EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (4 page)

Tossing out the bloody water from her weapons’ cleaning, Sara quickly scrubbed down the bucket with lye and put the scented soap and hot water into the tub for a wash-down. The scented soap was a luxury. It was one of the few luxuries they had, and Sara knew it was from the last of her mother’s stash. She’d given it to Sara as a way of making amends. Her mother didn’t like confrontation. Sara didn’t like confrontation with her mother. Anyone else, she’d confront and rip to shreds gladly. But not her mother. She stood in the kitchen as she cleaned her body of the dust, the dirt, and the few flakes of blood that had managed to land on her skin. Then Sara dressed, tossed out the dirty bathwater, and knocked on the wall next to her mother’s private space to give her a silent hug. Nothing needed to be said between them.
 

All was forgiven.

That night as Sara curled up in her blankets, she heard chittering coming from above her head.

Turning to her side, she called out, “Come here, you blasted ball of fur.”

She waited for a moment.

“Chrimrale, here now. I know you’ve been fed already. Mother may dislike you, but she wouldn’t let you starve,” grumbled Sara.
 

The next moment a light gray ball of fur, almost impossible to see in the darkness, landed on the blankets near her hand. It quickly skittered up to her chin and curled into a ball in the curve of her neck.

“That’s better,” muttered Sara as she dozed off.

That night Sara dreamed about what it would be like to walk onto the fishermen’s wharf and beg for a job. She knew it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Chapter III

T
HE
DAY
DAWNED
WITH
THE
loud squawks of the feral chickens outside. Sara heard them in her dreams long before she roused from her bed. After five minutes, she couldn’t take it anymore. Her eyes snapped open and she sat up, tense, in her bed. Chrimrale was already gone before she opened her eyes. She knew she wasn’t late for the open call at the fisheries. That happened at dawn. The cold in the air and the lack of the rooster’s crows told her the sun’s rays hadn’t broken the darkness covering the sky yet. Those feral fowls were diseased mangy beasts that prowled the street like a pack of wolves, pecking any feet that ventured close, and generally making a racket when they thought they could get away with it.

But they were singularly good at one thing. Telling time.
 

When you couldn’t afford a sundial or a mage’s water clock, you had to depend on your internal clock or that blasted rooster that crowed at the first blush of dawn like clockwork. Sara suspected he was the only reason that the neighbors that complained about them constantly hadn’t caught all of them and wrung their diseased little necks. She knew her mom despised the hens, as well.
 

She quickly snatched on her trousers and tunic with the boots coming on right after. Standing, she patted her pocket to make sure the slip was still there. But there was no rustle of paper through cloth. She quickly stuck her hand in to check. Then Sara groaned aloud while looking around. Of all the things to go wrong this morning, losing her work permit hadn’t been on the list. She knew it was on a little slip of parchment paper. She tore apart her room to find it. She tossed her straw-filled mattress on the floor up against the wall first, then she searched the smelly pile of laundry that had such a strong odor that she wrinkled her nose while she held each piece of clothing up to shake it for any bits of paper to fall out. Quite a few things fell, none of them parchment. Desperation began to set in. She started looking in the corners of the room. Twenty minutes had passed before her eye spotted a crumpled blue garment on the edge of the mattress.

And Sara remembered. She had worn that linen dress once and only once. When she’d gone to the magistrate’s court a week prior to register as an itinerant laborer—a person free to work in different menial occupations throughout the city. Diving for it, she snatched the offending garment off the floor and shook it harshly. She hated dresses with a passion. They were useless for riding, dangerous in sword-fighting, and more complicated than a double-action crossbow when she was trying to dress quickly.

“Found it!” she said triumphantly as she picked up the paper that had fluttered to the ground. Strapping on her knife and dagger, she jumped straight from the loft to the ground floor.

“Sara Jane Fairchild!” was her mother’s screech as Sara raced out the door.

“Sorry, Ma, I’m late!”

