Lodestone

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Other GenZ Publishing Fantasy Titles You May Like

  Thank You For Reading

  About the Author

  About The Publisher

  Copyright © KATHERINE FORRISTER 2021

  Supervising Editor: Caitlin Chrismon

  Associate Editors: Emily Chamberlain, Jaret Czajkowski

  Cover Designer: L. Austen Johnson, www.allaboutbookcovers.com

  Cover Illustration: Dany_Wika

  Internal Formatting: L. Austen Johnson, www.allaboutbookcovers.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations and other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to publisher at Info@genzpublishing.org.

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-952919-23-7

  ISBN (paperback): 978-1-952919-24-4

  GenZPublishing.org

  Aberdeen, NJ

  For Tom, who taught me to play pretend and inspired me to write it all down, and for Lindsay, who adventured with me through my favorite stories and helped me see them through new eyes.

  Chapter 1

  It was late in the day, and there wasn’t much magic left.

  Melaine struggled to guide the pure magic that originated in the marrow of her bones into her clenched fist. The deep power that nestled in every infinitesimal pocket of her body pulsed with a vibrancy not unlike a beating heart, ready to break through her skin and forge the physical with the metaphysical.

  She opened her fist and revealed a dark purple gem that flashed under the sun’s glaring light.

  “That’s good, love,” said the rough-hewn voice of Melaine’s current customer, a stranger. “Better be a good one, aye? I gots a job to do. A big one.”

  She avoided looking at the man’s pockmarked face and squinty eyes and stared at the stone in her palm, diamond in shape and purple-black like a bruise. Every bird-bone of her wiry body felt petrified. The stone scorched her palm from the dense magic she had poured into its confines, but frost crystallized her veins. She waited to thaw and for her lungs to regain the ability to push outward. She begged her muscles to overcome the inertia it would take to become a living being again instead of a vulnerable statue in the streets of Stakeside.

  Finally, her lips drew a breath. Her exhale was icy fog, though it was a fine autumn day. The fresh lodestone in her hand grew cold.

  She fell back against a grimy brick wall that formed a seam between two ramshackle tenant buildings, her senses reeling from exhaustion. The early autumn sun, drumming the last beats of summer’s heart on the land below, warmed her veins, but the damp chill of the wall pressed through her brown threadbare dress.

  Her customer, who stank of rotting teeth, leaned into her. His hot, grubby hand peeled the fresh lodestone from her fingers. He tossed it in the air and caught it with a heavy thump before wrapping his greedy paw around it, hiding his prize from view. He grunted with satisfaction as he felt the magic she had infused inside.

  “It’ll do the job, won’t it, love?” he asked, his squinting eyes meeting hers as he gave her a yellowed smile. “You’re the best, they say. You charge enough for it, don’t you?”

  He grasped a fistful of her lank, black hair. Melaine hissed as the back of her head knocked against the bricks, but she didn’t yet have the strength to speak.

  “You know what I fink? I fink you charge too much, no matter how bounced your stones are.”

  Melaine parted her chapped lips, drawing air from her tired lungs.

  “A tuppence.” Her voice was hoarse. “Like we agreed.”

  The man laughed, showering her with fetid spittle.

  A stamp of boots on wet cobblestones rushed toward them from down the street. The customer loosened his hold on her hair and sauntered back, though his eyes were alert as he shifted them around the huddled passersby.

  Melaine kept her eyes on him. She recognized the cadence of the approaching footfalls. A young boy who roamed the streets, called Gim, had once lifted shoes from the corpse of a man who had a peg-leg. One of the boot’s soles had a hole in the center from the wooden peg, causing every other of Gim’s steps to sound hollow. That, combined with the flapping sound of shoes that were too big for the wearer, made his run unmistakable.

  “Marm!” Gim’s little voice called from down the street.

  Melaine gathered her strength and pushed herself off the wall, though she swayed on her feet. Her customer bounced on his heels as he eyed the boy who was darting through people and past an empty cart, which no one had bothered moving from the middle of the road. Melaine knew Gim was harmless enough, but her current buyer didn’t. Even children in Stakeside could be dangerous, either by their own gumption, or under someone else’s tutelage.

  The customer grunted in annoyance and flicked a coin at Melaine. It landed on the cobblestones. He gave her a last, leering expression before he shifted away down the street. Melaine braced her hand against the wall and prepared for a bout of dizziness as she stooped over to scrape the coin off the street.

  Gim puffed to a halt, his damp, windswept hair falling into his eyes. He wiped a hand across his pink cheek, leaving a smear of mud in the light sheen of sweat.

  “Vintor wants to see yah, marm,” he said. “In his shop.”

  Gim’s voice was a little hoarse, and his frame was as skinny as anyone’s in Stakeside, but he hadn’t yet outgrown the brightness of youth in his eyes. Melaine wondered how long it would take.

  “He’s paid you?” Melaine asked. The boy hesitated. Melaine’s mouth slipped a wry curve, knowing she had caught on to his trick. “Aye, he’s paid you. Go on.”

