The girl that had once been a Queen’s handmaid was no longer a girl. Her hair had faded from mousy brown to a chalky gray. Lines about her mouth suggested that she had once smiled, but the wrinkles in her forehead troubled her most of all. Her son had remarked on them the day he left. “You are always worried, Mother.”

  She had been tending to his ripped skin with thin, dry hands. He had caught his elbow on the door frame again, leaving a clay colored streak in his normally white skin. “You shouldn’t go out there,” she’d said. “Someone will see you.” She should not have said that. But the words had come, and he had gone. Begging him to stay, to accept the change, had only gotten her so far.

  She hauls herself from the creaky bed she calls home and busies herself with a pot of tea. Her one room home had raised them both; her landlord gracious enough to accept a young woman and her boy, dreadful from the heat. She gently pulls the window curtain back and the piercing light of the desert shoots in. She clears her throat, dry from the night, and hears her landlord’s door shudder closed. She opens a small crock of imported black tea, the stamp of Larynth on its side, and inhales the herbal scent. As she begins to pour hot water in her mug, the landlord smashes through her door and she flinches, burning herself.

  “Wrena, have you heard from that corpse boy of yours? He’s due to repack the cracking in the foundation!” He stands with the door open, dust and light spewing through the opening. She turns, leaning against the earthen counter.

  “No, I have not. He has not returned.”

  “Where is that boy?” he shouts, spinning on a heel and slamming the door behind him.

  She turns back to her tea, cleans up the spilled water, and sits quietly on the bed, nibbling at a mesquite flour pancake she had stashed in the cupboard. When she is finished, she dresses, wraps her mouth and nose in her tattered scarf and exits into the blistering heat. The desert had little use for a woman her age. She spent her time cleaning fish on the harbor for the markets. The only vendor that would hire her was an elderly woman whose arthritis prevented her from fileting them herself. Wrena had begged her for the job.

  She enjoyed watching the birds snatch scraps from the boardwalk and the creak of ships as they came in. But she never became quite accustomed to the smell of fish entrails. She stank of it, even after bathing in the salty waters.

  For the past month, she had watched ships from the northeast slip into the docks, unloading passengers in exchange for coin. As these people were marched to the dome in the center of the city, she fed the birds entrails. She listened to the fighting and screaming that echoed from the boardwalks as the prisoners fought to free their shackles; and when the same screaming came from the dome in the evenings, she instead focused on the seagulls’ cries.

  “They’re sacrificing people, Mother! Real people who do not look like me. Real people who should have a life!”

  She understood why he had left, yet it still pained her. Even as his mother, he was ghastly to lay eyes on. The flesh hanging from his gaunt face frightened many of the children in Izevel, and they spoke foul of him behind her back. He was too soft to say anything back, just as he was too soft to sacrifice another for the sake of his own skin.

  She remembered the day he had changed. When the Queen had delivered his squirming, fleshy body into her arms, the warm weight of a living child brought tears to her eyes after the loss of her own infant. He was perfect. As he grew, he sprouted a shock of black hair and his eyes turned grassy green. She raised him in a farmer’s barn, he who so graciously let her stay unquestioned. She worked his sheep until her feet blistered and her hands calloused from the shears. For the price of a life, it was worth it.

  When her son turned eight, she left the farmer, kindly thanking him in the doorway with tears in her eyes, and swept her son off to the southern docks, hailing a ride with a scruffy barge captain hauling linens to the southern desert county. She had vomited profusely over the railing of the barge, her son holding her hair behind her.

  She found the docks of Izevel rank of fish and crawling with peasants, covered in baggy linens from head to toe. She had sweat through her cotton gown on the ride over and her pale face had begun to burn in the unforgiving sun. Her son had moaned about the heat for days. Her landlord, milling mesquite pods in the afternoon blaze, took kind to her when she had approached him, smelling of body odor and begging for water. Not long after they acquired their humble adobe home, her son changed overnight.

  At the docks, she slips a fish from a basket by the water. The fisherman nearby scowls at her. “For Paesha,” she nods, raising the fish in his direction. “She will pay your share.” He nods, turning back to his net. She grabs an empty basket and slips her knife from under her linen gown, finding an empty cleaning table. The girl at the table next to her smiles with blue eyes from under her head wrap, tossing fish guts into the water below. Wrena flops the fish onto the wood and begins at the back of the gills, forcing her dulling knife into the flesh of the beast with a crunch. As she works, her graying hair begins to escape from under her wrap, falling into her brown eyes. The steady splash of guts in the water and the crunch of bones under her knife lulls her into a trance.