“I don’t care if the hounds of Hell are on your tail…” was all Sara heard before she hastily shut the front door and raced into the streets. She felt freedom. Freedom from her mother, their small apartment, and the weight of memories. Slowing down at the corner, she grimaced at the lack of weight on her back. She was used to having her sword strapped there. Her father had given her the sword a few years ago, imbued with the gift to grow with its owner. But city ordinances prohibited swords in certain parts of the city and the fisherman’s wharf was one of them. Why, she had no idea. But she didn’t want to be kicked off of the job on her first day because of it. So she only carried two weapons instead of three.

Checking the security of the knife at her waist and the dagger at her thigh, Sara waded into the early morning crowd. It was still dark, but she could see the sun’s rays begin to peek over the tops of buildings as she walked by. Beggars were already setting up shop on the busiest of street corners. Away from the routes of the city watchmen, those corners were prime territory. Only the earliest of risers or the fiercest could claim them. Because of what you did, you tried your best not to annoy the city watchmen too much. She’d known a man thrown in a jail cell with no food and dirty water for two days, all for annoying a merchant who called the city watch. He’d been told that if caught a second time, he’d lose an ear. Sara considered that lucky. You could work without an ear. Thieves lost their fingers.

She walked by the baker where the scent of bread already wafted in the air, then she changed directions to cut through the meat market. Next to the baker’s district, the meat market was one long street where all of the butchers displayed their wares. Before her eyes, wooden doors were pushed back to reveal small box butcheries with enough room for a cutting board and all the meat for the day being arrayed on the high table behind the owners. She passed plucked ducks with their heads still attached, a whole leg of lamb ready for spices, and a man whose blood-free stall specialized in fertilized duck eggs. There was something here for everyone.
 

But Sara hadn’t come to shop. And she certainly didn’t love a leisurely stroll through a street that smelled like raw meat and had hordes of flies at all times. This just happened to be the fastest way she knew how to get to the fisherman’s wharf without ducking through the jeweler’s market. She avoided the jeweler’s market because it came with its own set of problems that weren’t sensory-related. She didn’t mind fancy baubles; what she did mind were the muscle heads that guarded each shop, challenging her to a duel every time they spotted the famous Fairchild daughter.

She’d beaten three of them in fair hand-to-hand fights before she started killing her other opponents to deter them from challenging her again. Surprisingly, her fights to the death hadn’t actually discouraged any of her eager adversaries. In fact, it only urged them to challenge her more. Everyone wanted the reputation of defeating or even killing the best duelist in all of Sandrin. Sara never tired of defending her family’s honor, but she wasn’t an idiot. If she took on challenge after challenge, day after day, sooner or later she would fall.
 

So she now avoided the areas where she knew the challengers would be waiting. Including the jeweler’s market. She was also careful about who she took on in a fight. Unless they were backstabbing bastards like Simon Codfield—then they deserved to face her and atone for their wrongs. With a sigh of relief for her poor nose, Sara exited the butcher’s market. She stopped on the street corner to watch the sun rise in front of her. The golden rays spread like a gentle touch across the vast ocean and lit the water with hues of pink, red, and orange. The sound of the waves lapping at the edge of the beach came to her ears and for a moment all Sara wanted to do was go out to the edge of the water to stick her feet in. She felt her heart lift from the quagmire of worry. The beach brought back memories of family picnics near the surf.
 

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. I can listen to the lapping waves as I work
, she thought optimistically.
 

Heart lighter, Sara turned and walked to the fisherman’s wharf. Hoping for the best. But ready for the worst. She wasn’t a Fairchild for nothing. She had her family’s instinctual wariness embedded in her bones. She always looked for danger, for obstacles, and for challenges. It wasn’t really something she could turn off anyway. Her father had taught her how to watch the people on the streets. To see them for what they were. To realize that an old crone who crouched at the corner of the gold merchant’s stall might not be so old or so womanly when the caked layers of makeup on her face were wiped away to reveal a young man ready to thieve. To see that a brawny city watchman and his small partner might not be so mismatched as they appeared upon first glance. One could sprint after the suspects quicker, faster, and with more dexterity while the other could beat to a pulp an entire group of men without batting an eye. A match that worked to equalize their strengths and negate their weaknesses.