  She nodded down the street, though she didn’t really care which way he decided to go. Gim averted his eyes. A flicker of disappointment tinged their hopeful light as he lost the opportunity to trick her into paying him twice over for his delivery. Melaine had no doubts he’d learn his trade in time.

  He took off down the street at a more relaxed jog than before. Melaine was probably his last message recipient for the day. He would find some hole to crawl into for the night, most likely one of the little dens that children tended to make for themselves in the tight crawlspaces and sewer entrances where adults couldn’t fit. Melaine’s one-time haunt had been a half-buried supply crate at the base of the Stakeside wall, right behind the butcher’s yard. She’d stayed there till she was six and then moved in with a group of fifteen or so orphaned waifs who lived together in a cistern.

  That was before she’d started peddling lodestones, of course.

  Melaine looked up the street in the direction the boy had come from. The sun was casting long shadows from the disheveled tenements and tiny shops, all stacked on top of one another without adhering to any real standards of structural integrity. Wooden beams jutted out at odd angles to hang crudely painted signs, most with pictures instead of words; the vast majority of Stakeside’s residents couldn’t read. The plaster walls were yellow with water stains and black with mildew. The thatch roofs secreted a damp, sickly sweet smell that only added to the thick stink of the streets, cramped with people, animals, excrement, rotten food, and the tang of residual magic that clung to every gutter.

  Melaine mustered her strength and started walking up the street. If anyone else had asked to see her
at this time of evening, she would have laughed in their face. But Vintor was one of the few people in Stakeside who was actually worth listening to. And Melaine felt a kick of cautious excitement in her breast as she suspected the nature of Vintor’s upcoming discussion.

  She slid the tuppence into her pocket, and it scraped against a brass key, a glass vial of corrosion potion, a small knife, and a crust of bread, all of which took up far more physical space than the simple dress pocket should allow as a result of a pocket-enlargement spell she learned a few years back.

  She found the final object—her other glove—within her pocket and took it out. She pulled the glove on to her hand in a stiff but careful motion. Her fingertips slipped through the holes at the top, and she felt a knot of tension loosen when her bare palm was covered from the elements and the eyes of others. She glared at a hole near her wrist that had widened since the day before. She had already stretched the thin fabric to its limit trying to mend it, yet there it was.

  Melaine scowled and covered the hole with her clenched fist.

  Another day’s work. Another day alive.

  She paused in a moment of grim satisfaction as her strength began to return. Soon, she wouldn’t have to put up with swill like that customer. Soon, her magic would be hers to keep. That or she would die trying. Melaine had avoided death for all of her twenty-one years, a feat for someone who had grown up as a Stakeside orphan. If she succeeded in her plan, she might get another sixty years. Fail, and she would be a miserable lodestone-peddler for twenty, thirty years at the most.

  Even if by some miracle she did live longer, would it be worth it?

  It was only recently that she began asking that question. Maybe it was reaching adulthood that had done it, but life had gotten a lot more complicated once the simplicity of childhood was gone. Once her mind had matured enough to think beyond the next meal or the next place to sleep that wouldn’t attract thieves or rapists, deadlier thoughts settled in. Her gratitude for survival had altered into the question of What would make survival worth the effort?

  Not peddling lodestones—that she knew for certain. Her bread and butter would get her nowhere but an early grave.

  Melaine’s strength continued to grow as she threaded her way down the streets of Stakeside. Children picked pockets, but they didn’t go near Melaine. Beggars called for alms, but none bothered asking her anymore. Prostitutes smiled at passersby, their red lips chapped and their faces pockmarked from the poison of their cheap, lead-based makeup. One woman on a street corner sent a curled sneer of disgust toward Melaine’s gloved hands, but another met Melaine’s eyes and sent her a nod with a small, soft smile. Melaine didn’t recognize her, but the newcomer must have already learned of her profession. Flesh-peddling and stone-peddling were one and the same, many people thought. Both sold aspects of their bodies. Both sold pieces of themselves. Melaine twitched a nod in return, a silent acknowledgment of mutual existence that rarely came from anyone outside of their respective lines of work. She then hurried past. The other prostitutes spared her nothing more than a passing glance.

  The buildings began to stand a little straighter as Melaine walked farther. Their plastered walls were a little less yellow, and the thatch didn’t smell quite so ripe. Fewer people walked along the cobblestones as the streetlamps glowed a little brighter, wearing clothes that weren’t as threadbare as Melaine’s. But the step-up was minuscule. No matter how much closer these buildings and their tenants were to the wall, they were still a part of Stakeside.

  Melaine shivered as a chill breeze rode the evening between the cramped rows of buildings. A warming spell was out of the question in Melaine’s weary state, so she dealt with the cold as best she could and tried to pick up the pace, looking forward to the small fire that no doubt burned in Vintor’s hearth.

  She stopped when she reached a shop whose façade stood out from those around it. It still bore the same dingy, weathered cracks and wrinkles as the rest, but the mud had been scrubbed from its plaster on a regular basis, and its door bore a tarnished, brazen knocker. The sign hanging above the entrance had an actual word stamped below its carved picture of a candlestick, a sewing needle, and a cooking pot. Though Melaine already knew what the sign said, she still focused on the letters of the single word because, as her friend Salma had told her when she began teaching her to read a few months ago, practice was the only way to get better.

