to argue with that. Should she insist that her mother would have fled, she’d be denying her parents’ love for each other.

Why did they have to die, anyway? Why did magic have to be so dangerous?

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said at last. “They’re both dead, and Naral did give me the bloodstone.”

“Yes,” Korun said, “He gave you the stone and the spell, and he told you that that was all he could do, to let you get by until you could find a place for yourself.”

“Well, then?” Darranacy snapped.

“Darra,” Korun said quietly, “I think he had four days in mind, maybe as much as four sixnights, but not four months — or four years, the way you’ve been going.”

“Three years. I’ll be twelve in less than three years, and then I’ll find an apprenticeship.”

“You plan to stay that long? To keep the spell that long?”

“Why not?” Darranacy stared up at him.

“Do you think you’ll be in any shape to serve an apprenticeship after three years here?”

“Why not?” Darranacy asked again.

Korun didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to.

Naral hadn’t mentioned anything about the bloodstone’s spell being unhealthy; Darranacy was sure that Korun was just jealous when he said that.

But even so, what would she have to wear after three years in the Field? She’d have outgrown all her clothes, and would just have rags. Who would she know who could give her a reference? What sort of diseases might she have caught? The bloodstone didn’t keep away disease. Or fleas, or lice, or ringworm, or any number of other things that might deter a prospective master.

Magic always seemed to have these little tricks and loopholes built into it — but then, so did everything else in life. Nothing was ever as simple as she wanted it to be.

“All right, then, I’ll find a place sooner!” she said. “I’ll fix myself up and I’ll be in fine shape when I turn twelve!”

Korun smiled sadly.

“You think I won’t find a place for myself?” she demanded.

“I think you won’t unless you start looking,” Korun told her. “I’ve seen too many people start out with fine plans and high hopes only to rot here in the Wall Street Field. You think Mama Kilina, here, never set her sights any higher than this?”

Darranacy turned and started to say something rude, then stopped.

She had never thought of Mama Kilina ever being anywhere else. Just days after the demon had carried her parents off, leaving their tidy little apartment and shop a burnt-out ruin, and after Naral had enchanted her but refused to take her in, the tax collector had come around for the annual payment on the family’s property.

Darranacy hadn’t had the payment — she hadn’t had any money at all, had never found where her parents had hidden their savings, if in fact they had any. She had packed up a few belongings and fled, crying, and had come to the Field — everyone in Ethshar of the Sands knew that that was the last refuge, the place where the city guard never bothered you and nobody cared who you were or what you’d done. She’d found Mama Kilina there, sitting by her cooking pot, just as she was now, and it had never occurred to her, then or any time since, to wonder how old Kilina came there.

Even Kilina must have been young once, though.

Mama Kilina grinned at her. She still had almost half her teeth, Darranacy saw.

Darranacy did not want to ever wind up like Mama Kilina, bent and old and eating rotten cabbage.

“All right,” Darranacy said, “I’ll find a place, then. Right now!”

“How?” Korun asked quietly.

Darranacy looked up at him angrily. “Why should I tell you?” she demanded, as she stared challengingly at Korun.

He shrugged. “Please yourself, child,” he said. He squatted down by the cookpot. “Spare me a little, Mama?”

Darranacy watched as the two of them ate Mama Kilina’s cabbage stew. The smell reached her, and simultaneously revolted and enticed her.

She never felt real hunger now, but the smell of food could still affect her — even such food as this. She remembered the happy meals with her parents in the back of the shop, the pastries her father sometimes bought her when they were out on one errand or another, how she would sit and nibble at a bowl of salted nuts while she practiced her reading...

But she couldn’t eat anything now. It would break the spell, and then she’d need to find more food or starve, she’d need to find clean water — the stuff the others here in the Field drank, mostly rainwater collected from gutters of the city ramparts or from gravel-lined pits dug in the mud, was foul and full of disease. Attempts to dig a proper well had always been stopped by the city guard — the edict that had created the Field in the first place said that no permanent structure was permitted between Wall Street and the city wall itself, and that included wells as well as buildings.

Once she had a proper home again, then she could break the spell. Not before.

She thought over Korun’s words. He was right, it was time to find a proper home.

She stood up and turned away from Mama Kilina and her cookpot, and began walking.

Darranacy reached her own little shelter, built of sticks and knotted-together rags pilfered from Grandgate Market — a crude thing that could be knocked down, or simply trampled, in a matter of seconds if the city guard ever decided to clear the Field out properly. She ducked inside, shoved aside her crude bedding, and dug into the sand, uncovering the pack she had hidden there.

This pack held everything she had brought from her parents’ house that she wasn’t already wearing.