She recognized and catalogued faces, appearances, and strengths like other women catalogued shoes, hairstyles, and the latest fashions. Sara could tell a person’s physical strength with enough certainty from a few feet away that she almost never misjudged her opponent. Which was why when she walked through the door of the head fisherman’s office she almost turned right back around and left. Almost. She needed the money more than she needed to stay out of trouble.
They
needed the money.

As she stood behind a person already there on business, she studied the medium-sized man who sat behind a large wooden desk that sagged under the weight of the coin purses and stacks of paper in front of him. When he looked up, she shuddered. Not because he had a cruel scar bisecting his face into the ruin of his right eye, but because out of his left eye shone pure evil. This was one man she wouldn’t mess with. There was bad and there was
evil
. Men like Severin, the thief lord who hadn’t been able to finish an argument without using his fists, were bad.
 

She knew this man was worse, much worse than Severin just from the glance she had given him. As she waited for the seated man to finish his business with the patron in front of her, she studied him. Sara could tell that the seated man was cunning from just looking at him. But cunning and evil were two very different things. Reluctantly, she dived into her gifts. She needed to know where he treaded the line. After all, being maniacal wasn’t a crime.
 

She confirmed the hint of malice in his eye when she opened her mage sight to take advantage of the powers of the battle magic that raged within her. She only used a spark of the powers, as it was dangerous to tap into the whole of her battle magic. Sara became virtually unstoppable when using the full force of her gifts. Battle magic was unique among the mages in that it affected their mental states. Battle mages had a nickname she despised, because she shivered in fear whenever she heard it. It was like hearing the death knell and knowing that it was coming for you. The word? Berserkers.

The berserkers, or battle mages, were infamous upon the fields of war for being kill-hungry and virtually unstoppable. Sara had never gone berserk and she
never
intended to because she refused to go to war. She wasn’t stupid. There would be no better way for a battle mage to trigger the terrible gift, than to be surrounded by blood and enemies everywhere they turned.

I don’t know how my father managed it
, she thought to herself.

She shook her head as she thought it over,
No, actually I do. He went to war, but he never served on the front lines. He never exposed himself to the temptation to dive into a reign of blood and death. As an officer and as a commander, he was safe.

 
But still, like the ghosts that haunt a child’s bed, the idea of becoming a person unable to control their emotions and being filled with a ravenous urge to murder filled her with dread. Which was why she only used her battle magic sparingly now. She didn’t want to wrestle the dark demon of desire and rage like so many in her family had. She’d heard stories about her ancestors from her father. He had even spoken occasionally about using battle magic in the arena as a gladiator. But one thing he continuously warned her about was that being a battle mage and being a berserker were two wholly different things. You could be one without the other as long as you practiced control. But once you went berserk, you stayed in that state until you died.

Sara knew that in time she wouldn’t have a choice about using her gift of battle magic. If she didn’t use it, it would use
her.
So she did what she could to placate the urge to kill. She tapped into her gifts slowly and siphoned off some of the power each day. It was part of the reason she had been in that alley the night before and had taken on Simon and his crew. She had no choice. It wouldn’t drive her to be berserk, but not using the gift was just as bad because it could drive her mad.

 
This time when she tapped into the gift to assess the power and potential threat of the man before her, the power was just enough to get her eager to drive a knife through someone’s skull, but not enough to make her go out and kill someone that very second. Battle magic could do that. It had done that. She knew of a great-grandmother who had killed six men in her village before she’d been shot down by a storm of arrows from the local guard. Battle magic made the Fairchilds fierce, unpredictable, and deadly. But it was also a gift that she and her ancestors had to treat carefully. For the sake of all those around them.