Thorn (22 page)

***

Violet’s secret friend shows up to dinner come evening, his hair slicked back from a recent wash, his clothes carefully mended. From the way he embraces Ash and ruffles Rowan’s hair it is clear they are old friends, his appearance no great surprise. Despite Violet’s best efforts, Ash and Oak maneuver the young man to sit between them. I am introduced to him simply as ‘Thorn,’ and he, with a polite nod, turns his eyes to Violet and keeps them there. His name, I learn in turn, is Massenso.

Massenso brings more news of the city. He tells us that Lord Melkior, in his capacity of High Marshall, has ordered a crackdown on the thieves in the city, and I think with some guiltiness of Red Hawk.

“The king thinks they are a danger, but they’re only thieves,” Rowan observes. “Not snatchers.”

“Snatchers?” I query when no one answers this.

“Slavers,” Ash explains, his voice quickening with anger. “Melkior would do well to track them down instead.”

“But surely you don’t,” I stumble.
Menaiya? Have trouble with slavers?
“You mean the slavers—”

“Snatch our young women and children,” Rowan finishes for me. “From the street, from their beds, from wherever.”

I glance around at my friends, aghast. Their faces are hard, but they do not speak.

“Thieves are also a danger,” Oak rumbles. “Perhaps not as much as the snatchers, but the feuds between the thieving rings must be stopped or there will be blood on the streets.”

“I would take Red Hawk any day over the snatchers,” Violet says lightly. “They say he’s not all bad.”

I nearly choke on my bread.

“That’s right,” Ash agrees, pouring water into my cup. I drink it thankfully. “A good man with a thousand gold coins as bounty for his head.”

“A thousand gold coins?” I echo, nearly spilling my water. In all the time I have worked, I have not yet earned a silver.

Violet nods. “He’s the leader of the ring of thieves based in the South side.”

“Not like Bardok Three-Fingers on the East side or the Black Scholar on the West. They’ve only got five hundred a piece.” Rowan winks at me.

“It will be the death of him one of these days. One of his men will take it, hand him over, and retire into the country to live on their own private estate. Greed’s a powerful thing,” Laurel says.

“What has he done?” I am painfully certain that I do not want to know.

“He’s stolen from half the nobles and our wealthiest merchants, not to mention the king himself. I expect his victims have pledged to pay the reward in return for his death,” Massenso tells me.

“Why?”

“Because he stole from them,” Ash repeats.

“No, I mean, why does he steal? Where does the money go?”

Massenso shrugs. “To hear the king’s men, he’s a power-hungry bully, buying his way into every dark business there is. Though no one believes he deals with the snatchers.”

“He takes care of his own,” Ash adds. “He hires poor folk who have nothing to live on and gives them enough to get by. There’re probably a hundred street urchins who would give their lives for him, for the coppers he tosses their way to keep their eyes open for him. But he’s playing his own games too, setting by a store for himself. If he’s wise, he’ll know that he can’t keep on without getting caught.”

“I’ve heard enough of Red Hawk to hope he doesn’t get caught,” Rowan says bluntly. “Better him than the Black Scholar.”

The others shoot him warning glances but none contradict him, Laurel simply turning the conversation away altogether to the delegation from Chariksen, visiting from far across the Winter Seas.

“Finally!” Tarkit cries as I turn down the alley the next morning. Beside him, his two friends gather up their marbles. “We waited
forever.
Come on.”

“Sorry.” I have arrived a full hour earlier than usual, but clearly not early enough. We start down the alley together. “Who are your friends?”

“I’m Torto!” the first boy pipes up. “I’m ten, and my Papa’s gonna apprentice me to a carpenter.”

“That’s nothing,” Tarkit boasts. “I’m gonna be a baker. I start tomorrow!”

“Who is your master?” The question unleashes a flood of information, including the size of the shop, the number of apprentices, the new set of shoes he will be given, and how his first task will be to draw water for all the baking. When he pauses for breath, and perhaps to dredge up any additional details he has somehow left out, I turn to the third boy. “And what’s your name?”

The boy, by far the youngest and the dirtiest of the three, shrugs his shoulders and looks to Torto.

“That’s my brother,” Torto explains. “His name is Fen but he doesn’t speak to no one.”

I nod knowingly. “He’s shy.”

“No, he stopped talking. He doesn’t talk to no one now, not even our Mama.”

“Why?”

“He got snatched,” Tarkit whispers. “They found him and he was all hurt and beat up bad. He got better but he didn’t ever talk again after that.” Fen glances at Tarkit, then up at me, his small body tense.

“I’m sorry,” I say without thinking.

“It’s not your fault.” Tarkit looks at me curiously.

“No,” I respond, but I am not sure what I mean by it.

“Anyhow, he doesn’t remember it.”

“What?”

“Being snatched,” Torto pipes in. “Whenever we get back one of the snatched, they have to be blessed. The snatchers put a curse on them, the Darkness, but the blessing makes it okay.”

“What’s the Darkness?”

The boys look at me in surprise. “It’s just the Darkness,” Tarkit says. “Their minds go dark. But the blessing saves them from that.”

