This pack held everything she had brought from her parents’ house that she wasn’t already wearing.
There wasn’t anything really valuable in the pack; the demon and the fire had destroyed all her parents’ precious arcane supplies, the dragon’s blood and virgin’s tears and so on that her mother had used, and Darranacy hadn’t been able to find any gold or silver anywhere — maybe the demon had taken it all, some demons did crave money, though her father had never told her what they did with it.
There was, however, her good tunic — fine brown silk with elaborate rucking around the waist, and gold embroidery on the sleeves and hem. Wearing that she would be attired well enough to travel anywhere in the city, up to and including the Palace itself.
She looked down at it for a moment.
She could go anywhere in it — but where should she go?
She wasn’t about to go to the Palace; that was too much. The overlord scared her; she’d never met him, but she had heard enough about him that she was not about to intrude on the Palace.
But she wanted to find someone rich to live with.
Well, there were plenty of big, elaborate homes around the Palace, homes where rich people lived. She didn’t know how she could get someone there to take her in, but maybe if she looked around...
An hour later Darranacy, in her fine silk tunic but still barefoot, was wandering the streets of the Morningside district, admiring the marble shrines on the street corners, the iron fences and ornate gates that guarded the homes, the lush gardens behind the fences, the lavish homes beyond the gardens.
This was so different from the crowded streets where she had always lived! On Wizard Street or Wall Street the shops were jammed against each other right along the street, with no room for gardens either between them or in front of them, and the courtyards to the rear would hold only small vegetable patches, not these great expanses of flowers in every color of the rainbow. The residents lived upstairs from their shops, or behind them — a home without a business, a building without a signboard over the door or a display in the window, was rare indeed. A block a hundred yards long would hold at least a dozen homes in a solid row, broken perhaps by a single dark, narrow alley — two at the most.
Here, such a block would have but two or three houses, each standing apart amid its own gardens and terraces, closed off from the street and its neighbors by walls and fences — if there were businesses in there, customers had no way in! Windows gleamed on every side, fountains splashed — Darranacy couldn’t quite imagine living amid such sybaritic surroundings.
And there didn’t seem to be all that many people who actually did live there. She saw a young couple on a bench in one garden, and a woman tending flowers in another, but for the most part the yards were empty, the streets almost deserted.
Darranacy guessed that there weren’t enough rich people to fill all those big houses, and that encouraged her — they must be lonely, in there.
But she couldn’t just walk in somewhere and ask to be adopted.
She walked on, and saw three little children, all of them much younger than herself, playing ball on the terrace of a particularly fine mansion.
A boy of seven or so was climbing a tree a few doors down, and she considered calling out to him, but decided not to.
She was almost to Smallgate Street, and the houses were growing smaller and squeezing in four to the block, when she saw the girl.
She wasn’t playing, or climbing, or gardening; she was just standing there, leaning on a fence, her face thrust between the iron bars, looking out at the world beyond her home. She was taller than Darranacy, and probably older, but she wore just a tunic, not a dress but a dark red tunic with no skirt, which meant she was still a child, not yet twelve — or if her parents were exceptionally old-fashioned, it meant she hadn’t had her first monthly flow yet.
“Hi,” Darranacy said, from a few steps away.
The girl blinked at her. “Hello,” she said back.
“My name’s Darranacy.”
“I’m Shala.”
“You live here?”
Shala nodded.
“You look bored.”
“I am.”
“So am I,” Darranacy lied.
“Want to do something together?”
Darranacy almost gasped with relief.
“Sure,” she said.
“Come on in,” Shala said, pointing to the gate.
This was the perfect opportunity. Darranacy hurried into the yard.
Now, how could she bring up the idea of adoption?
She thought about that as Shala took her inside and found a pair of dolls, as Shala introduced her to her mother and the housekeeper, as they went back outside and played out game after game... but as time passed, she thought about it less and less. She was having too much fun.
The two girls played princess-and-hero with the dolls, and romantic rivals (a stick served as the object of their competing affections), and various other games — but Shala balked when Darranacy suggested playing wizards.
“My Dad doesn’t like magic,” she said. “He says it makes people lazy and careless — they figure if anything goes wrong, magic can fix it.”
Darranacy blinked in surprise. “But magic’s hard,” she said. “And dangerous and expensive. You don’t use it for stuff where you don’t have to.”
“Some people do, my Dad says,” Shala said darkly. “He talks about that a lot — he says the overlord depends on magic more than he ought to, and since he’s the overlord, it doesn’t matter how hard or dangerous or expensive it is.”
“But...” Darranacy began.
Then she stopped.
If Shala’s father didn’t like magic, then she was in the wrong place. Both her parents had been magicians, after all, and she was proud of that — even if it had gotten them killed in the end.
Magic was hard and dangerous, and shouldn’t be used if you didn’t need it, but there wasn’t anything wrong with it.
If there were... well, right now her whole life depended on magic. Without her enchanted bloodstone she’d be a beggar starving in the Wall Street Field, instead of...
Well, so she was a beggar living in the Wall Street Field, but she wasn’t starving, and she wasn’t going to stay there.
“Come on,” Shala said, “we can have your doll be an evil magician, and my doll will be a hero who has to kill her without getting turned into a newt or something.”
“Okay,” Darranacy said, a bit reluctantly. “What kind of magician? A sorcerer?”
“What’s that?”
Darranacy blinked, and struggled for an explanation. Her parents had taught her the differences among all the various schools of magic, but that didn’t mean she could explain them to Shala.
“How about a magician who can call up demons for my doll to fight?” Shala asked.
“A demonologist?” Darranacy said. “But they’re not really evil, they just have a bad reputation.” She saw Shala’s expression, and quickly amended that. “At least, my father always said some of them weren’t evil.”
Before Shala could reply, the housekeeper’s voice called her name from the back door.
“It must be dinner time,” Shala said. “Do you want to eat dinner with us? Would your parents mind?”