Unlikely

The staircase ended in mid air. Moss caked the stone surface, crowding into the cracks and lending a spongy, green pattern to the ruined structure. The steps turned once, bent as if they still followed the wall that had long since crumbled around them. They rose to a second story that no longer existed, continued to climb and then stopped on nothing, as if one might find some hidden doorway there, hanging in space, some portal to a world long lost.

  Satina huddled in the shadow beside the structure, pulled her heavy cloak tighter and pondered the stairway. Pretty. That arch of stone whispered of the Kingdoms as they once were. They sang of the time when the world still embraced magic and the Gentry races mingled freely with humans. A time when she would have been welcome anywhere.

  Ironic, the dramatic illusion, the thought of ancient portals hanging in space. She squinted, made her eyes shift to a subtler vision and eyed the authentic portal, the genuine door she’d slipped through only moments before. The one that had just saved her skin. The real thing shimmered twenty feet away from the elegant ruin, but it marked a spot of little visual import, a bush, a stretch of mud like any other—except for the pocket of Old Space hiding behind it.

  She sniffed and pressed her back against the mossy stones. For the moment the pocket didn’t matter much. Satina let her eyes drift, still seeing what she could. The portal had brought her here, and now she needed to know where here was and, more importantly, who held sway over the area.

  A muddy road wound through the forest only a short trot from the staircase. Deep ruts, where a wagon had passed not so long before, gleamed in the moonlight. Rain had fallen recently, though long enough past that the foliage had already dried. The woods themselves were thick and shrouded, offering only hints of the terrain beyond between thin tree trunks and dense shrubbery. Farmland, no doubt, with a well-traveled roadway. She’d find a village close by, a cluster of hard-working souls seeking nothing more than health and safety.

  Maybe she could help them.

  Convinced the pocket had delivered her where she could do some work, Satina settled her attention on the stairway’s arch. She’d been on the run too long to remember safety, the warmth and promise of a permanent residence. No matter. Her lot rarely found a long-term welcome among civilized folk anyway. Even without a price on her head, her trace of Gentry blood set her forever apart.

  These stairs made a perfect boundary, a lone sentinel and reminder of the Old Kingdoms. Had she been affiliated, she might have tagged them herself, and so she circled it now, convinced that either gang would agree with her assessment. The soft ground made little sound under her steps, and her cloak hung in a wave the same color as the night so that she feared little of detection, little compared to the knot of unease that would not rest until she’d made certain she hadn’t landed amid the Shades.

  But the old stones held no tag, no mark of any sort visible to her sight, mundane or otherwise. A second circuit produced the same results, and she had to concede. The area, by some miracle, had escaped notice, though she’d long believed not an inch of these lands hadn’t been divided and tagged to one affiliation or the other by now.

  She’d heard rumors, tales of places still untouched by Shade or Starlight, but doubted, even here in the face of the unmarked stair, that she’d been lucky enough to escape that noose. She had found shelter though, tagged or not, and the wind bore enough trace of moisture and chill that she’d soon be grateful for it.

  Satina scooted into the shadow beneath the stones. Her hand followed the surface, squishing pillowy moss and guiding her steps until the arch sheltered her completely. Then she dropped into a squat, tossing her cloak open and rummaging in one of her many leather bags with her free hand. The ground was too damp for sitting, but if she wedged her back against the structure, she could relax in some measure of comfort. The device she withdrew would do the rest.

  She’d recovered the metal disks at different locations. The lower of the two, she suspected had been a sword hilt once, the sigils cast into the bronze were meant to repel evil, and it was for that factor that she’d hoarded the scrap. When a later dig produced the brooch, the idea for her device solidified. She’d bartered for a simple spindle, mounted the repellent disk half an inch below the brooch, which still harbored an attraction enchantment. The flowery carvings on its face led her to suspect a love spell, some trick of a courtly lady long before the Final War.

  Love or luxury, the attraction was all that mattered for her purposes. Using opposing magics, one to draw and one to repel, her theory had borne fruit with only a little tweaking. Now she stabbed the long end of the spindle into the soft earth until it stood without tilting. Her fingers swung the lower disk sunwise adding the impetus of her own, faint magic until the metal spun smoothly on its circuit. Then she twirled the brooch in the opposite direction.

  Heat burst from the device, warming her hands in an instant. The two spells fought with one another, and Satina smiled at her ingenuity. She never got tired of it, of feeling the heat build. In moments the ground would dry and she could sit and pass the night in comfort without need of a fire.

  A twig snapped. Her heart jolted and she looked, instinctively, toward the pocket. She saw nothing but the shimmer, knew exactly how little that meant. Her warmer made no noise, but the energy it expelled could be sensed by the right eyes…maybe the wrong eyes. She listened and moved one hand out very slowly to stop the dual spin.

  If someone had opened the pocket, they still may not have spotted her. They might not have sensed the magic unless they’d been looking for it, unless they’d been on her tail the entire time. She peered into the night. She watched the bushes, scanned the empty road and almost missed the shadow slipping toward the stairs from the opposite side.

  As it was, her hand grabbed at her cloak only a breath before the figure reached the bottom stair. She listened to its steps, felt their tremble through the stone even as she tried to merge her body with it, to blend into the arch. The vibrations followed the structure to its pinnacle. Satina held her breath, snuggled further into the cloak and watched the open space at the stairway’s end.

  A pair of boots dropped into view. They were sewn of soft leather, tightly stitched, and painted along both soles with liquid magic. She knew its language. Squinting at the script, she picked out at least one sigil for stealth glowing among the charms for protection, luck and speed. He either practiced the Old Arts, or he’d stolen those boots.

  Something about the way his legs swung back and forth, relaxed but speaking of absolute confidence, suggested the former. The owner of these boots would be well-versed, possibly even Gentry or of that blood. Not the last person she wanted to see on a dark night on unfamiliar ground, but a danger all the same.

  She didn’t dare move. The ensorcelled boots swung, first one leg and then the other. The clouds wandered away from the moon, which lit the road like a silvery ribbon. The invader above her whistled a long trilling note against the silence. It wandered into a soft tune. He knew she was there. The swinging boots, the song—all too casual and meant to tell her exactly how little he cared.

  Her skin prickled. She lifted her eyes to the stones over her head, as if she could gaze through them and catch some small advantage. A flare of iridescence shimmered beneath a layer of moss. She squinted at the sigil, followed the lines with her eyes and let her frown deepen. The mark was old, but then moss no doubt took root quickly here.

  The tag claimed the ruins for the Starlight gang. Bound by the rune and the magical paint, the affiliation would hold until the sigil wore away or a contrary ward supplanted it. She’d been right all along. Not an inch of their world had remained undivided. Satina turned away from it, away from everything it represented, and a squeak escaped her. A man’s face hung over the stair’s edge. His eyes sparked like the sigil once, a flare of power, before his thin mouth stretched into a smile, and he winked at her.