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“Hey, pay for that!” the gruff vendor barked. This seemed to catch Ryson’s attention as he neared her back, perhaps to look over her shoulder.
Clea didn’t know what to say, cradling the glass vial close as she watched the milky substance churn slowly inside. Typically, they were a bright blue, but this one had been trapped for too long. Releasing it wouldn’t do anyone any good now, but she still wanted it.
She swallowed to fill the crack in her voice before she said, “How much is it?”
“Twenty-seven notes,” the vendor said sternly. The price was ridiculous and no doubt he’d increased it just now seeing the expression on her face. She’d been a fool to show she cared at all.
“What is it?” Ryson asked, though she knew he could see it.
“It’s someone’s mind,” Clea said and Ryson paused as if reasoning out for himself why she might have grabbed it, perhaps sensing the sadness in her voice. He didn’t react for a moment.
He must think her insane, but ever since learning that people’s pieces could be extracted and sold like this, she’d been unable to stomach the practice. Each exposure to it only seemed to make it more potent, and she’d never dared to ask how the extractions were done. It was clear no one had wanted to tell her either. A person’s heart, mind, body and soul were vital parts of them. The idea of splitting those parts and profiting off them made her sick. Furthermore, the idea of someone consuming another’s mind to get smarter, or stealing another’s heart to gain control of them were completely unfathomable to her. Rare as it was, it didn’t make it less horrible.
“Let me see it,” Ryson demanded, extending his hand.
She dropped the vial in his hand and without a second thought, he popped the top off with his bandaged thumb and the substance inside evaporated.
Clea jolted toward the burly vendor in shock.
The man’s face purpled with rage. “You!” he started to shout.
Ryson replied with a simple coldness. “What?”
His nonchalance seemed to take the man off guard as Ryson closed the top again and offered the vial back to the vendor. “I’m giving you back the only thing of real value. Take it. You expect someone to purchase a decrepit mind? Any Dark Market vendor worth their salt would never pay for a useless mind, and anyone else would avoid the purchase out of pure superstition. You’ll get more for the vial alone.”
He dropped the vial, the vendor scrambling to catch it before Ryson walked off, pulling Clea with him. Clea glanced back at the man who seemed stunned into inaction, looking down at the vial as if considering if he should still get angry or not.
She heard Ryson mutter under his breath, “I'll sell your bleeding heart.”
“Thank you,” she whispered back to him, ignoring the comment entirely.
He didn’t respond, and his mood seemed even darker for the rest of the afternoon. Clea was relieved when they finished their errands and paused to take a break. She eased down on an old crate in the shade as Ryson sortedthrough their remaining currency. She stared ahead at the road, wondering what made Ryson so bitter about the event with the vendor but thinking it better not to ask. His feelings aside, they’d freed someone’s mind. That’s what she cared about and knew it had been a good thing.
One mind freed.
Perhaps ten more were stolen and sold on the Dark Market every day. Oh well.
Clea resisted that familiar wave of dread, recognizing how tired she was and that overthinking would likely only sink her deeper into a bog of black feelings. Her mind was rescued when commotion from a public performance filtered over the crowded street in bursts.
Clea glanced back at Ryson to see him still occupied before a wave of clapping drew her eyes beyond the crowd. She noticed a backdrop of painted trees that gave her hints of what the performance was about.
She let her exhaustion settle as she watched from the shade of their latest shop’s veranda. Through the occasional passerby, Clea could see glimpses of a stage made of crates and lopsided boards. Her suspicions were confirmed when a figure in a monster’s mask waded up onto the stage. Paired with a crown of horns and a black cloak, the toothy mask represented the Warlord of Shambelin. Her irritation and sadness from the afternoon evaporated.
It had been so long since she’d seen the play of their history. When she was a child, she’d been afraid of the opening, precisely because the warlord’s representation in Loda was often two people stacked on top of each other in a long cloak, stilts and ropes.
An old man sitting on a crate near the side of the stage seemed to recite the play from memory. It told the tale of how centuries ago, cien had ravaged the world and society had collapsed into chaos.
Clea’s lips moved slowly around the words, compelled to recite the lines in an almost ritualistic way.
“From the darkness,” she whispered, “arose the monstrous Warlord of Shambelin with an army of forest beasts behind him.”
Ryson looked up from the coins, following her gaze as he tucked them away under his cloak.
“It’s a play,” she said, half expecting him to utter some sarcastic remark or urge her up and onward, but he didn’t.
She watched the performance, struck by the memories and emotion it ignited.
Three figures in tattered cloth charged upon the stage. In Loda, they had worn pure white with the crest of each city stitched upon their back. They were the heroes of the three cities, each with wooden swords, but Clea could just as easily imagine that they had flaming torches, often used to represent the heat and light of ansra.
