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  He shuddered, then slammed his fists into the top of the wall. It cracked slightly, sending adobe flakes cascading into the street five stories below.

  “I know you used to sneak into the forest. It drew you. You've stopped.” He had always returned to her. She thought if not for her he would be one of the glowing eyed wildlings that skittered through the night on the edges of the Dark, near the trash heap that circled the narrow crooked streets, utterly mad. She looked at his clenched jaw. His golden hair drifted in a warm summer current.

  “You will have to go to them someday, and I will go with you.” The words hung in the air, heavy with power. “That is what Scuffle meant when he told you I am your key. I've had three years to think about it and I know I can do it. It will be an adventure.”

  He whirled, eyes glowing with vivid green magefire, fingers curling, snarling with a mouth that had grown protruding teeth. “I would never give you to them. Are you mad?! Why do you think I’m so desperate for you to start living on your own?” His speech was garbled, but she’d gotten better at understanding him. She simply waited. It was like this now whenever he was angered or threatened.

  When he finally sagged, crumpling to the floor, she dragged her will around her. Her fingers actually clenched to hold the invisible tatters in place.

  “I love you Rylan. I will always support you just as you have always been at my back. But you are right. There are some things I cannot do for you. And there will come a time when I need to be able to sleep without you, after I take you to them. I will meet your woman. Bring her here, and I’ll move to another wedge.”

  He still said nothing, slumped against the wall. She went to him, kneeling and reaching for his strong shoulders. They leaned into each other, and it was sweet. His smell filled her head and she breathed in time with him, just as she always had. But in her heart she knew she was never going to be KarRylan again. Only KarRa. Alone in this Dark.

  Her heart pounded with a wild fear as she choked out a whisper, “I'll love your children, too.” She pushed down the bitterness at how she’d ended up comforting him, when he had destroyed her. Eventually, he led her to the pallet of some straw and thin blankets, all she had left after selling even the bed to afford the night with the smoothskin boy, and they slept, entangled, as they had since they were small and clanless.

  In the morning, she sat on the building's front stairs while he fetched the woman, Vili. She stood when they approached, and bade the woman welcome. Her voice was calm, polite. Vili was lovely, darker than KarRa, with the full curving figure of a woman much older. Nothing like KarRa's wiry, muscled litheness. She left them with nothing but a scrap of lace, feeling just as fragile.

  She did not like to remember the next few weeks of her life. It was a blur of pain and hunger. She held no grudge for the scar on her neck. She’d started it. It was the pain inside that mattered. It would have been easier if she could hate him. But he was part of her. Her clansisters helped, even a few clanbrothers. Rylan checked on her often, forcing her to eat. The stiffness between them wore off in a few months, and they regained the ability to laugh and share.

  The woman Vili did not become the mother of his children. She lasted almost year before leaving him for a newly exiled potter. Rylan would return to sleep with KarRa between lovers, potential mothers for his ghost children. Sometimes it took him months to find a new one. But he always did. He was beautiful, powerful, and strong. He was ruthless but not vicious and women sought him out. He always was there, even unasked, to help her if she was in a tight spot. They saw each other several times a week, sometimes at the clanhome, sometimes at meals. She still loved him with a wrenching fury, and knew that he cared deeply for her.

  The one thing they did not ever share again was night pleasure. KarRa remembered their nights together with an ache in her heart and between her legs. An ache her own fingers always failed to soothe when she tried to pleasure herself alone. If Rylan was staying with her, she crammed her desire to share their pleasure down deep, and waited until he was gone. Rarely, she’d give in to the desperate loneliness and indulge in the expense of the safe smoothskin houses. But the stranger, no matter how beautiful, never soothed the ache either.

  She worked at running messages, planned snatches, tried to stay out of riots. She ate. She laughed with her Clan. She managed to protect herself, make good trades, and learn new tricks as needed. Life, as a kind of consistent struggle, continued.

