“Yes!” Mae said. “They’re all on our side. They’re not magicians. We can use all the magic and all the help we can get, and the Goblin Market should be a place where we can all live and work together, not just one night a month.”
“And you’re the authority on how the Goblin Market needs tearing to pieces, why exactly?”
“Who else is there?” Mae demanded. “What would you do?”
A young potion-maker Sin knew called Isabella yelled out to Mae about where to put something. Mae glanced around.
“Coming! Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” she said. “You,” she added, addressing Nick in a cold voice, as if to prove to both herself and him that she truly had not forgiven him. “You’re a demon, right? I seem to recall something of that sort. If you have to be here, go make yourself useful.”
Mae stared stonily at Nick. Nick stared back, his face a blank wall, but after a moment he walked toward one of the wagons under construction. Mae glared after him and then went running off to Isabella.
Sin was left standing alone at her own Market, with nothing to do.
“Sin,” said Carl the weapons master, breaking away from one of the murmuring knots of people. “Thank God you’re here.” He hesitated. “Where’s the—”
“Lydie’s with my father.”
Carl’s face cleared. Sin’s father was a tourist, after all, not one of them. “That was the right decision. And now you can be here for us. That tourist’s got completely above herself, and she’s running wild. Some of those necromancers arrived with stinking bodies in their cars.”
Confusion to the enemy seemed to be leading to confusion about who the enemy was.
“Nobody’s happy,” Carl murmured conspiratorially. “Look around.”
She looked at Jonas trudging by with his tools and fresh wood in hand, wearing a scowl caught between uncertainty and anger, and she realized that most of the core Market people, the real Market people, were feeling that uncertainty and anger. They were feeling abandoned enough that they would put their trust in what was familiar. Merris was possessed and abandoning them. Mae was a tourist dragging chaos in her wake.
Sin had arrived without a magician in tow. They knew her.
She wouldn’t even have to try and win them back. If she started giving orders, they would obey.
It was a stunning realization. Even more stunning was the second one.
She didn’t know what orders to give. “Everything stay the same!” was probably not a good idea, given that the magicians could attack at any moment.
Given that the magicians could attack at any moment, having more people in place to fight started to seem like a better idea.
Sin caught sight of Matthias, piping beside one of the wagons shining with new paint. There were tiny objects floating in the air all around him: hinges, nails, and several small screwdrivers.
She excused herself to Carl and headed over to him.
“Hey,” she said. “Got a minute?”
Matthias lowered his pipes. A dozen nails dropped lightly to the ground and lay sprinkled and gleaming in the grass. “Not really.”
Sin inclined her head to the wagon. “You moving in as well?”
“Oh yes,” said Matthias. “Nothing in the world I want more than to live with you miscreants in all this racket.”
“Why are you helping, then?”
Matthias, raising his pipes back to his lips, paused. “If people are so massively misguided as to want to live with you,” he said eventually, “they should be allowed.” He paused again. “Besides,” he added, “with the new regime, I thought I might bring my parents to the next Market.”
“Your—what?”
“My
Sin had never thought of Matthias as having parents. She supposed it was logical, most people had them, but Matthias liked music so much more than people, she would hardly have been surprised to learn his father was a flute and his mother a music stand.
With the new vision that came from being jolted into a new way of thinking, Sin watched him push back his hair and noticed that despite how gaunt and worn he was, he was probably still in his early twenties.
She wondered if there were young necromancers, too.
“Your parents would have been welcome anytime,” she said.
“Oh yes,” said Matthias. “Anyone with money’s welcome. And if they happened to hear a joke about pipers stealing children, well, where’s the harm?”
Sin didn’t make piper jokes herself, because it would be insane for a dancer to annoy her musicians. But she’d heard them. “That bothers you?”
“Only the fact that they’re stupid,” Matthias snapped. “What the hell would I do with a pack of children anyway? My landlord doesn’t allow pets. But my parents don’t need to know about it. They gave up a lot for their piper son. I accidentally stole their voices when I was a kid, and they think the Market is this place of—of
Sin chose her words with care, because she was not sure how to respond to what Matthias was saying, but she had asked to hear it. He deserved a thoughtful response.
