Free Sorcery Rising by Jude Fisher

length of his—
    ‘Saro!’
    Saro’s head shot up so fast he cricked his neck. Favio Vingo had joined his brother and Tanto and was even now bearing down upon his second son. Thank Falla his people were not mind-readers, Saro thought wildly. If they were, it would not be Tanto on the receiving end of a whip.
    ‘Hello, Father.’
    Favio Vingo was a short man, though compactly muscled. He hid the shame of his encroaching baldness today under a fabulously-patterned silk head-wrap, fastened with a vast emerald on a pin. ‘I have something to show you, Saro. Come with me.’ His father beamed: clearly, Saro thought uncharitably, the effects of the araque must still be with him, that he should be so magnanimous towards one he so despised.
    Garnering his most obliging and agreeable expression, Saro took his father’s proffered arm and fell into step with him.
    ‘What is it, Father, that you wish to show me?’
    ‘Words would not do justice to the experience: you must see it for yourself and form your own responses. I remember witnessing a similar scene on my first visit to the Allfair—’ he paused. ‘By Falla! Over twenty-five years ago, now: can you believe it?
Twenty-five years
. Twenty-five visits to the Moonfell Plain, by the Lady! And still the memory of that first time as clear as if it were yesterday: such excitement, eh Fabel?’
    Fabel Vingo looked over his shoulder at them. ‘Ah yes. I remember my first time at the Fair – would have been a few years after you, though, brother.’ He winked and then turned back to continue his conversation with Tanto. As if unconsciously, he ran a hand through his own thick cap of hair.
    Favio grimaced. ‘It wasn’t just his
first time
at the Allfair, either,’ he said in a voice too loud to be destined for Saro’s ears alone, but there came no response from his brother.
    They made their way past the rest of the livestock stalls and the temporary booths for the herdsmen and servants, and soon found themselves out on unoccupied ground. The sun, coming to its fullest point now, beat down on the volcanic ash so that in the miasma of heat thus produced, it seemed that the eastern mountains rose off the plain in great, rippling waves, like a tide. The sky overhead, early clouds now burned away to nothing, was the deep, unflawed blue of a Jetra bowl.
    Favio shaded his eyes. Saro, following his example, stared out into the heat-haze. Tanto and Fabel, bored already, started to discuss the intricate silver inlay-work that could be commissioned from some northern craftsman they’d heard of who specialised in ornamental daggers and pattern-welded swords. Lovely work, apparently: though far from cheap.
    ‘Oh!’
    The gasp escaped Saro before he could draw it back. Out of the middle of the haze as from the heart of legend, or the gorgeously deceptive Fata Morganas reported by explorers in search of fabled Sanctuary, shimmering like a mirage and most eerily magnified by the waves of heat, a nomad caravan pulsed gradually into view – a weaving, many-legged millipede of a creature displacing clouds of dust as it travelled unerringly towards the fairground.
    ‘Wanderers!’
    ‘Aye, lad,’ Fabel said cheerfully. ‘The Lost People; the Footloose: here they come, ready to fleece the lot of us yet again!’

Three
    Charms
    J enna Finnsen gazed into the polished metal mirror Halli Aranson had just brought to their booth as ‘a gift for a maid on her first visit to the Allfair’. She’d heard him announcing himself at the doorflap and had promptly disappeared behind the partition, leaving him shuffling his feet awkwardly in front of her father.
What a clod
, she thought. Just a great big farmboy with no courtly manners at all, even if he was desperately in love with her. She giggled, then watched with alarm as her large grey eyes disappeared into fat little folds of skin and lines etched themselves around her nose and mouth. ‘Oh no,’ she thought desperately. ‘Not at all