The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) by Glenda Larke

lack of citizenship, I could live well.
    There had been a time when I’d thought money would also buy me a black-labour tattooist, a man or woman who could etch an island symbol and insert the precious stone within the tattoo, illegally, for a price. I had eventually discovered my mistake. The only artists who knew the secret of how to inlay the stone so that it did not fall out, so that the skin never grew over it, so that there was no scarring, so that its authenticity would never be questioned, were ghemphs—and ghemphs were incorruptible. They always had been and always would be, damn them. You couldn’t buy beings who apparently wanted nothing more than what they already had.
    The Cirkasian put down her drink and reached across to me to touch my hair. I jerked away, but she was only pushing back my curls to look for a tattoo. When she didn’t find it, she withdrew her hand and looked at me with something like pity in her eyes. ‘You poor bloody isle-hopper. You don’t have much sodding choice, do you?’
    I blinked. ‘Er, not much.’ She’d surprised me again, this time by her sudden lapse into earthy vulgarity; it was so at variance with her normal speech, with her aura of high-class style.
    She poured some more brandy into my mug and reverted to her usual language without missing a beat. ‘Cut your losses on this one. You’ll never find the Castlemaid Lyssal.’
    ‘Who the hell are you? A friend of the Castlemaid’s?’
    She shrugged. ‘What does it matter? I have Cirkasian citizenship, but otherwise, like you, I’m a renegade. My name’s Flame, by the way.’
    I knocked my mug against hers in salute and started to chuckle.
    ‘What’s so funny about that? It’s not my real name, of course. It’s because of the colour of my hair—’
    ‘It’s beautiful hair,’ I said diplomatically. It was yellow, rather than red, so I assumed whoever had called her that must have been thinking of candle flame rather than a kitchen fire. ‘The name suits you.’
    ‘So? What’s so funny?’
    ‘My name’s Blaze. Because I had a bit of a temper in my younger days. Together,’ I grinned, ‘we’re a conflagration.’
    We stared at one another and then simultaneously burst out laughing.
    I hadn’t wanted to like her. She was everything I wasn’t: petite and lovely and purebred. And she had sylvmagic—which would have bought her Keeper citizenship if she had lacked a citizenship of her own. She had everything I’d ever wanted… Yet I liked her. I liked the intelligent humour in those lovely blue eyes, I liked the compassion I read there. I liked the way she came straight out and said what she thought; it may have been dangerously naive, but after the deviousness I’d had to deal with, it was a draught of sweet water. I said, ‘You’d better watch your step, Flame. Did you know that no one who sailed in to the Docks on that slaver from Cirkase would tell me you were on board?’
    She shrugged. ‘They were well paid to keep quiet.’
    Did she really think money would buy the silence of dregs like that? Her strange mix of naiveté and shrewdness was puzzling.
    I said, ‘I suggested that I would pay them more. Normally that would be enough to have such men show an interest, at least, but they were scared. Or dunmagicked. You didn’t threaten them with sylvmagic, did you?’
    She accepted without comment that I knew she had sylvtalent, but her frown deepened. ‘You don’t threaten people with sylvmagic.’ She had a point. Sylvmagic could do lots of things as far as people who had no Awareness were concerned; it could deceive the senses, cloud the truth, blur reality, create limited illusions, promote healing—but you couldn’t hurt anyone with it, not physically. Not like dunmagic. ‘What are you trying to say?’ she asked.
    ‘That someone didn’t want me—or anyone—to know that you or the Castlemaid Lyssal came in on that vessel. And they were either willing to make some pretty dire threats or