  At noon, a ship rolls into the bay carrying hides. The dock workers unload wagons of buckskin hides to take to the vendor district. The same men, an hour later, load the same wagons with winter melons and fish from the bay, and drive them onto the ship for transport back to the northern countries. As the men stop for lunch, Wrena cleans her knife off in the water and stretches the knots from her lower back. She walks to the vendor district, dropping her morning basket at Paesha’s stand. Paesha, a frail hunchback of a woman, grunts in acknowledgement, snatching the basket away with decrepit hands and dumping its contents into a filthy water trough. “You’ll be bringing more this afternoon, yeh?” she croaks.

  “Of course,” Wrena says, bowing lightly. The older woman squints at her, grunting again and mumbling about late payment as she busies herself with inspecting the fish, her eyes glassing over. Wrena watches the woman swipe stray scales from the filets with knobby fingers. “Would you like some lunch, Paesha?” she says gently. But a reply does not come, only an absentminded humming noise, and she leaves to find something to calm the rumbling in her stomach.

  The vendor district spans the northern portion of the city. Its pathways are packed smooth under the wheels of wagons and bare footsteps. Sharp wind from the sea picks up the goods of parchment and quill vendors, leaving them screaming after their wares, and the trash finds its way to the edges of the ocean, often washing back up on the docks in the evenings as she finishes her basket of fish. She pads through the streets with bare feet, locating her favorite food vendor. He smiles crookedly, baring his missing teeth, and the wrinkles around his eyes collect at the corners. He is a tall elder man, worn down from the desert, his back collapsing under the weight of his chest.

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  “Wrena,” he breathes, giving her a smile. The breeze tosses his thinning white hair about his age-spotted forehead.

  “Hi, Judoc.”

  “You are as beautiful as ever today, my dear.”

  Wrena looks over Judoc’s assortment of millet hand pies, delicately stacked in rows upon parchment. He had carved a different design into the crust of each pie with his knife—wildlife, trees, fish, houses. He was a favorite among the children of the city, and they could often be seen swarming his stand in the late hours of the day.

  “What flavor is this?” she asks, pointing to a rustic hand pie with a spindly horse etched into the crust. Its ears were much too large for its head and the crust had bubbled near its belly, giving it a pregnant swell.

  Judoc grins, his eyes squinting, and clears his throat of gritty sand. “Winter melon and mint.” His joyful tone gives way to a crackling cough that shakes him for a moment. Wrena winces as he hacks. When he recovers, “Mint came dried from Larynth.” Wrena wrinkles her forehead at him and he waves her away. “Don’t go worryin’ about me. There are plenty of youngins to take my place.”

  “I’ll take the horse.” A smile forms in her cheeks, but seems out of place. “I don’t believe I’ve had mint before. Maybe once when I was young.” She pays him coin and waits patiently as he wraps the hand pie in a small piece of parchment and hands it across the stand. She eyes it for a moment and takes a small bite of the horse’s hoof, chewing the millet dough through a painful molar. A cool wash of mint sparks over her tongue. “Its lovely, Judoc,” she says. A peel of wind shifts the hair about her face and Judoc nods lazily.

  “I like to experiment when I can afford the herbs. They’re reserved for the alchemists and I can barely get my hands on them. My wife loved my pesto pies.”

  “That’s basil, right?” She replies.

  “Yes, my dear. Savory basil and chicken. Or gull when the chickens miss the ships.” He gives a light chuckle.

  Wrena swallows another bite and looks about the market. Dusty, dirty faced children working in their parent’s stands. Women stoking fires in the sweltering heat. An elderly woman leaning weakly against the side of a crumbling building, fanning her face as the heat wavers around her.

  “Judoc,” she murmurs. Her lips purse. “Have you seen much of the alchemists lately?”

  He shakes his head quickly, waving a liver spotted hand. He whispers, “They’ve been absent, yes.” Then a crooked smile creeps across his face and his voice raises. “But they are busy helping the corpses, no? I saw Evella’s son the other day—fresh as a daisy now. All fixed up.”