There wasn’t anything really valuable in the pack; the demon and the fire had destroyed all her parents’ precious arcane supplies, the dragon’s blood and virgin’s tears and so on that her mother had used, and Darranacy hadn’t been able to find any gold or silver anywhere — maybe the demon had taken it all, some demons did crave money, though her father had never told her what they did with it.

There was, however, her good tunic — fine brown silk with elaborate rucking around the waist, and gold embroidery on the sleeves and hem. Wearing that she would be attired well enough to travel anywhere in the city, up to and including the Palace itself.

She looked down at it for a moment.

She could go anywhere in it — but where should she go?

She wasn’t about to go to the Palace; that was too much. The overlord scared her; she’d never met him, but she had heard enough about him that she was not about to intrude on the Palace.

But she wanted to find someone rich to live with.

Well, there were plenty of big, elaborate homes around the Palace, homes where rich people lived. She didn’t know how she could get someone there to take her in, but maybe if she looked around...

An hour later Darranacy, in her fine silk tunic but still barefoot, was wandering the streets of the Morningside district, admiring the marble shrines on the street corners, the iron fences and ornate gates that guarded the homes, the lush gardens behind the fences, the lavish homes beyond the gardens.

This was so different from the crowded streets where she had always lived! On Wizard Street or Wall Street the shops were jammed against each other right along the street, with no room for gardens either between them or in front of them, and the courtyards to the rear would hold only small vegetable patches, not these great expanses of flowers in every color of the rainbow. The residents lived upstairs from their shops, or behind them — a home without a business, a building without a signboard over the door or a display in the window, was rare indeed. A block a hundred yards long would hold at least a dozen homes in a solid row, broken perhaps by a single dark, narrow alley — two at the most.

Here, such a block would have but two or three houses, each standing apart amid its own gardens and terraces, closed off from the street and its neighbors by walls and fences — if there were businesses in there, customers had no way in! Windows gleamed on every side, fountains splashed — Darranacy couldn’t quite imagine living amid such sybaritic surroundings.

And there didn’t seem to be all that many people who actually did live there. She saw a young couple on a bench in one garden, and a woman tending flowers in another, but for the most part the yards were empty, the streets almost deserted.

Darranacy guessed that there weren’t enough rich people to fill all those big houses, and that encouraged her — they must be lonely, in there.

But she couldn’t just walk in somewhere and ask to be adopted.

She walked on, and saw three little children, all of them much younger than herself, playing ball on the terrace of a particularly fine mansion.

A boy of seven or so was climbing a tree a few doors down, and she considered calling out to him, but decided not to.

She was almost to Smallgate Street, and the houses were growing smaller and squeezing in four to the block, when she saw the girl.

She wasn’t playing, or climbing, or gardening; she was just standing there, leaning on a fence, her face thrust between the iron bars, looking out at the world beyond her home. She was taller than Darranacy, and probably older, but she wore just a tunic, not a dress but a dark red tunic with no skirt, which meant she was still a child, not yet twelve — or if her parents were exceptionally old-fashioned, it meant she hadn’t had her first monthly flow yet.

“Hi,” Darranacy said, from a few steps away.

The girl blinked at her. “Hello,” she said back.

“My name’s Darranacy.”

“I’m Shala.”

“You live here?”

Shala nodded.

“You look bored.”

“I am.”

“So am I,” Darranacy lied.

“Want to do something together?”

Darranacy almost gasped with relief.

“Sure,” she said.

“Come on in,” Shala said, pointing to the gate.

This was the perfect opportunity. Darranacy hurried into the yard.

Now, how could she bring up the idea of adoption?

She thought about that as Shala took her inside and found a pair of dolls, as Shala introduced her to her mother and the housekeeper, as they went back outside and played out game after game... but as time passed, she thought about it less and less. She was having too much fun.

The two girls played princess-and-hero with the dolls, and romantic rivals (a stick served as the object of their competing affections), and various other games — but Shala balked when Darranacy suggested playing wizards.

“My Dad doesn’t like magic,” she said. “He says it makes people lazy and careless — they figure if anything goes wrong, magic can fix it.”

Darranacy blinked in surprise. “But magic’s hard,” she said. “And dangerous and expensive. You don’t use it for stuff where you don’t have to.”

“Some people do, my Dad says,” Shala said darkly. “He talks about that a lot — he says the overlord depends on magic more than he ought to, and since he’s the overlord, it doesn’t matter how hard or dangerous or expensive it is.”

“But...” Darranacy began.

Then she stopped.

If Shala’s father didn’t like magic, then she was in the wrong place. Both her parents had been magicians, after all, and she was proud of that — even if it had gotten them killed in the end.