  The sign read: Goods.

  Stepping into Vintor’s shop was always a gamble. His store sold knickknacks and household items—all of the odds and ends you could need at one point or another in life. But there was never any way of knowing exactly what he’d have in stock at any given time. Melaine had come in once looking for an eating bowl and hadn’t found one. She’d soon realized that she could never afford one from Vintor’s shop anyway. Yet, as Melaine opened the door and stepped into Vintor’s shop now, several stacked wooden bowls sat right by the entrance.

  Other shelves and tables held an assortment of goods. Not all of the candlesticks were unused, but they all stood at least six inches tall. Some of the bowls and basins were scratched, but none had cracks or holes to lessen their function. There was a tarnished chamber pot, but it didn’t reek of piss, and a couple of waste bins didn’t even have a trace of magical refuse in their depths. None of the goods were dusty, and the floor under Melaine’s worn boots was swept clean. And, as Melaine had hoped, a few coals burned in the small hearth at one side of the shop’s interior.

  Melaine smoothed her skirt and winced as crumbled leaves crackled down her dress. A single strand of her long, black hair floated to the floor until it curled up like a tiny worm near her boot. Vintor’s shop was the nicest place she had ever stepped into. She felt like she brought the filth of the street in with her each time she came.

  “Melaine!” cried an exuberant voice from the front of the shop. She stepped around a protruding shelf and saw Vintor standing behind the wooden counter. His slick-backed brown hair and sculpted beard made him look like a newly shined shoe, his smile the gleaming boot buckle. Yet something was different about his smile today. It was a little too broad.

  “Vintor,” Melaine greeted with a cautious nod.

  “By the fire, please, Melaine,” Vintor said. “You look frozen.”

  Melaine nodded in thanks, though it bothered her that he could see anything weak about her, even if it was as simple as being cold. She tried to hide her exhaustion with a firmer resolve as she approached the fire, though its welcome heat only made her want to fall asleep right then and there.

  “I have something for you,” Vintor said as he joined her by the hearth. Melaine frowned as he reached into his vest pocket. He wore a blue one today, corduroy for warmth. His shirt underneath was one of the whitest she had ever seen, and though the suit coat he wore over the ensemble was dingy, it was cut from thick, green and gold brocade. Even his trousers didn’t have any holes.

  He bought the entire outfit used, of course. But he was still one of the finest-dressed men in all of Stakeside. Melaine felt a thrill of pride, knowing she’d had the privilege of working with him for a few months now.

  Vintor, who was still smiling, had thin crow’s feet around his eyes—the only telling sign of his middle age. He pulled a small item from his pocket and let it fall flat on his palm as he held it out to Melaine with an expectant shine in his green eyes.

  Melaine’s lips parted. “Is that—?”

  She analyzed the object with a closer eye, checking for every small tell she knew that would belie a counterfeit. But the small, flat, wooden coin was flawless. Its grains were smooth, and its gleaming polish didn’t bear the slight greenish tint of cheap straw-fly wax. The engraved letter “C” on its center hadn’t been burned into the wood with a hot poker. It was too perfect. The “C” had been engraved with magic.

  “That’s regulation,” Melaine said, her eyes widening as she looked back at Vintor. “Where did you get that?”

  Vintor chuckled. “From my buye
r. It’s for you.”

  Melaine paused. “I don’t take handouts,” she said, her mind flaring with suspicion. What did Vintor want from her?

  Vintor shook his head. “It’s not a handout. You earned this.”

  He reached out to touch her shoulder in a friendly pat like she’d seen him use with others, but he withdrew his hand mid-motion. Good. He still remembered the painful shock she’d given him the last time he’d tried it.

  “Melaine,” he said, dropping his hand while raising the other that held the wooden coin a little higher for her inspection. He glanced at the empty shop’s closed door but still lowered his charismatic voice a small amount. “Your fresh batch of lodestones fetched a higher price than I expected. The buyer was impressed. She threw this in. I already know the spell, and,” he eyed her clothes, lingering on the hole in her glove, but his expression wasn’t unkind, “I knew you’d appreciate something like this.”

  Melaine’s cheeks flushed under his inspection. “What’s in it?”

  “A mending spell,” he said. “Spinning, specifically. It allows you to spin more fabric from an article you already have. Not a large bolt, mind you, but it’s useful for patching holes.”

  “Really?” Melaine asked. A smile almost made it to her thin lips. “You sure you’re not attaching any strings to this little prize?” Little was a major understatement, but she couldn’t let Vintor know that she thought so.

  “Not a one,” Vintor said, placing his hand on his heart in a solemn promise.

  Melaine eyed him for a moment and then reached out and took the wooden coin from his palm between two fingers. She held it up, twisting it from one side to the other. There were more letters engraved on the back of the wooden disk, so small that Melaine would have had a hard time reading them, even if she could read without her mind stuttering to prevent the flow of words.