Lilac Child Chapter 13

The shaded alleyway was a cool place to crouch and think, while everyone else hid inside from the midday sun. Zini liked shadows. They were perfect for brooding in and not being seen doing so. She’d tried it back at the boarding house, but Mrs Greeves took deep thought to be a sign of sickness. The cure being another cup of marel tea. Still buzzing from the last one, Zini had hopped down the steps and made a break for it, not stopping until she was lost in the maze behind her street.

An oppressive heat had built since the morning, leaving the city a stinking sweaty heap. It would lift as quickly as it arrived, but Zini would still feel burdened by her thoughts. Crow walking is what Batu called it when she caught one of her little fish walking about with their head in the clouds. That’s what Zini had been doing, just walking, and thinking about everything that was going wrong. Ell’ha and his brush with death, dog killer Ravin and his lecherous smile, Queen Galean, and her low-cut bodice. Zini hated her and not just for the attention Ell’ha was giving her. A Religion based on the killing of animals had to be wrong, even if they did heal the sick. She couldn’t shake the happiness in Reshi’s clear eyes. She wanted to share in it, but the more the old cobbler gave to Roggon, the more the God would own his soul. An afterlife in Roggon’s domain might not be worth a person’s sight in this one. But who was Zini to say? Reshi was the one that had spent his life in darkness. Maybe he saw it as a small price to pay. He was right to say that the Liandrans had failed to cure him, but that was down to a misunderstanding as to how Magic worked. Zini knew all about ether and its limitations. It was best to think of magic as water drawn from a well was how Zini had tried to explain it to others. If you took too much, you had to wait for it to refill and sometimes wells could become polluted or even run dry. Once used, the water returned to the rivers and soaked back into the ground or flowed to the sea, to one day return as rain. On its journey, it could be gathered and stored, but never hoarded lest the people and the land go thirsty. It needed to flow, but in a controlled manner.

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