  She waited for the news one of his lovers was pregnant, but it never came. When people called her KarRylan, she corrected them. “It’s just KarRa,” she'd say firmly, her stress on the second syllable almost a snarl. “Get used to it.” She waited for Scuffle's prophecy to come true, for signs of the Beast sickness that would announce Rylan’s time as a human in the Dark was over. And like all of Scuffle's visions, it came.

  * * * *

  Rylan's shivering woke her up. He was convulsing so hard the creaky bed trembled. He was still out. Almost two days now with no waking and she had to swallow down her dread. She rose from the clammy blankets where she had dozed. She glanced at the hand-sized window high in one wall to gauge the light. If he had been aware for the few hours she'd been asleep, he hadn't woken her. The room stank. She cleaned him, then lolled him onto a clean, damp towel she'd soaked in a bucket. She carried the blankets outside and threw them in the burning can. They were not going to be staying long enough to make the effort and cost of washing them worth it, and no one would trade for such a disgusting mess.

  Back inside she lit a small handful of dry pine needles and left them festering on the hearth to help scent the air. She wiped his sweaty body down again, sat and ate. All the while she watched his quaking body, golden still though the warm sun was five months behind. She listened to his uneven harsh breathing, a sound she thought she'd never get out of her head. She focused on remembering what his low smooth laugh was like, so different from her brash donkey braying, and was satisfied she could remember it.

  The room was cool. She hadn't bothered to cue the mageheat for her meal of dry crusts. She was trying to keep his body cool anyway. She was wearing all three of her sweaters, and her leathers, the only clothes she owned now besides the traveling set she'd saved for Rylan. She sat at the table, the sky slowly lightening, Rylan huffing.

  He wasn't going to get better this time. This was it. For the last year he'd sunk into these sweats for a few days, then revived. They knew his time was running out, and still he would not talk to her about leaving. His options were the same as they were the last time she'd had a meaningful conversation with him three days ago. Go—or death. They were out of things to trade and she could not leave him to run a snatch. It was time to go.

  Finally. She snorted at the thought. I'm twenty-five, she thought firmly. I’ve been waiting for this since I was sixteen. I'm ready.

  KarRa smoothed her hand over her beautiful skinmark on the inside of her left forearm. During its making was one of the few times she had ever been alone with Scuffle. He was a busy man, leader of a small made-family of just over fifty souls, all of whom he was constantly training in some capacity. This man, who had given her words, skills, warmth, strength, was her made-father, and her loyalty was fierce and undying. Before him she had truly been wild. How she and Rylan came to be with the other, they did not know. KarRa did not care, although Rylan thought there must be something to find, to go back to, that was better than this life in the crooked, vicious streets of the Dark. He said he could remember comfort and kind people. She couldn't.

  The tattoo was her own design, as all the Clan dreamed up their own unique skinmarks. Scuffle gave each member of his Clan one when they pledged their life to him. He didn’t allow children to do so until they were sixteen. An exile from a high Guild family, his own tattoo had been cut from his arm when he was turned out of the gates, barred from ever entering any of the Kingdom's Seven Cities again. He had simply remarked it on his other arm.

  “They cannot take who I am. They can d
eny me, but not erase me,” he would say.

  He had given the high Guild tradition to each of his madefamily, although he would not give them his design. In the Dark of Fourth City, they were the only marked Clan. She had dreamed and plotted on her skinmark design for years, searching for a physical symbol of Rylan’s mark upon her mind.

  Once, when Far had been taken by some stupid new-rising Clan angry with one of his daring thefts, they had scraped his skinmark off him, among other things. Scuffle had chopped the man's arms off. To get to him, he had left a river of blood, so many people falling before his magic and club that KarRa lost count. Killing was one thing wildlings did not do. Ever. You knifed, you clubbed, you beat, broke, whipped, and raped. But to kill…those who killed were visited by the Beast Guards and never seen again. Occasionally there were tales of someone who killed in self-defense being allowed to go free. But as harsh as the Dark was, the violent magic and blade Scuffle had unleashed that night to rescue and avenge Far had been extreme. No one had died, but the numbers of maimed and wounded were well higher than a normal all out riot. It had seared into her fourteen-year-old brain, and was still her gauge of badness.

