Feet braced evenly apart, Bredonna moved her knees, swaying her hips lazily to the sound of the music. She kept the movement simple. Jak paid her just enough money to eat with. There was no one in the pub room tonight with more than copper bits to find their way into Jak’s hands and not her purse.

They all wanted her, but she’d learned early to not settle for local blicks. The men rolling square bones and shoveling utto bowls of meat and grain into their mouths knew that.

One of them was single, would get some property someday. The other two were his uncle and father, reputed to share a wife and one household. Single women were rare. The boy was older than Bredonna but she knew he had no life experience. He could be trained well enough if she got him away from the other two.

This town had three times as many null males and females. The men were all low-grade farmers, former illium miners or some other breed of dirty-handed village blick. Any male of potential, void of magic or not, ended up in the city somewhere. Any city. Little Indio was on the edge of nowhere where only the dregs of humanity lived. If Bredonna wanted to be more than a farm wife or a pleasure dancer, she’d have to get out of this village.

The boy looked up from his food and Bredonna gave him a teasing hip roll that made her skirt swish and her blousy top sway softly. The white skin of her belly winked at him.

He looked back at his food, blushing.

Next to him, his older uncle saw the move, glanced at Bredonna and gave her a thick-lipped grin, before punching the younger man hard on the shoulder. She could hear the surprised “Oof,” over the music.

This was one of her favorite skirts. It was nice to be seen in it, even if no one cared how hard she’d worked for it. She’d traded for the bright crimson thread to sew into the panels of the underskirt and dyed the lighter outer-skirt her favorite purple. She out-sewed every other woman in the village, but without husband, protector, or parents, they’d never admit she could do anything better. And they’d die before offering to pay for her skill.

In their jealousy, some of them even accused her of using mage magic instead of skill to do the work. Stupid nulls. A witch could do nothing with her inner-light if there wasn’t a mage around capable of pulling it and shaping it. And a femaile void was nothing but a mage-compatible fuck toy.

Her mother taught her to sew, encouraged Bredonna’s nimble fingers for something pretty and practical. The lesson didn’t save the girl from her womanhood as mother hoped.

With no magic other than a dried-up bloodline and gift for needlework, Bredonna’s mother still had enough shine to pull a mage’s attention. The High Proctor’s trained squibbles were relentless. No one was safe from the patrols of the Unifier’s Consortium. They’d taken Bredonna’s mother and marked her child to be tested.

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When they came for her, Bredonna failed their tests. She was listed in their books as a void. Her father, a snake of a man, paid them off and they left her behind.

She’d never miss that little yellow haired troll of a man. At least her mother tried, but in the end, both her parents failed her, leaving Bredonna stranded in the intangible space of being neither witch or null. No one wanted people like her in the Balance. Nulls didn’t trust them and the High Proctor didn’t want them in his mucking mission to unify the balance.

Bredonna knew she could be more. If she could just get to the city with some silver in her pocket to smooth the way. If she could find a proper protector. She knew she had it in her to be more. They should have taken her. Put her in one of those city families where there was so much gold to go around that women wore ornaments of it draped in their hair and rubbed the dust on their skin. The only dust in New Indio was the bug dust farm wives rubbed on their cheeks and chests to cover the dirt and mud.

She glanced at Jak as he left the kitchen carrying a big fat pot of new grain to boil in the central hearth. Put together in pre-war times, probably before nulls outnumbered mages, when farmers knew how to live without illium to power their plows, Jak’s old place was one of the most practical buildings in town. His fireplace where he cooked the utto was a huge old thing in the center of the room. It didn’t require a witch, or any kind of outside energy source, to power it.

This kind of place was better than the apartment she had to share with her stepsister. Constructed for illium miners, that temporary structure had neither locks or lights unless there was something to power them. The lack of magic for power resulted in a badly constructed two level crap house that hadn’t worked for years.

Jak passed her on the way back to his bar, giving her big cow eyes. He was not an attractive man, but he did have long eyelashes. The sweeping fans were just silly on a male his size. He didn’t think it was funny when she told him so.

He was getting a too possessive for his own good, but as a man, he had more power in Little Indio than Bredonna ever would. As her employer, he was the closest thing to a protector that she could get without a uniting ceremony. She gave him a false smile, restraining the certainty behind her teeth that he was going to mess up everything for her with his stupidity.

Sky save her from sex obsessed idiots. She was surrounded by them day and night. They were easy to manage until the point she asked them to help her and Anika to the city. Jak especially wanted them both to stay. Bredonna would get to play his hearth bride and her stepsister would take Bredonna’s place servicing customers from her back instead of in the kitchen.

They could sell her virginity when she came of age, Jak said. “She’s a lumpy mess but wash her up and a cunt is a cunt. You’d be mine, and we’d have silver to spend.”

Jak didn’t know his place in the world at all. How dare he come up with this idea on his own, as if he had a right, daring to think she’d allow it? “You can’t. She’s my sister. Wouldn’t be right. I need to find her a proper husband so she can have a better life. How could you be my husband if you would use my own sister like that? For your own greed? How dare you? You should help us!”

Jak gave up on the idea. For now.

But she had to find a way to get out of this place and back to the city where she was born. Jak had no clue what value Anika really had.

The door to the pub opened from the other end of the room, the cool outside air rushing in. Everyone looked up to see, including Jak. The mayor, head covered with his official hat-of-office, paused, taking in the room, before he rushed over to Jak.