"What did you need the swamp yirrus for?" I asked. "Was it important?"
"Everything on that list was important," Naji said. His pitch quill scratched across the paper. "But I can make do."
I wanted to sit down, but it seemed weird to sit on the bed next to Naji. So I made a place for myself on the floor and watched him write. When he finished he tucked the quill back into his robes and read over the sheet one last time. Then he started rifling through the bags, pulling out the wisteria vines and the rose petals.
"You don't have to watch me do this," he said, laying everything out on the bed.
Ain't no way I was ditching the inn after the run-in with Gray Eyes at the market, and downstairs there wasn't nothing but drunks and whores, and I wasn't of a mind to deal with either.
"I'd rather stay, if it's no trouble to you," I said.
He glanced at me. The scars made his face unreal, like a mask, but I didn't mind looking at him.
"You might find this unsettling."
I shrugged. Naji picked up the wisteria vine and started braiding the pieces together, threading in the rose petals and strips of acacia leaves. He chanted in that language of his while he worked. The room got darker and darker and his tattoos glowed brighter and brighter. I recognized some of what he was doing as dirt magic – the chanting over dead leaves and the like – but those tattoos and the darkness weren't like nothing Mama ever taught me.
Naji set the charm down on the bed. He reached into his cloak and pulled out that mean-looking knife from earlier, and then, so quick I hardly had time to realize what he was doing, he drew the knife over the palm of his hand. Blood pooled up in a line across his skin. He tilted his hand over the charm and dropped the blood a bit at a time into the twist of wisteria vines.
His tattoos glowed so bright the whole room was blue.
He stopped speaking and squeezed his palm shut. His tattoos went back to normal. Then the whole room went back to normal, though I could still smell blood, steely and sharp, hanging on the air.
He dabbed at his palm with a handkerchief, not looking at me.
The sight of blood ain't anything to get me worked up, but the idea of using blood in magic – Mama had told me it was a dark thing to do, and dangerous, though she'd made it sound like blood-magic always used someone else's blood, not the magician's. She always said it was the magic of violence.
"I want to apologize," Naji said. He slid off the bed, the charm resting in the palm of his hand. "I didn't want to bring ack'mora into this–"
"What's ack'mora?"
He looked down at the charm. "What you would call blood magic. I didn't want to use it, but without the swamp yirrus…" His voice trailed off. He shoved the charm at me. "This is for you. Please wear it at all times."
He sounded more formal than usual, like he was nervous. Weird that he should be more nervous than me. But I took the charm from him anyway and ripped a strip of fabric off one of my scarves so I could tie it around my neck. The sense of protection that wrapped around me was warm and thick, like blood.
"I've never seen anyone mix 'em up like that," I said. Naji had walked back over to the bed and was cleaning off the space. He looked over at me when I spoke. His face was pale, drawn, in a way it hadn't been a few minutes ago.
"Mix them up?" he said.
"Yeah, dirt magic and blood magic. Uh, ack'mora."
"Yes," he said. "I do combine them sometimes. I learned some – what did you call it? Dirt magic? – from my mother."
"You have a mother!" I didn't mean to blurt it out like that, but the idea of him coming from somewhere was too bizarre.
"Of course I had a mother." He scowled and yanked the uman flower out of the bag.
It took me a minute to realize he'd switched into the past tense. "I'm sorry," I said, and I really did feel bad about it. "It's just – you're an assassin, and I didn't think–"
"I had a mother before I went to the Order," he said stiffly. He obviously didn't want to talk about it. "I thought you'd prefer a charm born of the earth and not me, but, well, I had to make do."
I thought that a weird way for him to say it, a charm born of me, like he'd hacked off part of himself and handed it over.
"Thank you," I said.
"You're welcome," he said, and he actually bowed at me a little. Not a full bow, just a tilt of the head, but I got real warm and looked down at my hands. I was very much aware of that charm pressing against my skin, soft as a lover's touch.
"This next spell is a bit more involved, I'm afraid." He was laying out the rest of the stuff I'd bought for him, the powders and the uman flower. "I'll be stepping out of myself for some time. I have questions that need answering." A long pause, like he expected me to say something. "You really don't have to stay. It's… Well, I'm doing something very rare, full ack'mora – I wouldn't expect…" He straightened up, ran one hand through his tangled-up hair. "Though I ask that you stay in the hotel. My… oath. I'm not sure what would happen to me if you got caught up in danger while I'm away."
All that talking, and the only thing I could say in response was, "Away?"
He nodded.
"The Mists?"
"Curses, no." He shook his head. "We call it Kajjil – there's no translation."
"But it's a place?"
He stopped messing with the powder vials on the bed and looked me hard in the eye. "I'm not allowed to discuss it with outsiders," he said, and I understood that well enough, being a daughter of the Pirates' Confederation and all.
I used the language of pirates to tell him I understood, which was a joke, because I knew there wasn't no way for him to know what it meant. But he kind of half-smiled at me, not with his mouth but with the skin around his eyes, and got to work.
This one was a lot weirder to watch, cause it wasn't nothing like the bits of magic I'd dabbled in before. Most of it centered on the uman flower. He spent awhile mixing up pinches and shakes of the powders I'd brought him, in some big clay bowl that looked like it'd come from the inn's kitchen. Then he set the uman flower on the floor and cast a big circle around it with the powders. The knife came out again, only this time he cut along one of the tattoos on his arm, and he splashed the blood onto the circle, right on the floor like we weren't in an inn.