  All of the Clan gathered in Scuffle's shak over the following nights as they nursed Far's broken body. KarRa had been among those to see the Beast enter. It was a silent conversation, the large, darkly tanned man standing confident and still, his hand never going to the knife at his belt, his only visible weapon. As if the Beast would need it. The legends said they could kill ten men with their hands before one even moved. Scuffle's eyes had locked with the dark eyes of the Beast in magespeak, and it had been only silent TruBeth who had kept nursing Far the long minutes during that discourse. She was the only one brave enough to move. Eventually the Beast had left. Scuffle lived. And could have ruled the Dark after that, but continued on his crooked strange way, dancing down the center of the vicious politics of Clan control fights.

  Remembering the smooth dusky skin, the strong flowing muscles, the powerful air of the Beast Guard that night drew KarRa's eyes to Rylan on the bed. He was going to become such a thing. She would see to it. Unlike most women who talked of the Beasts with revulsion, KarRa thought he was beautiful even in the twisted form he grew when angered. It was his lack of a third, animal form that was making him so sick. Killing him.

  Idly stroking her fingertips over her blue feather, she wished Scuffle were here to argue with him. At least he would take joy in it. This last year was the first time in his life Rylan had fallen sick. Still he’d denied the coming change. Every time she had tried to talk to him about going to the Beasts, he cut her off. Arguing only made him leave, and being alone in the Dark when you were weak with sickness was very dangerous. Off and on he had faded and recovered. He'd grown too weak to keep up with a schedule of thieving or running messages this time, and his latest lover left.

  Now here she was, sitting in this one room shak, only four paces wide and stripped of everything but necessities. Listening to his struggle for breath, thinking on all that waiting, all that struggle to stay alive, she grew resolute. She was going to fulfill the destiny Scuffle had seen years ago during her skinmarking. She could finally be of some real worth to Rylan, and he had better make it, so all of these years apart could mean something.

  When she had arrived to care for him in this most recent sickness she had ruthlessly stated, “I'm through giving you time. You know what happened to Borl. We have to go.”

  He had rolled onto his side, giving her his back. “Don't start. I'm not giving you to them.”

  “Stories! That's all you know! And I’m going there by my own will!” But he had not budged, ignoring her until he passed into fevered gibberish again. She wanted to choke him. The Beasts lived to the south, in great stone mountains and dark caves. She had paid dear City coin to know that much was not just a song. The Beasts were the ultimate guards, the ultimate punishment, and the ultimate protection. She had seen them many times, from a cautious distance. They were uniformly large, muscular, quiet, and never came into the Dark, at least that anyone saw, passing only through the mage guarded roads into the City. They were distinctive in their richly crafted all-leather clothing, usually embossed with animals. If there had been a suspicious death, and someone disappeared shortly thereafter, night whispers carried tales of how the Beasts had eaten another murderer.

  Despite their lack of influence on daily life in the Dark, stories abounded. About how they could work greater magic than high Guild mages. How they killed the guilty by drawing out the agony as they ate them alive. How they could transform into horrific man-beasts. How they could possess animals. How they raped women, and if those women bore a child, both disappeared. How the cities paid them with women and children, who were raped, enslaved, eaten.

  KarRa's skin had prickled to listen to the stories in the taverns and on the streets, knowing her destiny lay with these magical, secretive man-creatures. She'd listened to every story she could. And told herself in the still of night that the reason she lived, fought to survive, plodded through dangerous daily thieving snatches among the sly and stinking alleys, was to discover the truth behind the stories when she would trade herself for Rylan's life. The night whispers said that if one of the lost Beasts who grew up outside of the mountains wanted to be taken in by the Beasts, he had to bring a woman in offering, and the right woman at that.

