Free The Drowning City: The Necromancer Chronicles Book One by Amanda Downum Page A

stomped into her boots. Sandals would be cooler
     and less conspicuous, but she liked having a place for extra blades.
    She leaned against the handle to keep the door from squeaking. Moisture warped the wood till nothing opened or closed smoothly.
     She turned her key in the lock and slunk down the shadow-thick hall.
    She’d hoped—ancestors, how she’d hoped—but the witch’s contact was nothing but a foolish child. Didn’t want bloodshed. Xinai
     snorted softly. There was nothing without bloodshed, let alone tearing down the Khas and casting out the Assari conquerors.
     Freedom was measured in blood.
    She pitied the poor dead woman, trapped now, forever cut off from her family and her homeland. She hadn’t had the heart to
     ask what would happen to her spirit once the witch returned to Erisín. An ugly fate.
    But no worse than her own family had known. Did their ghosts linger still, haunting the jungles or the mines?
    The night was heavy in her lungs as she slipped out the servants’ entrance to the street and turned toward the docks. But
     after a few streets she halted, frowning. She needed more than drunken complaints and rumors. She knew where she needed to
     go; she’d avoided it long enough.
    Xinai turned and made her way to Straylight, and the Street of Salt.
    Easy for the mageling to keep her idealism. No Laii ever lived in a tilting hovel that flooded with the rains, ever sent their
     children to the mines or fields to keep the lease on such a hovel. Easy for the mages to look down from their mountain and
     call Symir a jewel, when they were too far away to see the flaws at its heart.
    She smiled at the missing signs and Sivahran writing, tried to imagine the whole city like that. No use. The city was Assari,
     from wooden pilings beneath the water to the rooftop tiles, even if it had been paid for with native blood. Perhaps it could
     be reclaimed, made Sivahri, but the jungle was her true home. She should go into the hills, find her family’s banyan tree.
     If it still stood. The spirit might have withered with no one to tend it.
    She touched one of the charms around her neck, the oldest. The last of her mother’s work, containing bones and ashes of generations
     of Lins. She should have worn her mother’s bones in that pouch, but they were lost.
    A pack of young men loitered on the corner, lounging against crumbling walls. Prides, they called themselves, like hunting
     cats. Clanless children who banded together for safety, formed families just as tight as blood-kin. She had feared them when
     she was young, but now she understood. She nodded acknowledgment as she passed and the leader nodded back.
    The smell of herbs and witchery washed over her as she walked down the street and her eyes burned. Time pulled away like the
     tide, leaving a different Xinai standing on the pitted stones. Young and scared, torn and bloody.
    She stopped in front of a narrow shop-front, swallowing the taste of tears. The sign was nearly the same as it had been twelve
     years ago, faded now and weathered. Lamplight flickered through the windows. Too much to hope…But she climbed the worn stairs
     and knocked.
    For a moment she thought no one would answer, but finally the door creaked open. A stooped woman stood silhouetted in the
     doorway, her face cast in shadow.
    “What do you want?” she asked. A familiar voice, like a cold blade in her heart.
    “Selei?” The name cracked in her mouth, nearly shattered.
    Silence stretched. Finally the old woman moved, let the light fall through the door.
    “Xinai? Xinai Lin?” Her wrinkled brown face broke into a wondering smile. “Oh, child—” And she stepped forward to clasp Xinai
     in her arms, and pulled her into the shop.
    The room was much the same as she remembered, clean but crowded, walls warped and water-stained. Fragrant herbal smoke drowned
     the mold-musk that lingered in older buildings. The last time Xinai had crossed the threshold she’d been barely fifteen,