  Wrena looks away from him, chewing at her cheek. “Yes, of course. That’s wonderful to hear.” She smiles weakly. “Thank you for the beautiful lunch, Judoc. It’s delicious.”

  Tell Paesha she’s welcome to grab some lunch for herself,” he winks, waving and leaning over the counter to greet a young boy with shaggy hair kicking impatiently at the sand.

  Wrena steps away from the market to enjoy the lull in sound and the freedom from the smell of fish, though her oily hands are quick to remind her. She peers about the adobe buildings with their cracking faces and the people weaving in and out of them. Following the street that leads to the center of the city, she dodges pellets of goat manure and sinking wagon ruts. Her bare, calloused feet take her to the dome-shaped structure that binds the streets together. One doorway on the eastern side of the building opens to a darkened stairway that runs from the light of the desert. She waits on the other side of the street, under the eaves of a crouching clay home, finishing her hand pie and wrapping her damask scarf tighter over her escaping hair.

  She steps across the street, narrowly missing a speeding child, and ducks under the low hanging door of the dome. The smell of body odor hits her nose. An adobe hallway, old as time, carves around the edge of the dome, dimly lit by the occasional torch. Her skin cools in the darkness. She paces a few steps down the hallway to the right, then turns back and paces to the left, not sure which way to go. A few meters down the left wing of the hall, there is another low hanging door, where a murmur of voices travels down the hallway toward her. She picks up the conversation as she runs her hand along the cool clay walls.

  “They cannot be connected?” A curious, young voice.

  “No. You’re thinking too abstract. The Xelinites’ gift is the gift of alchemy, in its own way. They bear a force fierce enough to shred the bones of their foes, but with the price of their life, you see.”

  The second voice, pompous and clarion, oversteps the younger one, thick with the accent of a high born. Wrena stops near the doorway to listen. Her hands are shaking. The clarion voice continues.

  “Without knowledge of it, these desert rats are capable of performing alchemy. There must have been a mistake upon their creation.”

  “Without circles?” the other asks.

  “Yes, though I do not believe they’re aware, else our efforts may not have succeeded here.”

  Wrena tiptoes into the doorway. “H-hello.” Her voice feels much too small.

  The two men turn, their white robes folding around their ankles. The second voice speaks again, from the mouth of an elderly man with spindly fingers and a Leviathan tattoo on his forehead where his hair would have been, his bald head shining in the candlelight.

  “Ah, hello, madam. Is there something I may help you with?”

  Wrena hesitates. There are shelves higher than her head, filled with innumerable scrolls and leather-backed tomes. The other man, small and squat, busies himself clattering through bottles of herbs and colorful liquids on the table at his hip. He grasps a withering candle and lifts it to his chest, bowing to the elder man before sweeping himself through a rear door.

  She nods to the elder. “My son. He is a… corpse,” she swallows. “Would you be able to help him? To be normal?”

  The elder’s skin wrinkles about his gray eyes as his lips lift at the corners. “Yes, we can.”

  “Is there a price to pay?”

  “Not monetary price. However, it may depend on what your definition of ‘price’ may be. Or that of your son.”

  His voice is almost soothing. She shakes her head, studying the dirt floor. “I think it is a higher price than he is willing to pay. Of course, I knew this before I came.”

  The alchemist plucks a vial of purple liquid from the table below him. “Why are you here…” A pause, then, “May I ask your name?”

  “Wrena,” she says.

  “Why are you here, Wrena? You knew your son would not pay the price readily, yes?”

  She nods again, fingering the hem of her shirt. The man’s shadow bounces across the floor with the candlelight.

  “Bring him to me,” the elder spits. “I may have another way.”

  Looking up, she pleads, “And what if he will not come? What if I do not know where he is?”

  He turns away, placing the purple vial in its holder. “Then I cannot help you, can I? You should not be here. Please go out the way you came.”

  Wrena gives a terse nod and turns, tripping over the threshold to exit down the hallway. The tears pooling in her eyelashes come streaming down her cheeks. She can feel them grow cold in the dark of the dome. She rushes down the hallway, scraping her hands along the clay as she goes, to exit through the light and sound of the eastern doorway.