The Red Fortress
Book 2 in the Divided World series
In the impregnable red fortress, the mysterious leader of the slavers waits, accumulating power.
Slavers have been taking children from across the divided world for longer than Nes can remember. While she’s rescued her sibs with the help of her friends Malenie and Paza, her cousins and her ma are still missing and most everyone has given up hope.
But Nes has the shaper’s sense. With it, a lock of hair will lead her to its owner and a pebble can become a truth stone.
Friends may not let friends hunt slavers alone, but if Nes doesn’t succeed, she will lose not just her family but Malenie and Paza too.
The Red Fortress will be available on Amazon closer to the release day.
Out now!
Chapter One
When I was little, I choked on a chicken bone once. It scraped the sides of my throat, and the bone and panic closed off my breath. I was afraid I was gonna die. Well that’s what it’s like for me most times with words. They stick in my throat and choke me. It doesn’t matter if they’re words of love or anger. I feel like I’m trying to swallow something too big, except I’m trying to get the words up and out, not down and in.
Even though I wasn’t trying to talk, that’s what I was feeling I sat on the big old steps of my friend Malenie’s family’s house and watched my sibs play. The twins, seven-year-old Tep and Del, raced up and down the raked gravel lane—wider than the twisty alley Malenie and I used to live on—screaming with delight, at the game, at each other, for the freedom of it I suppose. They were young enough that they didn’t know either. Mostly they avoided trampling all the unfamiliar plants and yellow and pink flowers, still as awed as me at all the richness surrounding us. I don’t know why they’d taken to playing in the front garden, maybe because they weren’t supposed to, or maybe so they could watch the gate and all the comings and goings. We were all still pretty skittish. I was just glad they felt free enough, safe enough to do something they weren’t supposed to, and that made the lump come up in my throat.
So when Malenie skipped down the steps and stopped next to me, it was a relief to laugh and forget about all the things I wanted to say and couldn’t. Malenie glittered. I mean really, her skin was twinkling in the harsh morning light and reflecting it back like tiny mirrors. She’d been practicing her magic like there was no tomorrow ever since, well ever since most of our troubles got solved. She grinned back at me out of that pointy face of hers and flipped her black hair over her shoulders. She says she can’t wait ‘til she’s old enough to tie it back—that’s some kind of religious rule her people have that girls leave their hair loose—but I think her straight slick hair is pretty in an odd sort of way. I fingered the narrow braids of hair around my wrist—hers and our friend Paza’s—and admired her show.
She opened her mouth and my good mood got a dent in it ‘cause I knew what she was going to ask. My sis Chal ran up right then, shouting “Do me! Do me!” and danced around us. Malenie looked at me and lifted one eyebrow, a trick she’d picked up from the Suntin matriarch after hours in front of a mirror holding onto one while she grimaced and wiggled the other. I shrugged, but Chal squealed in delight. She knew I couldn’t say no to her right now.
Malenie’s hand felt slight and cool in mine. As soon as I started talking, Malenie’s magic began to build as pressure behind and under and above my eyes and in my ears. The dark blue diamond patterns on Malenie’s skin, the sign of her magic, responded too, throwing off a bright glow. “I wish Chal’s skin looked like Malenie’s,” I said, and the pressure and force released with a whoosh only I heard. The magic was Malenie’s, not mine, but it couldn’t work without me or Paza. We were her callers, and we gave it direction. Just not always great direction.
I stared with chagrin as Chal turned sparkly just as I had intended, and the medium brown of her skin lightened to the red-tinted brown of Malenie’s. I hadn’t intended that.
“Oops,” Malenie giggled as Chal whooped in delight and ran off to prance in front of our other sibs.
“Not specific enough, Nes,” I made my voice deep and precise to imitate our tutor, Sarl. He said that to us every day, many, many times, as we practiced using Malenie’s magic.
Paza, the third in our group, joined us on the stairs and asked the question we’d been asking each other for weeks, the question Chal’s interruption had stopped Malenie from asking. “Are they here yet?”
I flung my arm out at the empty yard, and as if that had been a signal, the heavy double gates to the street swung open and a swarm of people spilled through as if I had magicked them. My mouth dropped open ‘cause of course I can’t, I don’t think anyone has that kind of magic, although Malenie’s is very strong and can do impossible things that are, like, well, magic. Malenie and me grew up on the other side of the Wall, where magic only works through things, so this kind of magic was pretty new and amazing to us. Paza laughed at the expression on my face. She had the same pointy nose and chin as Malenie—after all, they’re cousins as well as friends—but her cheeks were leaner and her hair wasn’t as long. It had been growing like cattails in the spring for the last two months and now reached the top of her shoulders. It looked a lot better than the almost shaved bristles that had stood up all over her head before. You wouldn’t mistake her for a boy any more, as Malenie had when they first met.
We lost our smiles as we really looked at the newcomers. They were dusty and worn as you’d expect since they’d been riding hard for months, searching for the renegades who had burned my hometown to the ground and stolen all the children for slaves. Under the grit, the search party was exhausted, with none of the underlying energy they’d have had if they’d found them.
