Liavek 1 by Emma Bull, Will Shetterly

sometimes ill," Ondur said from behind her hair. "I am ill now."
    "No. You are not."
    "Stay indoors today, Reykja."
    "What do you think I will do, bum down Wizard's Row?"
    She laughed, a sudden glittering sound, sharp as broken glass. "Do you fear that for me, Ondur? That I will try to set fire to Number Seventeen Wizard's Row? Me, a bond servant with neither money nor magic? Me?"
    "It is your birthday, Reykja."
    "Then perhaps I'll find a two-copper on the street for my birthday luck. Eh, Ondur—a two-copper, as a token of what magic can do for such as me? Why are you never ill, Ondur?"
    Behind the curtain of hair, the pestle rose and fell in the mortar.
    "I heard in the Market," Reykja said in the same glittering voice, "that someone in Liavek seeks a white girl, all white. Someone is asking questions about a white girl."
    The pestle stopped.
    "Why are you never ill, Ondur?"
    With one quick motion Ondur flung the white hair back from her face. Her colorless eyes met Reykja's, and they did not flinch. "Stay indoors, Reykja."
    "Are you a magician, Ondur?"
    Ondur put both hands over her face.
    "Are you a magician? Is that why you are never ill? Answer me!" Reykja pulled Ondur's hands away from her face—not roughly, but with a kind of coiled intensity that was almost pain. The slim white hands came away easily. Under the hands, Ondur was laughing.
    "Ondur!"
    "I can't help it," Ondur gasped. She could not. It was helpless laughter, without mirth, and she could not get her breath.
    "Are you a magician?"
    "No," Ondur gasped out. "I am not a magician!"
    Reykja let her go. Ondur spoke the truth, and even in the brittle glassy state to which Reykja had come, she could see that it was the truth. She hissed in frustration, and in relief, and in the sharp restlessness that never left her alone now, never, not for a moment.
    "Stay indoors today, Reykja."
    "No." She flung open the kitchen door. Outside, it rained. Rain dripped from the eaves of the house, the leaves of the straggly vegetable garden, the loose stones in the crumbling garden wall. A gust of wet air blew into the kitchen, bringing with it the smells of ashes and dead fish. Reykja pulled her hood over her uncombed hair and slammed the door behind her.
    Birth magic tingled along her arms, sparked at her wrists, danced at the tips of her fingers. She had never felt it before, not like this. She could not keep her fingers still: they curled of themselves into fists. Reykja let them, clenched hard, thought suddenly of Ondur's thin white fingers pushing the white hair off her face. I am not a magician. Reykja pushed the picture from her mind.
    Liavek was full of magicians.
    She slipped noiselessly, muffled in her cloak, along the streets of Old Town, along Bregas Street, along Wizard's Row itself. The Row was here today, although Reykja could not have said what it looked like. At the end, where Wizard's Row joined Cheap Street, stood the tiny house where Kalum had taken his lessons in investiture. She had never gone with him, never seen the magician—but Kalum had shown her the house. It faced not the Row but Cheap Street, and the house itself was a little hard to see through the mist. The magician, who, now that she thought of it, had never been named directly by Kalum—how could she not have noticed that Kalum never uttered the wizard's name?—might also have been a little hard to see. Or might not. Kalum had never said what he looked like, and why had she never noticed that either?
    But Reykja knew what he looked like, what he must look like. Out of bitterness, out of the need for enmity fit for Kalum, she knew what he looked like. Tall. Gold. Icy, powerful, glittering...Yes.
    She paused at the tiny arched door set in the wall. Rain trickled under her hood and down her neck. She had one moment of fear, but only one. The glassy shining hatred was thick within her, and with it the birth magic, that once-a-year intensification of chance and will that is not true magic but is