Breathing heavily, Hope knelt before Rafe and started to undo his belt. He grumbled a little in his sleep and whispered something she did not understand. Her excitement grew. Words of old! she thought. She slipped his trousers down slowly, glancing at his pale limp cock.

He has no navel.

There could be other explanations. She had missed it, perhaps, or a trick was being played, a complex deception for the amusement of some of her regular customers, those of whom she always asked her questions, again and again as if they would suddenly remember.

But she looked again.

He has no navel!

“Mage shit, it’s really here.” The tattoos on Hope’s face were in flux, shifting and moving as her emotions swayed from fear to elation, delight to terror. Here was the living future, and the dead past. This boy was more myth than reality, a story so rare that she had never heard it told other than by her own mother and grandmother. Magic is destined to return, they had said, and it will be in a child unbirthed, offspring of the womb of the land in darkest Kang Kang. She had never truly understood what that meant, but now she was faced with the myth in the flesh.

For a few seconds Hope held her breath, terrified that Rafe would simply disappear. She had realized the impossibility of his being here; perhaps that knowledge would drive him away. But he remained, squirming on the bed and frowning as he tried to make sense of some deeply hidden dream, a recurring voice in his head that must be trying so hard to make itself known.

Hope held his cock and squeezed slightly, feeling it grow hard in her hand, the incredible heat as his blood coursed through his body, driven by the turmoil of his dreams and drawn to this point. When it was fully hard she stood and raised her skirts. She could take him inside her, have his seed, and what would that make her? A part of things? More than just a witch without magic, a fool mixing herbs and chanting mock hope back at herself? She waited for long seconds, poised, staring down at the boy’s face and seeing conflict etched there in his skin. Her own tattoos itched as she fought her own private battle.

She did not know what would happen, what she would gain, if she took him now. But she knew what she would lose: his trust.

She covered him up with a smooth furbat-skin blanket.

“Sleep easy,” she said. “Get what rest you can. Listen to the voices, but don’t let them frighten you.”

She looked at the paraphernalia of her life once again—all suddenly redundant, like so much medicine pumped into a dead person’s veins—and then sat back to watch Rafe sleep.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

IT DID NOT take long for Alishia to decide to leave Noreela City.