  Borl had been a member of Morg's people, the one other Clan that lived in L with Scuffle's Clan. Borl had been a Beast, and he refused to go into the True Wild, the forest beyond the rimming garbage wall that was the Dark’s poor version of the City wall. He had taken ill a few years ago and died an agonizing, screaming death that had taken days. He had shocked everyone by not suiciding, nor even attempting the journey south. They whispered that no woman cared for him enough to sell herself for him. None of his Clan would end his cries, of course. To kill even in mercy might bring the Beasts upon you. The shaks for three blocks around had emptied as people fled the constant death echoes. KarRa held Rylan tight as he shuddered and shook, sweating, after silence had finally fallen.

  It happened rarely, that a man discovered he was a Beast in the Dark, and it was so memorable everyone knew the results. A few years before Borl there had been another Beast who'd grown up in the Dark, who had gone insane and killed eighteen people before two real Beasts rose from the earth and killed him. Everyone knew the Legend of Trey, a man who went into the True Wild shortly before Scuffle had come, with a woman, and never returned. Then, a few years later, he had been spotted, healthy and glowing with power, along a road into the City. The woman had never been seen again.

  There was also the story of Kir. He had been a Beast also, at about the same time. He had gone into the wilderness with a woman, and when they returned two weeks later, he had suicided when the sickness came upon him. The woman had refused to speak. The night whispers said her silence was because of what the Beasts had done to her before they turned them away. Sometimes the Beasts liked the woman, and sometimes they didn't.

  KarRa believed in Scuffle. She believed he had been one of the most powerful men in her small crowded world. People who taught themselves to control their magic became powerful. True trained mages, with secrets and knowledge of City life, were rare. He had told her, in the trance he held as he pricked her skin with cobalt dots, She would save Rylan. He had told Rylan she was his key. Rylan had argued with that man his entire life. Well, to be fair, most people had because he had been ornery and snappish. But for just this once, couldn't Rylan see the truth? KarRa had been having dreams of being late for months. Nearly all of their Clan had come by to talk to him, but he had ignored them all, even Far. Finally she had contacted Sera, Far's woman, and a powerful prophetess. Rylan had always disliked her.

  When Sera came to the door, Rylan had bellowed, “I will not listen! I will not believe I do not make my own fate!”

  KarRa snorted and shouted back, “She's not here for you, pukeface! She's here for me!” He stared a
t her with angry, slitted eyes. More calmly, she had asked, “Sera, will I come to harm if I go to the Beasts? Read my eyes, so I can find the courage to face what I must.”

  Sera speared her fingers into the tangled brown locks around her clansister's face and KarRa sank into the pale grey eyes before her. Coming back into focus, Sera studied KarRa's deep brown eyes, then said firmly, “No.”

  KarRa turned to Rylan with her hands on her hips. “Now may we go?”

  He turned to the wall. “You asked her to say that. She's lying.”

  Sera hotly jumped in, “You stubborn, rockheaded…”

  KarRa laid a hand on her sleeve and shook her head.

  They left together to walk out past his hearing. Sera gave her an old loaf of bread that would come to be her only food for days.

  “Thanks for trying.” She hesitated, not sure if she really wanted to know. “Did you really see something?”

  Sera nodded, looking away. “I focused on harm and I saw some harm.” KarRa’s stomach fell away. She stumbled to a stop. “But I followed your thread on and there was no harm on your soul. Indeed, the harm I see in you now was … not gone, but healed. I sensed someone so much more than the KarRa you are as you stand here, I wasn't sure I had followed the right thread. But I traced it back and it was you.”

  “How can a soul be more than itself?” KarRa had not had such a mind-twisting thought since Scuffle had died. He had loved philosophy.

  Sera looked at her incredulously. “You, KarRylan, ask me that?!”

  KarRa turned away, confused. “My thanks, clansister. Give Far my farewell and best wishes. Everyone's been by now, I think. We'll be going soon.” Sera nodded, touched one of KarRa's dark flyaway hairs hacked off above her ears, and left.