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I
woke up huddled in a doorway in a Twilight alley, blinking at the early-morning light.

A cold wind blew down the alley, pushing snow fine as dust before it. The sky overhead was gray. I shivered and got to my feet.

I looked down at myself. I had
on a black sweater with too-long sleeves that hung down over my hands. Nobody’d stolen my shoes; I was wearing good stout boots and knitted socks.

I hunched into the sweater and headed down the alley. My stomach was hollow with hunger. Maybe I could find a pocket to pick or I could steal a bit of bread from a Sark Square stall.

I peered out of the alley. The street was busy, full of people walking, a chimney swift and his boy carrying their brushes, a girl selling broadsheets, a woman working to fix a pothole.

The Twilight wasn’t usually this busy, was it?

I skiffed back down the alley and headed up the hill toward Sark Square.

The market was busy, too. The air smelled like fish and bread baking. Beside one of the stalls a brazier was set up with magic fire burning in it; a few people stood around it, warming their hands. If I was lucky, one of them might have a pocket I could pick, and then I could buy a sausage in a biscuit for breakfast.

I edged up to the brazier and held up my hands.
The magic fire burned without crackling, giving off a wave of soft warmth like a blanket.

One of the other people at the fire looked up. He was a big man with a wide, ugly face. He nudged the man standing next to him, who was even bigger and uglier, with a lumpy nose and just one eyebrow.

“What, Hand?” the uglier man said.

The man called Hand pointed with his chin toward me.

The uglier man looked, and his eyes widened. “That you, Blackbird?” he asked.

Oh, no. The men were minions, weren’t they? I stepped away from the fire.

The two men started around the brazier, coming after me.

As the uglier one reached for me, I ducked under his arm and slipped and fell on the icy cobblestones. I scrambled to my feet and backed away.

“No harm,” the man said. “Underlord’s been looking for you.”

The Underlord? No, I didn’t want to see him.
I turned and raced away, heading for an alley to hide in.

“Hoy, Blackbird! Come back!” the man shouted.

Not likely. I ran and hid, and they didn’t catch me.

The next morning I woke up shivering in a doorway in Rat Hole, the deepest, darkest part of the Twilight. When I opened my eyes, I saw a little monster like a lizard, greenish-gold, with wings and bright red eyes, sitting in the middle of the alley watching me.

I jerked myself to my feet, ready to run away from it, but the little lizard hopped back, then flapped its golden wings and flew away. It landed on a step leading up to a burned-out tenement house and perched there.

I went to find something to eat. As I headed out of the twisty, dark Rat Hole streets, workers passed me, heading in, carrying ladders and toolboxes,
talking loudly. I heard the sound of hammering. Was somebody fixing up the Rat Hole houses?

A good place to find something to eat was a yard behind a chophouse, where the keeper sometimes put out pots and pans with scrapings and crusts of food in them. It was early enough that the chophouse wasn’t open yet. I crept into the yard and over to a big kettle half full of soapy water. The back door of the chophouse creaked open.

I looked up, frozen.

The chophouse keeper, a stained apron wrapped around her belly, put her hands on her hips and looked down at me. “Here, now,” she said. “Aren’t you the wizard’s boy?”

I shook my head,
no
.

“Well, you don’t need to scrounge for food. You clean those pots for me, and I’ve got a plate of yesterday’s stew you can have. C’mon in when you’re done.” She tossed me a rag and bristly brush.

While I worked, a black bird with a patch of white feathers on each wing flew down and perched
on the edge of a pot, watching me. Another black-and-white bird flapped down and perched next to the first.
Grawwk,
it said.

After I’d finished rinsing the pots at the pump outside and had gotten wet down my front for my trouble, I went into the dark, low-ceilinged kitchen. The keeper pointed to a stool beside a stove, then handed me a bowl of stew and a spoon.

The keeper went to a table and started chopping up carrots. “What’s your name?” she asked, tossing a carrot top into a swill bucket at her feet.

The minions had called me
Blackbird
, but that wasn’t right. I took a bite of stew and thought about it.
Boy
. That was my name.

The keeper shrugged when I didn’t answer.

I ate the rest of the stew, and left.

The next night was colder, but I found a good sleeping place in a tall house in the deepest part of Rat Hole, an attic where the stairs had rotted away, but there was a ladder leading up to it.
Somebody’d lived here not too long ago; I found ashes in the grate and blankets piled in the corner and rags stuffed into the cracks in the window frame to keep out the cold. And rats scrabbling in the walls. Except for the rats, it was a good place to come back to after picking pockets or stealing a bit of food.

I’d been staying there for a while and was coming back with an empty stomach at the end of a day filled with minions who seemed on the lookout for me on every corner. I climbed the stairs. At the bottom of my attic ladder was a package wrapped in brown paper.

The landing was empty, except for shadows.

I crouched beside the package and opened it. Biscuits. With bacon! Without thinking, I grabbed one and took an enormous bite. Then another. A moment later the biscuit was gone. My stomach gave a happy gurgle. I picked up another biscuit.

From a doorway leading off the landing came a
noise. Getting to my feet, I spun around, and a huge man grabbed me by both arms.

I dropped the biscuit and squirmed, and kicked out at him, but he held me tightly, then gave me a cuff on the head.

“Keep still, you,” he said. He had a hard face like a fist full of knuckles; he wore a brown suit with a knitted red waistcoat under it.

Still gripping me by the arms, he brought me through the streets to a tall, stone house down near the bridge. He went inside, past minion-looking guards, up stairs and down cold, stone hallways, to a door. Outside it was the minion who’d almost caught me at the brazier in Sark Square. He nodded at the man holding me. “Benet,” he said.

“They waiting?” the man called Benet asked.

The minion nodded and opened the door.

