BOOK II: TRADER'S CROWN
The Path of a Collector
Asleep
Awakened
Ascendant
Transcendent
Divine
The Once Five Great Schools
The Terra Magma School
The Silver Sanctum School
The Valshynar School
The Four Winds School
The Serpent Moon School
Designations in the Trader’s Guild
Unincorporated companies (unlimited)
Incorporated companies (unlimited)
Sitting companies (one hundred eligible)
Council companies (ten eligible)
Council chair (one eligible)
The Two Worlds Trading Company
Chief proprietor: Elias Vice
Chief business officer: Bertrand Fairweather
Chief operations officer: Briley Soren
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Chief mechanic: Gabby Mason
Chief foreman: Iric Halvorson
Cat: Islet
PROLOGUE
The baby kicked inside her stomach as if charting its own course. Lucia Fisher shifted in the hard, wooden seat she had sat in for days, snug beside her husband on a dusty carriage that had taken them across borders and, at long last, into the desolate state known as Sapphire’s Reach. Familiar comforts were far behind her now. There was only the promise of something new, somewhere in this sea of cracked clay.
“There it is,” Sylas said, wrangling his distracted wife’s attention. “Up ahead, look, just by the river.”
“What’s this town called again?”
“Acreton.”
“Hardly a speck of dust on the map,” Lucia said.
“Exactly,” Sylas replied. “It’s perfect.”
Like their mode of travel, their destination was unremarkable by choice. Airships kept manifests. Large cities had too many eyes. Sylas was running a never-ending race from those who pursued him, and thus she had volunteered herself for a life of running too. Lucia had always fancied herself a wise woman, but love could make a fool of anyone.
“The river looks nice,” she added, already trying to make the best of it.
“The Valshynar don’t come here,” he reminded her for the hundredth time. “There’s no reason for them to, and I won’t give them one. We’ll be free. Finally free. I know it’s modest, but one day we’ll build a house by that river, a place to raise our child, and what more could we want?”
He touched her stomach. She squeezed his hand. Then she squeezed it harder.
“Are you okay?” Sylas brushed a chestnut lock from her pale face. “You look rather ghostlike, my love.”
“Maybe we should hurry,” she croaked. Lucia could feel water trickling down her inner thigh. “Your child shares your eagerness.”
* * *
“Most husbands leave the room during the birthing process,” mentioned their physician, a bespectacled man who normally left this kind of business to the midwives. Alas, there had been no time for anyone else to intervene. Time was ever the enemy of a couple on the run. Even if their dogged pursuers failed to catch up with them, time would still snag their ankles.
But now, supposedly, they were done with running. Lucia was literally out of breath.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Sylas told the doctor. “Thank you for helping us, sir. If there’s anything I can do to repay you—"
“You will repay me,” the man said, “in relics.”
Seemingly oblivious to their conversation, Lucias stared deeply into the wandering eyes of her baby boy as Sylas eventually joined them, kneeling beside her skinny bed. Sunlight slipped through a paned window in desperate need of cleaning, revealing every imperfection marring the peeling plaster walls that enveloped the scene, though nothing could rob it of its perfection. This, Lucia could see in her husband’s slow, captivated movements, and so it was for her.
“He has your eyes,” she noted. They were green, greener than eyes should be. “What shall we name him?”
Sylas shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve been so focused on everything else that I’ve scarcely given it a second thought. Do you have any ideas?”
“We could name him after your father,” Lucia suggested.
“No,” he said almost immediately. “I want my child to be his own person. He needn’t bear the weight of another man’s legacy. Let him fly freely.”
“Perhaps we could name him after a bird,” she mused. “My little Sparrow?”
“Let’s keep that one on the shelf for now.” Sylas grinned.
Lucia chuckled. “I’ve always liked the named Elias.”
“It has a nice ring to it,” he agreed. “Never known an Elias. You?”
“Only one. A magician who passed through town when I was a teenager. He was very charming, or at least my younger self thought as much.”
“Was he good?”
“Not terribly.”
“That is for the best, I think. I wouldn’t want my son born under the shadow of some great magician.”
“I’m afraid it’s already too late for that.” She eyed her husband.
Sylas smirked a silent smirk, checking that their physician had left the room. “Will we tell him where he got his name?” he asked.
Lucia shook her head as she lifted her boy by his limber shoulders, as if he could already stand. “Never,” she said. “Elias will write his own story.”
