Day 14, Season of Summer, 513 AV
Kit squirmed, squinted at a ray of sunlight that shone through, clutching at herself in defense against some dark dream before Syna's light fully roused her. Kit tensed, looked around her expecting the bodies of slaves, expecting Jet or the Cripple to loom over her and tell her what to do. What she saw instead was an empty room, with simple furnishings. The Tarsin Boarding House's cheapest room, she remembered.
She reached down and grasped a bed, hard and simple by any measure but her own, but Kit's body remembered seasons of sleeping on hard ground beneath tents, shackles clasped around her wrists. She remembered a bedroll in the company of slaves, twisting and turning and interrupting her sleep with rogue knees and elbows. To her, any bed at all felt like heaven.
She slumped back, closed her eyes and breathed in deep, letting the simple pleasure of rest and luxury take her as she breathed. I'm free, she told herself and ran both hands over her face. I'm free!
Tears. She felt tears running down the side of her face. Kit did the best to rub them away with her arms and elbows and hands but they kept flowing still. She was balanced on a razor's edge. Someone could uncovered her secret any time, trace her escape in some way she had not foreseen and arrive at her door. They could enslave her again, and this time guard against subversion by her illusionism. Still her relief could not be contained. "Shyke," she whispered. "Free!" The rising sensation in her chest was tremendous and terrifying.
For a few chimes all Kit could do was hold her head in her hands and cry.
This, she realized, after she finally succeeded in rubbing away her tears, called for a celebration. When Kit had been snagged off the road, Kit had kept herself safe with remembrances of old stories, Ionu's servants waiting patiently for their chance, and taking it so sudden and swift no one could find them before it was long since too late. When the punishments weighed on her mind and started to crack the hope of freedom it was the memory of Ionu's gift to her that kept her strong. Ionu hadn't swept in to save her with divine intervention. They hadn't needed to. Simply existing had been enough.
Ionu was not like other gods. Someone who worshiped Yaha might have fasted, a servant of gnora might have quietly meditated. Ionu would appreciate color and excess and excitement, Kit was sure. What else would please the patron god of the Inverted? And after all that, the Trickster deserved at least that much.
And Kit couldn't give it.
Pushing herself up, Kit brushed her hair out of her eyes and sighed. She slide to the edge of her bed and let her feet dangle over the edge. Kit raised a hand and, with an effort of will, emblazoned an illusion across the wall of her room. It was Ionu's favored sign, the Vildani, a spiraling staff with a star at the end, pulsing azure.
"Trickster," Kit whispered. "Ionu . . . I've done my best. I'm sorry I couldn't do better. I'm sorry I got snared at all. Your follower shouldn't have been caught or bound at all, but now I'm free, and I didn't need charity to make it happen. I earned it myself; stole myself right from under their noses."
She exercised her imagination further and played with the illusion. The Vildani shifted and twisted, turned into a great black raven with seven wings, three on the left and four on the right, each a different color of the rainbow.
"But I can't thank you yet." Kit breathed. "I'll find my way out of this damnable city, so no one will ever find me. I'll leave them guessing and bumbling behind me. Watch, Ionu. Watch me prove I deserve your favor."
Another effort of will changed the raven to an Inverted triangle. "Then," Kit said. "Then, then I'll give you the best celebration I can manage, I swear. Something you can be proud of." Kit held a palm over her heart. "Until then, I hope the trickery I need to do can be tribute enough."
Ionu's servants needed a good imagination, Kit was sure, so she exercised hers a little on the wall. She drew a bleeding wound of illusion, she drew herself, but older. She drew Ionu as they showed themselves the day they granted Kit's favor. Waves of starlight, people whose bodies glowed like fire, curious spirals and impossible fractals all drawn on the wall, reminding Kit why illusion was beauty.
"I'll never stop loving you, Ionu." Kit said, and her voice quavered with feeling. She swallowed and killed the illusion with a swipe of her hand and rebuilt Shy's features around her body. "Just . . . Hold on until I can shake the last of my last shackles loose."
And then, prayer done, Kit readied herself for the rest of the day.
x