Magic was hard and dangerous, and shouldn’t be used if you didn’t need it, but there wasn’t anything wrong with it.

If there were... well, right now her whole life depended on magic. Without her enchanted bloodstone she’d be a beggar starving in the Wall Street Field, instead of...

Well, so she was a beggar living in the Wall Street Field, but she wasn’t starving, and she wasn’t going to stay there.

“Come on,” Shala said, “we can have your doll be an evil magician, and my doll will be a hero who has to kill her without getting turned into a newt or something.”

“Okay,” Darranacy said, a bit reluctantly. “What kind of magician? A sorcerer?”

“What’s that?”

Darranacy blinked, and struggled for an explanation. Her parents had taught her the differences among all the various schools of magic, but that didn’t mean she could explain them to Shala.

“How about a magician who can call up demons for my doll to fight?” Shala asked.

“A demonologist?” Darranacy said. “But they’re not really evil, they just have a bad reputation.” She saw Shala’s expression, and quickly amended that. “At least, my father always said some of them weren’t evil.”

Before Shala could reply, the housekeeper’s voice called her name from the back door.

“It must be dinner time,” Shala said. “Do you want to eat dinner with us? Would your parents mind?”

This was her chance, Darranacy realized. If she were going to say anything, learn anything useful from Shala, this would be the time.

“I don’t have any parents,” she said.

Shala blinked.

“They’re dead,” Darranacy continued.

“Oh, Darra, I’m sorry! So do you live with your grandparents, or something?”

Darranacy shook her head. “No,” she said. “I live by myself. In fact, I was here today looking for someone who might adopt me.”

“Oh!” Shala stared at her.

“Shala of Morningside, get in here!” Shala’s mother called from the door.

“I have to go — Darra, come on in! I’d love it if you could stay here — maybe not permanently, but maybe you could stay for a little while? I bet my Dad could find a place for you!” Shala grabbed Darranacy’s hand and began tugging her toward the house.

Darranacy came reluctantly. Now that she finally had the chance, she was losing her nerve. This wasn’t the right place, with a father who hated magic, and this big strange house — but it might be the only chance she would get.

At the door Shala announced loudly, “This is my friend Darra — can she stay for dinner?”

“No, I can’t,” Darranacy said quickly, even though the mouth-watering smells of roast beef and fresh-baked bread were incredibly, unbearably tempting.

But she couldn’t eat anything, or the spell would be broken and she would starve.

“Hello, Darra,” Shala’s mother said. “I saw you two playing so nicely out there — we’d be pleased if you stayed.” She gestured at the dining table.

“No,” Darranacy said weakly. “Thank you.”

She stared at the lavish meal that was set out — sliced roast beef and several different vegetables and hot buttered bread, steaming on the table.

It had been so long since she had eaten anything, and there was so much here, and it looked so good! This wasn’t the mess in Mama Kilina’s stewpot, this was real food.

Korun was almost right after all, she thought — right now she almost wished she didn’t have the spell on her.

But she needed the spell. She couldn’t trust these people, they wouldn’t want to keep the daughter of two magicians, and when they threw her out with her magic gone she’d have nothing left at all, she’d starve in the Wall Street Field.

This might be her chance to find a home — but it was too much to risk.

“Thank you for inviting me,” she said politely, “but I really can’t stay.”

“But Darra, you said you didn’t have any family!” Shala protested. “Why can’t you stay?”

Darranacy looked at Shala, and at her mother, and her father, and the housekeeper, all of them standing around the table and staring at their ungrateful guest. She patted the purse on her belt and felt the reassuring shape of the bloodstone.

“I just can’t,” she said. Her eyes felt hot and her throat thick, as if she were about to start crying.

“Well, all right,” Shala’s mother said. “If you can’t stay, you can’t, but we won’t let you go away empty-handed.” She picked up something from the table, and stepped over closer to Darranacy.

“Here,” she said, “just a little something.”

And as Darranacy started to refuse, Shala’s mother popped a candy into Darranacy’s mouth.

Darranacy froze, then started to spit the candy out, then stopped.

It was too late; she could feel it. The spell was broken, and her empty stomach growled, for the first time in four months.

And then she did start weeping, sobbing hysterically as she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Shala’s entire family rushed to comfort her. It took twenty minutes before she had calmed down enough to make a clear explanation, and the food was cold when the five of them finally ate, but it was still the best dinner Darranacy had ever had.

She stayed three years.

And when the time came she was not apprenticed to a wizard, nor a demonologist, nor any other magician, but instead, at her own request, to a cook. The bloodstone, no longer enchanted, paid for her apprenticeship fee.

Cookery was a magic she could trust.