not an uneducated girl from a second-rate mestina in a second-rate city on the wrong side of the kingdom.
But there it was.
Faella reached out her hand and began the motions of a new mestina she'd just begun to write. It was called 'Twine.' She glamoured two thin strands of pure color: one red, one gold. The two threads weaved around her in the darkened theater, bathing her face in their light. She moved her wrist slowly in rhythm and the strands began to move more quickly, circling one another.
Once she'd begun to believe that she'd truly done something unusual to Silverdun, it seemed to set something off in her. It started small. Little things: The very item she needed would find itself to hand without her having to look; a dress she'd been longing for would turn up drastically on sale at the boutique on the Boulevard. That sort of thing.
But soon inexplicable things had begun to happen. One night, when the first month's mortgage payment had come due for the theater, she'd opened the cash box to find precisely the amount she'd needed to pay. What made this even more remarkable was that it was at least twice the amount it should have been, given the ticket sales that night.
Never anything astonishing. Never more than what she needed at a given moment.
The red and gold strands circled each other, then dove toward one another, twirling around and around. They dipped and dodged and wove in and out. Twining about in a perfect braid and then-
The two strands became tangled; they hitched in the air above her, in a snarl. She let them go and they fell limply to the floor in a disappointing knot, then faded away.
Certainly the others should have started appearing by now. Mestines weren't known for punctuality, but they were seldom this late.
'Miss Faella!'
Faella looked up and saw Bend, one of the stagehands, running into the auditorium.
'Bend?' she said crossly. 'Where is everyone?'
'Apologies, miss. I looked for you at your home but you'd already left.'
'Why? What's going on?'
'It's Rieger,' said Bend. 'He's hurt bad, stabbed.'
'Oh, hell,' said Faella. She and Bend ran from the theater together. Rieger was Faella's on-again-off-again lover, but more to the point he was one of her best mestines.
Estacana was an unusual city, having been built for giants; its roads were too wide, its windows too large, its steps too tall. Faella liked it. She liked things that were larger than life. But today the city didn't hold her interest as it usually did. She followed Bend through the streets to the fourth-floor garret where Rieger lived.
The room was crowded with players and hands from the Bittersweet Wayward, all standing around looking worried. Leave it to mestines to become melodramatic and useless in a crisis.
'Everyone out,' she barked. 'Go to the theater where you can be useful.' She began shooing them out.
Once the room was cleared she found her way to Rieger's bedside and looked down at him. A physician, an elderly woman in a starched-neck black dress, was tending a wound in Rieger's abdomen with herbs and smoke, blowing the white healing vapor into the cut. Rieger's sister Ada sat next to him on the bed, holding his hand.
The physician looked up at her. 'Who are you?' she said.
'I'm Faella,' she said. 'I'm his employer.'
'Will you pay for my services?' asked the physician.
'Yes. Use whatever cures you have at your disposal.'
The physician nodded, reached for her bag, and rummaged through it.
Faella knelt next to Rieger and ran her fingers through his hair. He was unconscious, breathing rapidly.
'What happened?' she whispered to Ada.
'You know him,' Ada said. 'Out drinking and carrying on until day break. He and another fellow at the tavern got into a drinking competition, and somehow a fight started. Rieger went into it with his fists, but the other fellow had a knife.'
'Do they know who it was?'
'Oh, sure,' said Ada. 'Malik Em. But he's with the Wolves, so they won't touch him.'
