The Pain Merchants

I wove through the flow of people coming off the ferry and hopped up on the wall behind Aylin.

“Please tell me you know about some work. I need good news.”

“Hi, Nya.” She tossed her long red hair and waved at a well dressed merchant walking by. He flipped up his brocaded collar and ignored her. “Nah, just the usual stuff. Are all the jobs taken already?”

“I got a late start. Think the canal master is hiring leaf pullers?” Water hyacinths clogged the canals every summer and made it tough for the pole boats to get through. Dangerous work, but it paid well.

“Feel the need to dodge crocs?”

“Feel the need to eat.”

Her smile vanished. “Oh, that bad?”

“Would I risk becoming a meal to get one if it wasn’t?”

Her smile returned. “Hey, handsome, come inside! We have the

prettiest dancers in the Three Territories,” she called to a muscled soldier in Baseeri blue. He elbowed his friends and waved, but didn’t come over. “No, you’re smarter than that. I was telling Kaida the other day how you—”

“Aylin, are they hiring?”

“Oh, no, not any more. Morning, gentlemen! Come inside, three plays a day, the finest actors in Geveg!” Another set of soldiers went by, all wearing the blue and silver osprey emblem on their bulging chests. Baseeri soldiers always lined the streets, but I hadn’t seen so many on patrol since the occupation began.

My toes twitched with a sudden urge to be anywhere else. “Why all the soldiers today?”

“Verlatta’s under siege.”

“Seriously?”

She nodded and her dangling shell earrings swayed in time with her hips. “I had a Baseeri officer stop to talk on his way in last night. Said His Dukeship is after Verlatta’s pynvium mines.”

Even the late-morning sun couldn’t keep my shivers away. Baseer was two hundred miles upriver, on the borderlands between the Three Territories and the Northern Reaches, but it felt like the Duke was breathing down our necks again. He’d already conquered Sorille and now controlled most of the good farming land, but he hadn’t had any pynvium mines until he conquered us. We tried to fight him, regain our freedom, but it hadn’t worked. Once he had Verlatta, he’d rule all three lands his great-grandfather had granted independence to long ago.

“First our mines, now theirs. You’d think the Duke would have enough to heal everyone in Baseer by now.”

Aylin shrugged. “It’s not for the healing—it’s for the weapons. If he’d stop wasting his pynvium on weapons, he wouldn’t need so much. A vicious circle is what it is. Greedy toad. It’s his own fault.”

Aylin was right, but it was more sick than vicious if you asked me. Send your soldiers into battle and use their pain to fill your pynvium weapons, just so you could go attack other folks and steal their pynvium, so you could heal your people because you used all your pynvium to make the weapons in the first place. Stupid. Just plain stupid.

“There are a lot of people,” Aylin mused, watching the refugees shuffling off the ferry. The Duke had long since set up checkpoints on all the mainland bridges and roads, and without proper Baseeri travel seals, you didn’t get to pass. Getting proper travel seals wasn’t as hard as you might expect—it just cost you everything you had. Folks had tried forging them, but checkpoint soldiers were very good at spotting fakes.

“Too many people,” I agreed. Families in tailored clothes with the bright beaded collars popular in Verlatta shuffled beside families in sewn-together rags. Each person carried a bag or basket—probably all they could grab before they fled Verlatta.

And every last one of them would also be looking for work in Geveg.

I glanced at a pain merchant’s shop down the way, its sign swinging in the breeze. Teasing. Taunting. Tempting. Maybe I could risk it. Plenty of refugees around I could sneak some pain from and one sale might get me through a few more days. I just had to find someone who looked bruised or cut, nothing too serious that a Taker might recognise wasn’t a real injury of mine. Their lack of real training might be a lucky break for me.

