Magic's Price by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

ill.
    He’d known about this trick of his, this knack of “singing pain away” for a long time—he’d had it forced on him, for all practical purposes, by the old woman who had cared for him for as long as he could remember. It was either sing her pain away, or put up with her uncertain temper and trust he could get out of her reach when she was suffering a “morning after.”
    Old Berte wasn’t his mother—but he couldn’t remember anyone who might have been his mother. There had only been Berte. Those memories were vivid, and edged with a constant hunger that was physical and emotional. Berte teaching him to beg before he could even walk. Berte making false sores of flour-paste and cow’s blood, so that he looked ill. Berte binding up one of his legs so that he had to hobble with the help of a crutch.
    The hours of sitting beside her on a street corner, learning to cry on cue.
    Then the day when one of the other beggars brought out a tin whistle, and Stef had begun to sing along, in a thin, clear soprano—and when he’d finished, there was a crowd about the three of them, a crowd that tossed more coppers into Berte’s cracked wooden bowl than he’d ever seen in his short life.
    I looked up, and I saw the expression on her face, and I knew I’d never have to limp around on a crutch again.
    He closed his eyes, and let his fingers walk into the next set of exercises. Berte bought us both a real supper of cooked food from a food stall at the market. Fresh food, not stale, not crumbs and leavings—and we shared a pallet and a blanket that she bought from a ragman that night. That was the best day of my life.
    It remained the best day of his life for a long while, for once she had a steady source of income, Berte returned to the pleasures that had made her a beggar in the first place. Liquor, and the drug called “dreamerie.”
    She drank and drugged away every copper we made. At least I didn’t have to spend half of every night trying to run the cramps out of my legs, he thought, forcing the muscles in his shoulders to relax while he continued to play. Things were a little better. I could take care of her hangovers—enough so that we could get out every morning. I was hungry, but I wasn’t quite as hungry as when we’d just been begging for a living. The worse she got, the easier it was to hide a coin or two, and once she was gone into her dreams, I could sneak out and buy something to eat. But I kept wondering when she was going to run afoul of whoever it was that sold her the drugs—how long it would be before the craving got too much and she sold me the way she’d sold her own children. An involuntary shudder made both his hands tremble on the strings. I was sure that was what had happened when Lynnell grabbed me that night.
    It had been late; Berte had just sunk into snoring oblivion, and Stef had eased out between the loose boards at the back of their tenement room, a couple of coppers clutched in his fist. He had intended to head straight for Inn Row where he knew he could buy a bowl of soup and all the bread he could eat for those two coppers—but someone had been waiting for him. A woman, tall, and sweet-smelling, dressed all in scarlet.
    She’d grabbed his arm as he rounded the corner, and there had been two uniformed Guardsmen with her. Terror had branded her words into his memory.
    â€œCome with me, boy. You belong to Valdemar now.”
    He hadn’t the faintest idea what she’d meant. He hadn’t known that “Valdemar” was the name of the kingdom where he lived. He hadn’t even known he lived in a Kingdom! All he’d ever known was the town; he’d never even been outside its walls. He’d thought this “Valdemar” was a person, and that Berte had either sold him or traded him away.
    I was in terror—too frightened to object, too petrified to even talk. I kept