A Pretty Word
A short story of Breath
Liana Mir
©Copyright 2012 Liana Mir. All rights reserved.
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SHE WAS A DANGEROUS sort of writer, the kind who was sought out in back alleyways and offered thick marble rods as long as her own hand to just write a word, any pretty word, to comfort a poor lost soul. Lost from family, from friends, from work—it didn't matter. The requests were the same, interspersed, of course, with the occasional visit of a plain-clothes watchman in disguise to make sure she did not breathe on any of the words.
As if the words were the issue.
Kindia snorted out a steamy huff of disgust into the chilled alleyway. Breath of a soul, the skin of a human vessel, something tangible to make it take... These were the tools of her trade, the implements of her power, and it was an easy thing to keep her hands full of breath without a soul suspecting.
Keeping the wrong folk unsuspecting meant her life now that the Old King was dead. She walked the back streets of the city where people tended to forget she and the other powerful existed if they just stayed out of sight. The rebels hated the powers, hated the powerful. Well, except the bakers—kind of necessary, them—and the former enforcers of the Old King's guard who could raise the war again if they were forbidden.
They offered service enough for folk like Kindia, who had no other way to earn a coin, but she had seen the heartless, the downtrodden poor who sold off their passions and feelings for enough coin to feed their children. She sold her own banned power to save herself from such a fate.
Just write a word, any pretty word, to comfort a poor soul on a cold, dark night, lost from any other comfort.
"Madém?"
Upon hearing the honorific, she looked up from the brick back wall of the service shop she'd staked out earlier in the evening, before the city lights had been glowed. A street man, he looked like—could be just poor—stricken with age and bent-bone disease: dark skin and knobby hands, bundled up in thick mismatched coats and leggings under boots hardly thicker than night-time socks. Kindia could read the empty lostness in his muddy brown eyes.
"Cold?" she asked, ever the caustic.
The man bobbed his head, implored with those knobby fingers, wrapped in thin scarves he'd ripped tenderly in two. "Write me a warm?" His voice was dry and husky. The old man may not have been long for the world with a rasp like that.
Kindia nodded and settled into a crouch, still leaning on the wall. Crouching left her more options if a watchman should decide to try bludgeoning her for the craft. She rubbed her hands together, as if for warmth, breathed on them, and looked up speculatively at the old man. "You got coin, frít?"
He showed a gap-toothed grin, pleased at her naming him a respected patron. Pleased enough to flash his coin. Pleased enough to not hurt her when she snatched it in that flash.
Paper.
A scrap from the alley would do. For merely malachite, not quite a meal, she would not part with the sheets she'd bought down the front streets three weeks back. One malachite coin wasn't worth enough to line her own fingers with carefully ripped scarves tied about the palms. But it was enough to write.
Warm your hands; you'll never thirst. Warm your heart; you'll never hunger. Warm your soul; the vessel conform.
Price: something back street people rarely thought about, something front street people never thought about, though she wrote the price in every line. She could write in power, but few would ever receive the blessings of her breath.
"Take it," she said and flashed him a smile when she passed the paper.
The old man frowned. Her smile faltered. He knew she hadn't breathed on it. An odd clarity glittered behind his eyes.
She scowled. "What? You wanted a pretty word? You have one." Not a word that would come to life, not a breathed word, the heavens forbid. She hadn't breathed on the paper, and he would never pay the price she wrote within those lines and know that it wasn't the words that mattered. He would never guess she was a powerful. "Take it," she shoved the words at him angrily.
His eyes darkened—not muddied; she cursed: the man must have taken strong power to have escaped her discerning eye—and he backed away from her, one hand lifted shakily in defense. "'Scuse, madém. Thank you." That gap-toothed smile, the shuffling step out of the alley.
Kindia comforted herself as she gathered her things to move on. A precaution, some would say unnecessary. Perhaps, he was not a watchman—her inner cynic snorted at the idea—and she likely had little to truly worry about. He would never pay the price.
Jaspen was the sort of washed up fellow that years and years of ranking service turned out as soon as the skin began to sallow, the joints to stiffen, or the hair to turn empty as the white of milk. He was assigned to street watching. Every coin paid out from the rebel council was earned by another poor washed up man or woman being put away or destroyed for daring to keep the powers alive.
Ah, they weren't the sorts of things that could be easily played with, or even done away. Powers kept the children alive; powers breathed into every soul; powers brought life; powers maintained life; powers were from birth within the vessels of the men and women who wielded them. To destroy the vessel of a person was death. To scrub the power from a vessel was all but impossible.
He stared down at his own vessel now, weak and stiff, wrapped in any scrap of powerless cloth he could find to keep himself warm. And in his hand that bit of castaway paper with a neat, scrawled message. He needed food, and he'd only get that by turning in a real, unlawful powerful in exchange for his weekly pay.
Warm your hands; you'll never thirst, read the note.