"Don't look at the boy with the sling. Look at me." A porter named Dabar, who carried water jars in the night market of Raurush, remembered that line for fifty years and repeated it to anyone who would buy him a cup of beer. She had said it, in a quiet and pleasant voice, to a guard who had been about to bring a spear down on a young man's back, and the guard had looked at her, and had stopped, and had gone to sit on a barrel. That was Fadarad Kafafaes at her market in 1905 BCE, and Dabar never could say, afterward, whether he had been looking at the boy or at her. He only knew that for the rest of that evening he could not remember what he had come in to buy.
She was born in 1964 BCE at Rahordarad, a river village on the Persian Plateau of what is now Iran, and her gift when she was young was her voice. It was a thin clear soprano with a crack in the middle that she could turn into an advantage, and by the time she was twenty-five it had taken her out of the village and into the hall of a small king. She sang at court for fourteen years. She was paid in cloth and in barley, had a room of her own with a window, and a reputation for being impossible to hurry. She kept a pet jackdaw. She was, by the standards of the place, a success, and the Fadarad Kafafaes who sang in that hall was nobody anyone in the war would have noticed.
In 1925 BCE, at thirty-nine, she went with her king's embassy west into the highlands of Anatolia, to sing at the wedding of an allied house. It was a journey of some forty days across the passes. On the way back, in the narrow country beyond the last river, she was ambushed by road thieves who took the mules, the gifts, and most of her teeth, and left her to the crows in a ditch. A man found her there at dusk. He was tall, gray-eyed, courteous, and he never once looked at her wounds. He introduced himself as Shaa Arrutias, and the court of the high city called him the Velvet Architect, and he took her back to his house, and by morning she was something else. He made her, and he told her little. He remained in Anatolia, alive and in no hurry, when she made her way home across the mountains in the spring, and she had no further orders from him. She did not ask for any.
Home was a different place from the one she had left. The king was dead, the hall was occupied by a cousin, and the court singer was a rumor. She found the Winter House instead, a loose family of vampires who traded in secrets, and over a decade she rose in it by a clean method: she was a Charmer, and the Winter House needed one. Her gift was Glamour, and its signature form she called the Velvet Veil, a trick of voice and bearing that made a room's occupants take her for something harmless and then forget what they were guarding. It was a physical thing, a particular pitch of the voice that the human ear mistook for kindness, and it cost her a rawness in the throat that no amount of honey could mend. In 1903 BCE she made a child of her own, Darbaan Kaartaush, who took the alias the Crowned Architect and who is alive today; she spoke of him as a successful experiment.
The night market at Raurush was her masterpiece. The Gaunt Hunger, she was called by then, a name that made her laugh, for her cheeks were hollow and she ate nothing in public. Her house, the Winter House, was part of the Vampireverse, and she knew perfectly well that a vampire slayer existed whose business it was to put her down, though she had not yet met one. The Bronze Vigil was a long age, and she meant to see all of it. She ran it for eight decades from a stall at the gate, with a cheerful jackdaw on her shoulder and a ledger in her lap, and it supplied the Winter House with silver, news and blood. She was feared, but she was also liked. This was the odd thing about her. The traders who worked under her called her aunt. She knew the names of their children.
She met Faurius Rabaes in 1905 BCE, and the meeting changed her mind about the plateau. The young man who walked in through the curtain was one of the hunters she had been hearing about, an assassin with a sling and an unlikely gift for locating her. He shot blind, from the hip, with a silver pellet. It tore her upper arm. She had been shot before, but never by someone who had known to look at her instead of at his own eyes. Her veil, which worked on everyone, had failed on him. She rather admired that.
They crossed paths four more times in the following years. She learned his habits: he whistled, he counted shots, he never fired a second without a good reason. She had the market watched. On one occasion she nearly had him, and the pellet that grazed her cheek in the end left a weal that would not close for a year, the very mark that her kind is taught to dread. She wore a veil to the stalls and let it be thought that she was in mourning. By the time he stopped appearing, she was almost fond of the sound.
She learned of his death in the winter of 1896 BCE from a trader, and bought the sling from the same man the following spring for a measure of barley, and hung it from a nail over her ledger. It was not a trophy. It was, she told Dabar once, the only honest thing in the market. She sat under it for two hundred and fifty years.
The Winter House was purged in 1646 BCE by a coalition of cult-keepers, wardens and a few hunters from the Vigil. Fadarad was three hundred and eighteen years old. She was destroyed in the fighting, away from her market, in a house she had never visited before. The stall at the Raurush gate was cleared the same night. The sling was not found among the goods, and no one has said who took it.
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