They’d failed.
Mutely, Malenie held out her hand to Paza, who said the words to banish the glitter from her skin, and then we threaded our way through the milling people and camels. The smells of sweat and animals covered up the sweet scent of the flowers. I didn’t know any of them, they were all guards from Malenie’s families.
Malenie stopped in front of a man not too much older’n me. He looked friendly and like he usually had a grin on his face, but now all he had was sweat caked with dirt. “Hey now, lasses,” he said softly, leaning against his camel’s shoulder. “No news is good news, they say, but not now.” His voice was bitter. “We didn’t find a trace of them. Those baby stealers got clean away.” My stomach tightened up and I felt sick; the babies they had stolen were my sibs. No matter I’d gotten them back, I wanted the raiders caught. “Not a trace of them,” the man continued. “We went clear to that red fortress of theirs and the townspeople let us in polite as you please, because there weren’t nothing for us to find. They said there weren’t no robbers or slavers among them, only honest folk. We made them swear on a holy man’s rib bone and they lived, so they were telling the truth as far as they were saying.”
I reached out and ran my fingers through the camel’s soft blond hair at the base of its neck. Rage had made a home inside me, growing like a tapeworm each time someone else disappeared from my life: Pa, Aunt Stel and Uncle Den and their kids, and finally Ma and my sibs. Even Malenie for a while. Getting Chal, Del and Tep back hadn’t cured me of it, nor the two months of refuge with Malenie’s warm family, and now the rage burned through me with all its old strength. I tried hard to hide it when I asked, “What happens next?” but concern scrunched up Paza’s face and she grabbed onto my hand. I let her, ‘cause I was re-learning some things I used to know about letting others help me. It wouldn’t break me down as I’d believed for a while, no matter how much I felt like it would. That’s what they all kept telling me anyhow.
“Nothing,” the guard answered, “unless that wise man of Sarnath of yours or any of the magic users have something to go on. We don’t have any way of tracking them. I’m to take a report back to the Pashtin Matriarch on this miss,” he pointed to Malenie with his chin, “and her pa.” That meant he was from the other side—my side—of the Wall. The Pashtin matriarch was Malenie’s aunt. For someone who was next thing to an orphan two months ago, Malenie sure had a lot of family now, and important ones at that. I was happy for her, but her rapidly expanded family just pointed out to me how small my own had gotten.
“It’s not right, Thod!” Malenie shouted.
“We have no leads, nowhere to look,” he said gently. “No one’s admitting to seeing them, even. But your friends from Trader Town are keeping an eye out and an ear to the ground. They’re our best bet now.” He pushed upright like it hurt to move. “I have to report.” He walked away with the flatfooted stride of an old man.
I found Sarl, our tutor and more famously the wise man of Sarnath, in the camel pen, running his hands down his camel’s legs, and I knew he meant to leave us. He’d shaved his head in mourning like his son had died, and the white fuzz growing in made him look naked somehow. I didn’t like it, but it was better than the shining brown of his scalp. Scrolling green lines glowed from beneath the skin on his wrists, a sign of one of his magics. He had magic, like Malenie, and he had callers, like me, to make it work, but he was also a seer. And he took the responsibility seriously. No way was he going to sit here while his son’s friends, the raiders, were still loose in the world. Complicated thing, family. And like any adult, he wasn’t fixing on taking me. So I blocked the gate when he was done.
“I have to go,” he said. We both knew he didn’t just mean out of the pen.
It was hard to let him see my need, even him: “Take me with you.” He put his hand on my shoulder and his mouth opened to say no. “I can help—you know,” I pleaded, holding my hands out, palms up.
On the other side of the Wall, an awareness, a sensitivity, had been growing in my fingers and hands during the last year. Magic was in stone or bone or cloth there, but it still took a person to craft a spell stone to a specific purpose or to find the untapped magic—like the link between the braid of hair on my wrist to Malenie that always led me to her, without fail. Shaper’s sense, they called it. And sometimes I could do more than just tell, I could use the magic in the way it wanted to be used.
“We don’t have anything that belongs to their leader, Harashan,” he said.
“But you will and then you’ll need me, need my magic.” It hurt to see the deep lines around his mouth and the mask of calmness he wore in place of the genuine serenity he’d shown when we first met. The responsibility he felt for Colvin’s wickedness still rode him hard. He wasn’t thinking sensible because of it.
“Let us take care of it.” Us adults, he meant.
My mouth fell open at the unfairness. He doesn’t usually talk like that. As our tutor he’d been teaching us to think before we used magic; he’d never treated us like stupid children. In fact, lessons were the only times the pinched-up look on his face had eased a bit. “Your magic won’t even work there,” I snarled.
He ignored my anger and winked at me. I don’t know who he thought he was fooling. “We have more skills than just my magic.” He meant his two callers, Tal and Jos, and really there wasn’t much they couldn’t do. That’s why I needed to go with them: they’d succeed where others would fail. Had failed.
My tongue tied itself in knots as I tried to find a way to explain. I had to go. Maybe everyone else had forgotten the rest of my family, but I hadn’t. I was their only hope.
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