hit it and stopped.
Helen was staring at a point beyond Sin. Sin followed her line of sight, expecting to see that boy Seb.
Instead she saw her sister. Lydie, running into the fray with both her hands thrown up as if she had a shield in them.
Alan was behind her, limping far more obviously than he usually did, trying to catch up with her. He had Toby in the crook of one arm and his gun trained on Helen. Helen wasn’t looking at him. She had her eyes on Lydie and she was retreating, lowering her sword.
It was the worst possible thing she could have done.
There were a dozen Market people and pipers coming up behind her, Mae and Matthias among them, and all of them saw what Helen was doing.
They saw the magician refuse to fight one of her own kind.
Helen surveyed the new opposition over her shoulder, and then looked back to see Nick appear at Alan’s side. There was fresh blood running down his sword.
“Time to go,” Helen called out.
Matthias’s bow was already strung. He let fly an arrow directly at Helen, who turned with a sweep of her sword and disappeared in a wash of shimmering light, as if she was only the reflection of a woman in a pool and someone had drawn a hand through the water.
The magicians gone, they were left standing and staring at one another. The air was full of smoke and the smell of blood.
“So,” said Phyllis, drawing her dressing gown shut. “There’s a magician among us.”
Matthias had not put his bow away.
Sin backed up, knife in hand, until she bumped up against Lydie, felt Lydie’s small, frantic hands clinging to Sin’s belt loops.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Sin. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, baby,” Sin told her, then lifted her voice and spun her knife so that the Market people could not mistake her meaning. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Sin,” said Carl, who was draped with half the weapons from his stall, a broadsword in each hand. “She’s a magician.”
“She’s mine.”
“Think a little, Cynthia,” Carl said, coaxing. “If she can do that at seven, what’ll she do at sixteen when the power really comes in? You know what she’ll do. You know she’ll be one of them.”
Sin saw Mae make a small, angry movement, but there was nothing Mae could say: The whole Goblin Market had seen her brother join the magicians. They always went to their own kind, in the end.
“The issue could be shelved until she is sixteen,” Alan said softly behind Sin. “Now is hardly the time to fight among ourselves.”
“Now is hardly the time for divided loyalties!” Phyllis said, her voice crackling like old wood in a fire. “Iris is dead! We’re not keeping a magician in the nest. It’s not like this is the first time Sin has failed us. She would’ve sacrificed us all for the sake of that baby, last time. It’s not like we don’t have another choice.”
Everyone looked at Mae. Mae lifted her chin, glaring back at them.
“My brother’s a magician too.”
“A lot of us have magicians in the family,” Phyllis said. “And the magicians all left.”
Mae took a deep breath. “I don’t want the leadership like this.”
“But you would step up and take it if you had to,” Phyllis said. “You wouldn’t abandon the Market. That’s what we’re saying. It’s Sin’s duty to send the child away.”
Phyllis had known Sin and Lydie since they were born. Carl too. These were her people, the Market people, closer than an ordinary family, bound together by danger and a common cause.
Sin was amazed by how little that seemed to matter.
She was even more amazed when Matthias the piper, who she had never liked much or trusted for anything but a song at sunset, unstrung his bow with an abrupt motion and said, “Sin’s not abandoning the Market. Throwing ourselves into the arms of a girl we’ve known a couple of months is insane.”
“I have an idea,” Alan said. “If she would agree to leave the girl with magicians—”
“No!” Sin snarled, wheeling on him.
Alan stood with his gun lowered at his side. His eyes were fixed on her, intent and just for a moment, pleading. She knew him well enough by now to know when he was role-playing.
She could stay at the Market with Toby. He’d keep Lydie until they could get something figured out.
All it would take was Sin convincing the Market that she would abandon Lydie. In front of her sister.
No, no, not in a thousand years, even though she loved him for trying, not in the light or the darkness, not for any reason. Lydie could not be allowed to doubt, ever.
“She’s mine,” Sin repeated.
Alan lied more easily than he told the truth, but she was a performer: She knew there was always a choice between lies and truth, that it was a balancing act. Alan might not know what was too important to lie about. She did.
