Page 23 of Heir

“I’ve told you what you need to know,” the man said flatly. “Anything else would only put you in danger.”

“You can’t ignore my questions! You hired me to track for you—”

“Track,” the man cut her off, hands knuckled tight around the reins of his horse. “An interesting word. But not the right one, I think.”

He knows. Whoever he is, he knows what you truly are.

When Sirsha was a child, one of her aunts had been shunned by Kin Inashi—Sirsha’s family—for reasons the girl never learned. Like most of those cast out, Auntie Vee was ordered to give up her magic or face the consequences.

Kin Inashi was vast, made up of scores of smaller families. But Auntie Vee’s immediate family was renowned for their tracking. Auntie Vee thought she could use her magic to hide her trail.

Sirsha’s older sister, R’zwana, helped hunt Auntie Vee down days after she was banished. She was drowned, her body left as carrion that she might never return to the earth that nourished her.

Years later, when Kin Inashi cast Sirsha out, her mother had unwittingly—or perhaps wittingly, Sirsha never could tell—left a loophole. The girl was told to never again use her magic to huntas your Kin had hunted.

Since they hunted dangerous magic-users by employing skills that Sirsha possessed but avoided using, she figured she was in the clear.

Still, she waited a year—until she was thirteen—and a thousand miles to use her tracking. And even now, seven years after that, she wouldn’t take a job if she risked running into a member of her Kin, no matter how lucrative it was. None of her employers knew where she was from or how she tracked. If she caught the slightest whiff of magic, the deal was off.

But this fellow knew more about her than he’d let on. He could use that against her if he wished. Because while she could still officially use her magic, Sirsha had no doubt that if certain members of her Kin found out she tracked at all, they’d kill her on the spot and ask for forgiveness after.

Her hag of a sister would be first in line.

“Not the right one,” she said. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, Sirsha Westering, that I’ll let you keep your secrets, if you leave me to mine.” He gestured at the empty land to the south, and the boiling purple clouds gathering along the horizon. “South, you said. Best be on your way if you want to beat that storm.”

“South,” Sirsha ground out before wheeling her horse away and putting heel to flank.

7

Aiz

Among Aiz’s people, the Tohr was the hunched wolf of bedtime tales, a fetid maw from which few emerged unscathed.

The prison was built into a great granite mountain that abutted the western edge of the capital. Two huge slabs of black and purple stone stood sentinel on either side of an iron gate, with a third slab resting across the top. As Aiz passed through the doorway, her windsmithing, already skittish, faded into nothingness. The mountain’s rock dulled magic.

Tale-spinners said the bones of Mother Div’s enemies were ground into the dust of the Tohr’s lower levels, their spirits haunting the prison’s depths.

Not long after Aiz entered, she began to suspect those stories were true. As the jailer walked Aiz, Sister Noa, and more than two dozen other clerics through the low hallways, the rock seemed to close in, whispering,You will die here. Those you love will die here. It is your fault.

Aiz glared back at the rock. “Perhaps I will,” she muttered. “But I won’t let them die.”

One of the jailers, a short, bearded man with skin like a rotted fish’s, grinned at Aiz. Half of his teeth were missing. “Already talking to ourselves, are we? You’ll fit right in.”

“Aiz, my love,” Sister Noa murmured. “Do not fear. Mother Div is with us.”

“Shut it!” barked the other jailer, a broad-shouldered woman with a scarred face. “Don’t you invoke Mother Div.Accursed are the traitors, those who forsake me.”

“You can quote the Nine Sacred Tales,” Sister Noa said. “That is heartening.”

“Nine,” the jailer muttered. “Never understood why they called it Nine Tales if there’s only eight.”

Noa smiled, a flash of light in the gloom. “I used to ask that too. What is your name, child?”

Aiz prepared to step in front of Noa, expecting the jailer’s whip to come down. The woman lifted it, a vein pulsing at her temple; but then she looked between Aiz and Noa and shoved the latter forward roughly.

“We’ve got a special cell for you, hag,” the bearded man said. “Shut your gob and move.”

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