Maybe Aylin knew which Takers couldn’t sense? She’d want to know why though, and much as I liked Aylin, I wasn’t sure how good she was at keeping secrets. With five pain merchant shops in Geveg, the chances of one having a senseless Taker were—

A man was watching us, almost hidden behind a hibiscus bush two shops down. Dressed fancy too, in smooth yellow and green silk. He wasn’t carrying anything, so he wasn’t off the ferry. An aristocrat’s son? He glanced from me to Aylin and his lips wrinkled in a vaguely familiar frown.

“I’d better get going, see if anyone needs a hauler in the market,” I said. The show house was Baseeri-owned, so I didn’t care if my stained shirt and wild curls scared away its customers, but I didn’t want Aylin to lose her job over it. “You’ll let me know if you hear of any jobs?”

“Of course.”

I hopped off the wall and the world spun around my head.

“Easy there.” Aylin grabbed my arm and kept me standing. “You OK?”

“Just a little dizzy. Moved too fast.”

“You’re so skinny I could wear you in my belt loops. Do you need money for something to eat?” She reached for a pocket.

“No thanks, I’m all right,” I said quickly. I couldn’t pay her back and Grannyma always said a debt owed was a friendship lost.

Aylin frowned as if she didn’t believe me, but cared too much to call me on it. “Tell Tali I said hello.”

“I will.”

Things were still a little swirly, but I tried my best to walk straight and not worry her further. At the farmers’ market, a heavyset woman with a basket full of bread caught my eye. Not an aristocrat, but her pink shirt matched her patterned skirt and looked neither worn nor patched, so she probably worked for one. Kitchens most likely. She was looking at mangoes, picking up one at a time and sniffing them. My stomach poked at me again, pain caused more from guilt over what I was planning than from hunger, but no one would hire a girl who kept fainting.

I swayed as I walked by and lightly shoved the woman into the mango bin. Mangoes wiggled and several rolled off the top of the yellow-orange stack. She cried out and grabbed the table edge, dropping her basket and the fruit on to the rough street stones.

“I’m so sorry!” I knelt and picked up her basket before it could roll over and dump the bread. Good stuff too, warm and wrapped in cinnamon-scented cloth. “Here you go. I hope it didn’t get dirty.”

She snatched the basket out of my hands. “Stupid ’Veg!” she swore. “Watch where you’re going.”

“I’m so sorry. You’re right, I should watch where I’m going. There’s no excuse for such clumsiness.” I tucked two mangoes into my pocket and handed her three others. “I think these are the last of them.”

She glanced at my non-black hair and scoffed. “Useless, all of you.”

“Fine day to you.” I dipped a bow.

She harrumphed and turned back to her shopping.

I waited a heartbeat, then two. No cries of alarm, no angry farmer racing after me to demand payment. I slid into the crowd, letting it take me downstream of the market district and into the tradesmen’s corner.

Knees quivering, I settled down in the grass under the big palm tree in front of Trivent’s Leathers, leaning against the trunk with my legs out straight. Madame Trivent didn’t care for folks resting under her tree, which is why it was usually vacant. Not much open space in Geveg was unoccupied any more.

I bit through the mango’s skin, sucked the juice up, ignoring the pinch in my stomach as I tried to gobble it up quicker than I could eat it. The first went down fast and I started on the second, slower this time.

I’d missed all the morning work, but there’d be more after lunch. The fishing boats returned mid-afternoon, so if I went now, I could get work unloading today’s catch. The Sunset Runner was on a good streak this week. They’d kept me almost two hours longer than any other loader on the docks the other day. Said I’d done a good job too.

I stopped mid-chew. The fancy man was back, watching me from behind a fence. Me, not Aylin. No good reason why any man would be watching me, unless he was from the League.

The League! That’s where I’d seen him, passing behind the Elder and the wards.

The mango soured in my mouth. A League man overhears that I can shift and starts following me? What if he was a Tracker? I hadn’t heard talk of any since their kidnapping spree during the war. Rumours said they tracked for us and the Duke, so the Healers they grabbed never knew which side they might wind up healing. Folks whispered about Trackers like they whispered about marsh spirits and the haunted barge wreck. Except Trackers were real.