The room inside had a table in the middle of it with a map of the city of Wellmet spread on it, with notes scribbled on the map in red ink. Beside
the table, in a comfortable armchair, sat a very thin young man with black hair and a sharp face. At the table, squinting down at the map, stood a tall girl with red hair caught up in a braid that hung down her back. She wore a green velvet dress that had a tree embroidered on the sleeve.

The red-headed girl looked up and nodded when she saw us. “So it worked!” she said. “Well done, Benet. Biscuits?”

The big man nodded and let me go. I headed for the door, but he pushed me away and went to stand in front of it with his burly arms crossed.

The thin young man said something to the girl.

“I don’t know, Embre,” the girl said sharply.

“We could keep him here,” the man named Embre said. “There are cells in the basement.”

They wanted to lock me up? I eyed the tall windows. Maybe I could get out one of them.

“Not in the cells,” said the big man by the door.

“Benet’s right,” the girl said. She looked at me and smiled. “I’m very glad to see you, Conn.”

“So am I, Cousin,” said Embre, adding a sharp smile of his own.

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about.

The girl who’d called me
Conn
sighed. “Nevery still doesn’t know?” she asked.

Embre shook his head. “We weren’t sure it was him, or if we could catch him.”

“I’ll take him, Duchess,” said the big man by the door. “Master Nevery’s at the academicos.”

The girl nodded. “Yes, I suppose that would be best.”

“Just don’t let him escape,” said the boy. “He’s hard to catch.”

I’d be even harder to catch if they let me get away.

The big man grabbed me by the arm again. “Come on, you,” he said.

He took me to the river and put me onto a boat and, after tossing me a blanket to keep warm
with, rowed us across the choppy waves to a building on an island. He tied the boat to a dock and climbed out.

Leaving the blanket, I followed.

He kept his hand on the scruff of my neck, leading me into a wide gallery, past people in robes who stared and whispered when they saw me, and up a curved staircase to a door. We went in.

It was a library, full of books and two long tables.

Across the room, at the end of one of the tables, sat a gray-bearded old man, reading a book. He looked tired and stooped; a knob-headed cane rested against the table beside him and a gray robe was thrown over a chair.

The big man gave me a push. “Go talk to him,” he whispered.

All right. I walked down the room, my feet quiet on the carpeted floor.

As I got closer, the old man looked up. When he saw me, his eyes widened and his face went
very pale. He got to his feet, staring at me, holding on to the edge of the table. “Well, Boy?” he said softly.

Boy,
he’d called me. Did he know me?

He pushed aside his chair and took a step toward me. I flinched back. His bushy gray eyebrows lowered, as if he was angry.

I glanced toward the door. The big man was gone.

“Where have you been all this time, my lad?” the old man asked. “I thought I’d lost you.”

What did he mean by asking where I’d been? I’d been in the Twilight, hiding from the minions, until the big man had caught me with his biscuit trap.

The old man narrowed his eyes. “What’s the matter with you, Boy?” He took another step toward me, and I skiffed toward the door. I could’ve made a run for it then. Quick-dart out the door and back out into the steep, snow-cold streets of the Twilight. He couldn’t stop me. The big man was out in the
hallway, though, sure as sure, making sure I didn’t get away.

I paused with my hand on the doorknob. “My name is Boy,” I said, half asking. My voice sounded rusty, as if I hadn’t talked to anybody for a long time.

“It is not,” the old man said. He watched me carefully. “You don’t remember, do you?”

No.

“Curse it,” the old man muttered. He went back to his chair and sat down as if he was very tired. “You don’t know who you are,” he said. “I am who I am,” I said.

The old man leaned back in his chair and pulled at the end of his gray beard. “Yes, boy, that’s true. I suppose you are.”

The old man’s name was Nevery. He told me about the other me,
Connwaer
, which meant
black bird
. He took me to a tall brick house on an island called Heartsease, where he said I lived with him
and Benet. It didn’t seem like any place I’d ever been before, not like the Twilight. Nevery said that was because Connwaer had done pyrotechnics and had blown up the other Heartsease and then it’d been rebuilt.

The other me must’ve gotten into a lot of trouble.

Nevery was a wizard. He said Connwaer had been a wizard, too. “I’m not a wizard,” I told him. “I’m a gutterboy.”

“You used to be a gutterboy,” Nevery said. “But you’re not anymore.” He fetched a mirror and told me to look at myself.

I looked like I always had. Except I had a patch of white in my black hair. I didn’t remember that.

Nevery said I should study books called grimoires, and maybe I would remember. That was all right, because I liked to read. Most of the words in the grimoires were in a magical language that Nevery said had once been spoken by dragons. The words sounded strange and wonderful, but nothing happened when I spoke them.

The little lizard, which Nevery said was a dragon, kept following me around. I’d look up from a book I was reading and it’d be perched outside on the windowsill, shivering in the cold, but when I went over to let it in, it’d fly away.

One day, the wizard took me to see the red-headed girl, whose name was Rowan. She was the duchess and lived in the Dawn Palace. She had an office crowded with a desk piled with papers, and chairs and tables with lace doilies on them, a warm fire in the hearth, and trees in pots. On a cushion set on a chair was a white cat with splotches of black on it, curled up asleep. The cat looked like a predator, with a flat face and sharp ears. It opened one eye, looked me over, and then went back to sleep. The girl wore spectacles with gold rims.

“Hello, Connwaer,” she said, getting up from behind the desk and taking off her spectacles.

I didn’t answer.

She glanced at Nevery and he shook his head.

“Can I show you something?” she asked me.

I nodded.

She led me through the wide corridors of the palace. She and Nevery walked ahead, talking quietly; I followed, and then came two guards in green uniforms. One of the guards had a long, blond braid down her back and watched me with sharp gray-blue eyes.