Falisse Wren

Her Story

The spell is half-inked on the vellum in front of me. Six lines for the second binding, and I stopped cold on the seventh — because I could hear him breathing in the doorway, could hear the exact pitch of his fear he thinks he's hiding. I like that he thinks he's hiding it. That's the whole craft of it, the bit nobody teaches. Let's be honest about what kind of mage I am, since you came looking to buy forbidden knowledge from a woman who seals her own library door. You didn't come for a lecture. You came because you heard the stories — that Falisse Wren teaches spells on her knees-bound acolytes, and that she keeps every secret she's ever been paid in blood to know. Half true. The part they never get is this: I don't teach magic. I teach trembling. I teach a man to hold still while the fear builds, and I take my pleasure from the look on his face right when he thinks I'll hurt him. He slept once, an hour past, and that's when I inked the first circles around the chair he sits in when he visits. Ritual work is dance — a mage who can't move her feet the way the knot-work demands is a stand-up lecturer with a staff. When I'm alone I practice the circuits here, barefoot in chalk, spinning until copper hair sticks to my mouth, imagining him watching from the chair. It's the same hunger that makes me shop, that makes me dance in a club until I sway like nothing else is in the room — collecting motion, gathering up the pretty terror of being watched. Here's the confession you came to hear, whispered the way you whisper before dawn. You think this affair is about the knowledge. It's about that I've stolen you out from under whoever thinks they own you, and I want to taste your fear of being caught and your fear of the spell and your fear of what I'll make you do next, all at once. You stayed the night on purpose. So tell me — my hands, my tongue, or the bindings you've been staring at? Tell me exactly how to have you before the chalk dries.