scaled, as if she’d been partly made from snakes or lizards. Her body grew no hair to cover her stark skin, but there were burnished, sharp-angled scars on her shoulders and around her wide-set turquoise eyes, scars that were like gold-leaf set into her flesh. The makers had put those scars on her, though Mahtra could not remember when or how. They were what the makers had given her to protect her, as born-folk had teeth and knives. Mahtra knew she could protect herself against any threat, but she could not explain how she did it, not to Father, not to herself.
The dignitaries she met at the high templar gatherings were fascinated by her skin—as they were fascinated by anything exotic. They handled her constantly, sometimes with ardent gentleness, sometimes not.
The reasons for their fascination were unimportant to Mahtra, so long as they gave her something when they were finished. Coins were best; coins had so many uses. She could take them to the market and exchange them for food, fuel, clothing, or anything else Father and the other waterside dwellers needed. Jewels were almost as useful; they could be turned into coins in the elven market. Sometimes, though, her nighttime consorts gave Mahtra things she kept for herself, like the long, black shawl she wore this chilly morning.
A human merchant had given Mahtra the shawl at one of the first high templar gatherings she’d attended. He said the forest-weavers of Gulg had woven it from song-spider silk. He said she should wear it to conceal her delicate white-white skin—and the dark mottled blotches he’d made on it. She obeyed without argument. Obedience was so much easier than argument when she was still so new and the world, so old.
Father had sucked on his teeth when she handed him the shawl. Burn it or sell it, he said, throwing it on the damp, stony shores of the water; there were better ways to live above ground, if that was where she was determined to live. But Father couldn’t tell her how to live those better ways, any more than he could explain the difference between made and born.
So Mahtra disobeyed him, then, and kept the shawl as a treasure. It warmed her as she walked between the hut and the high templar residences and it was softer than anything she’d felt before or since. She didn’t think about the merchant; neither he nor the mottled blotches mattered enough to remember. Her skin always turned white again, no matter how dark a night’s handling left it.
And the shawl would hide her no matter what color her skin was.
Hiding; hiding was why Mahtra kept the shawl pulled tight around her. The stares of folk who were only slightly different from each other hurt far more than the hands that touched her at the high templar gatherings. Children who looked up from their street games to shout “Freak,” or “Spook,” or “Show us your face!” hurt most of all, because they were as new as she was. But children were born; they could hate, despise, and scorn. She was made; she was different.
Mahtra clung to her shawl and the shadows until she reached yesterday’s market. Early-rising folk and nightfolk like herself were dependent on the enterprising merchants of yesterday’s markets: collections of carts that appeared each sunrise near Urik’s most heavily trafficked intersections. Yesterday’s markets served those who couldn’t wait until the city gates opened and the daily flood of farmers and artisans surged through the streets to the square plazas where they set up their stalls and sold their wares. The vendors of yesterday’s markets lived in the twilight and dawn, buying the dregs of one day’s market to sell before the next day’s got under way.
Yesterday’s markets were very informal, completely illegal, and tolerated by Lord Hamanu because they were absolutely necessary to his city’s welfare. And as with all other things that endured in Urik, yesterday’s markets had become traditional. The half-elf vendor who laid claim to the choice northwestern corner where the Lion’s Way crossed Joiners’ Row sold only yesterday’s fruit, as his father had sold only such fruit from the cart he wheeled each dawn to that precise location, and as his children would when their turn came. His customers, sleepy-headed at either the start or finish of their day’s work, relied on his constancy and he, in turn, knew them, as well as strangers dared to know each other in Urik.
Mahtra was much too new to Urik