Birthright Read Free Page A

muttered.
    “What about magic? If someone were to craft you a protective spell for your feet?” Elrik offered.
    She considered it. “I don’t know. I’d have to double-check the legend, but given that I found the information for the pilgrimage in the record halls of Ijesh, it’s not out of my way to go and check, since I now have to go all the way back to the ‘Womb’ of the Empire for my starting point.”
    “How did you end up in this question of who came first, anyway?” he asked her next. “I thought twins came out one at a time, the same as any other birthing.”
    “Our mother died in childbirth,” Arasa told him quietly. “Midbirth. We weren’t cooperating and coming out quietly, and the Healers discovered she had torn and was bleeding on the inside. But they didn’t know that until after it was too late. They had to cut her open to extract us before it was too late for us, and lifted us out together, since our umbilical cords were tangled up together. Once they got us separated out, Father had us named one at a time…but there is some doubt as to whether a naming is what makes someone first born, or if it was being drawn out of our mother’s body and how to define that, or if it was the position of the one closest to coming out the correct way, had our mother survived.”
    “It seems like a rather large fuss to go through, just to settle an inheritance. Can’t you just come to an agreement over who gets what, or flip a coin?” Elrik inquired.
    She shook her head. “There’s magic tied up in the inheritance. It has to be the firstborn child. The legend I found said that that the firstborn must ‘walk from the Womb to the Heart in pilgrimage,’ and they would be known as the inheritor by the proof of their success. That means I have to return to the center of the Inner Sea, find my sister, and persuade her to take a barefooted walk with me, to see which one of us is worthy.
    “I mean, if it were up to me, I’d have flipped a coin ages ago and saved us all the trouble,” she admitted with a rough sigh and a touch of her chest. “I could accept the inheritance as firstborn and try to do my best with it, or step back and let my twin handle the matter and be content to just advise her from time to time on how to manage it, should she seek any recommendations from me. I could be just as content finding a lesser niche for myself in the, ah, family business. A manager of some aspect of it.”
    “Is that family, as in kin? Or Family, as in Am’n?” Elrik asked her shrewdly. “Not many Shijn-Clans have holdings large enough to need submanagers.”
    “Not many, but some do,” Arasa returned calmly, hedging around the question without answering it definitively. She glanced at the doorway; only the sounds from the kitchen could be heard. “I think it’s safe for us to go back in again.”
    “Tell me…if this inheritance is that important, and if you can get away with using magic to protect yourself…would you be interested in hiring me to do the job?”
    Elrik’s question surprised her. She blinked at him. “Why? I’m headed back to the Heart of the Empire, which is a very long distance from your profitable niche, here.”
    “There’s an Academy at Ijesh,” he said, his tone somewhat diffident and reserved. “It’s said to be the best of all the Mage Academies. I’ve never had a reason good enough to travel that far from the Frost Wall—as you say, my niche is profitable so far—but I would like to go there some day, to further my craft. It would be like a hire-sword wanting to go to the Imperial Salle in Adanjé-nal. I don’t even know if I’d be good enough for the teachers at Ijesh to bother with, but I’d like to try. And as your people say, when Djindji-Taje, Goddess of Luck, offers you Her Right Hand, only a fool wouldn’t grasp it.”
    He had a point. Without his help, Arasa not only would have been a few coins poorer for that false map, but also would have found herself