“Dinner.” Araya handed her own, much thicker packet of papers to the guard with an apologetic smile he didn’t bother to return. “But I told him I was meeting you?—”
“Hood down,” the guard ordered, his fingers curling around the club at his belt.
“Ah, sorry—” Araya shoved her hood back, not giving him an excuse to use it. The humid air clung to her skin as his gaze flicked from her face to the portrait stamped on her papers. Finally, he folded her papers back up, but he didn’t hand them back.
“Left hand,” he ordered.
The hair on the back of Araya’s neck prickled as she held out her hand, palm-down to display the rune tattooed just below the knuckle of her thumb, where the skin stretched thin over bone.
The guard leaned in, his sour breath wafting over her skin as he pressed his fingers roughly into the mark. Her stomach turned, nausea rising in the back of her throat as aether flared under her skin, answering his call obediently—then kept going. A thread of her magic slipped free, leeching away under his touch.
Araya barely checked the instinct to rip her hand away. That power wasn’t hers to give or his to take—it belonged to the Arcanum. But if she fought him now, the Arcanum wouldn’t be here to keep him from punishing her. All she could do was grit her teeth and close her eyes against the violation of it?—
“Is that really necessary?” Serafina snapped.
The guard’s lip curled, hisfingers lingering a second too long before he finally released her. Her magic recoiled, retreating like a wounded animal as he shoved her papers back into her hand with a grunt.
“Move along, then.”
Serafina muttered something vicious under her breath and turned, taking Araya’s arm gently but firmly. “Come on.”
She shoved through the gate, setting off at a brisk pace that forced Araya to almost trot to keep up, her skin still buzzing with unease as they rushed through the deserted streets.
“Are you alright?” Serafina asked once they were clear, her voice tight with fury. “He’s not allowed to do that—why didn’t you stop him?”
“Because then he would have beaten me,” Araya said flatly. “And I’d be one of your patients instead of your assistant tonight—that would have made usreallylate.”
Serafina stopped walking, guilt flickering across her face. “Gods, Araya?—”
“It’s fine. I’m fine—he didn’t take that much.” Araya waved her off, already moving again. “Let’s just get to the clinic.”
“You know I can’t do this without you,” Serafina said quietly, falling into step beside her.
“You have five apprentices,” Araya pointed out, laughing. “Surely one of them can handle checking names off a list.”
“I have fivehumanapprentices.” Serafina sighed, not bothering to hide her frustration. “Half these females wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have you with me. It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent my whole life helping them—here, they’ll never see me as anything but human.”
Araya didn’t have an answer to that. In some ways, Serafina was more fae than she was. After all, she’d grown up with a half-fae father, while Araya had been raised by human minders in the reeducation camps the Arcanum established for fae orphans, where they’d beaten every bit of fae they could out of her.
Buthere—just like in the Aetherium—blood trumped everything.
Serafina was only a quarter-fae. No one would ever mistake her blonde hair for spun gold, and her green eyes could have come from her human mother as easily as her half-fae father. She had never needed permission to practice magic. No one had ever pinned her to a table and tattooed aly’ithrarune on her hand, condemning her to a fraction of her power while the rest went to the Arcanum to feed their never-ending thirst for magic.
But Araya was three-quarters fae. A halfblood, by the Arcanum’s laws. Even worse, shelookedfae. From her deep red hair streaked with violet, to her silver eyes, to the way aether pulsed beneath her skin and her clipped ears, marking her as someone who had suffered at the hands of the Arcanum.
And that, to the fae here, made her safe.
They fell into an uneasy silence as they raced through the deserted streets. There were no cheery bonfires here, no bright songs drifting through the air. Here, every broken window and flimsy door was bolted tight, offering no sign of the residents that surely huddled inside.
“So?” Serafina demanded as they walked up to the community hall the Arcanum had reluctantly granted her use of for her maternity clinic. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him I couldn’t go,” Araya said.
“And he just took no for an answer?” Serafina snorted, handing her papers over to another human guard. “That doesn’t sound like Jaxon.”
“No,” Araya admitted, handing her own papers over. “He wants to get drinks after I’m done here. He said he has a table reserved.”
The guard here barely glanced at her papers, stifling a yawn as he handed them back. An interior checkpoint in Ravonfar was pretty much the lowest position a guard could get—Araya wondered what he’d done to deserve it.