“By taking their memories?”

“Just of the snatching, sometimes a little more than that. And who would want to remember that anyway?”

I frown, fighting a niggling sense of wrongness over a ‘blessing’ that takes your memories whether you want to keep them or not. Clearly this is something the boys accept, though. They lead me through a wide cobbled square. A set of gallows have been erected here, and while they are empty, their solid, enduring presence brings a dark gloom to the square. A beggar sleeps curled up against the platform, shielded from the wind. “What is this place?” I ask, forcing myself to move onto another topic.

“Hanging Square,” Tarkit says as indifferently as if we were passing through his kitchen.

Torto, noting my stare, expands on this. “It’s where all the bad people are killed. Sometimes they chop off their heads instead of hanging them.”

Torto proceeds to describe a particularly gruesome tale of an execution where a murderer made an ill-fated attempt to escape with his head intact, only to be mobbed and torn to pieces. I try not to listen, letting his story patter past me, and at the first opportunity ask more about his apprenticeship. So, between carpentry and baking, we arrive at Tarkit’s home.

Tarkit lives in a rundown yellow-brick building. Refuse litters the street, though the stained halls have been swept clean. The slightly warmer air wafting out of the occasional opened door brings with it the stink of dirty bodies. I clench my teeth as we descend to the basement, ducking through a low door covered by a cloth into a dark room. I stumble to a halt.

“Is that Lady Thorn, Tarkit?” a woman asks, her voice gravelly.

“Yes, Mama. I brought her to see you like I said.”

“Light us a candle and go play out front. Stay near, hear me? You’ll walk her back.”

“Yes, Mama,” Tarkit lights a stubby candle, throwing a wavering yellow light over a woman lying huddled in blankets on her sleeping mat, a stool beside her. Tarkit leaves the candle on the stool and departs, Torto and Fen right behind him.

“Good evening,” I say, dipping my head to the woman.

“Come closer, lady. I want to see your face.”

I kneel beside the sleeping mat, meeting the woman’s gaze. Her features, ravaged by illness and hard living, still shows traces of youth. While her eyes are old, her cheeks are yet smooth; while her brow is furrowed with wrinkles, her lips are still firm and pretty. Her hair has a sprinkling of gray. I would guess her to be barely more than a handful of years past my own.

“You’re a pretty girl,” she says, smiling. “Tarkit told me about you, and then I heard that he’d been given an apprenticeship. People don’t do that, you know, pay for a whole apprenticeship just like that. I asked Artemian and he wouldn’t say at first, but then he said it was you.

“I wanted to thank you, lady. You’ve given my Tarkit what I always wished for him. I’d given up hope of getting Tarkit a place once his father died.” She reaches out and grasps my hand, her own hard and knobby, her fingers stiff as claws. I wonder if her feet are equally deformed, her legs bent by illness and cold, leaving her bedbound. “Thank you,” she says.

“I didn’t,” I hesitate, clear my throat, start over. “Tarkit’s a good boy. He helped me. I’m glad I could help him back.”

“No,” she says. “You weren’t paying a debt. You know that. I just wanted to see your face and thank you myself. That’s all.”

I nod, at a loss for words. She pats my hand and asks me what I do, and we talk for a few minutes about the geese and the stables. Then I say good-bye and walk back outside.

Tarkit greets me with a shout, Torto and Fen racing up alongside him. “We’ll show you the city now, okay?”

I hesitate, but I had told Joa that I might be late returning. “Alright.”

“We’ll start with the well,” Torto says imperiously. “The others will be there.”

The well lies only a short walk away, a small stone circle at the center of a square, a bucket lying beside it attached to an iron ring by rope. A group of children play around the well. As we near them my escort breaks into a run, shouting names. They are swallowed immediately by the group, disappearing into a dizzying swarm of arms, legs and heads.

“Who’s that?” one voice cries. The little figures turn to look at me as one.

“Yeah, Tarkit, who’s that came with you?”

“Oh, that’s Thorn.”

“Yeah?” says one of the boys. He stands about a head taller than Tarkit, his face long and his ears protruding like the two handles of a jug. “Where’d she come from?”

“She works down in the king’s stables,” Tarkit explains. “But she used to live out in the country, and now she’s the friend of a friend.” The children look me over with interest.

“There aren’t any country girls that work in the stables,” says one of the girls.

“That’s right,” I agree. “I’ve been staying in the stables but I’m actually a goose girl.”

“Goose girl!” cries one of the boys. “Honk! Honk!” He is joined at once by the rest of the group, who honk and scronk in a most un-goose-like manner, milling around me and yanking at my cloak and skirts.

I stare down at them, momentarily speechless, then burst into laughter. “You’d better be grateful I don’t mistake you for my geese. I’ve got a staff I keep just for them.” I catch hold of the nearest girl and give her a good tickle. She shrieks and breaks free at the same time two boys jump on me, holding on tight as leeches. I stagger to the side, tickling one while I try to wriggle free from the other. Just as I get free of him, two girls reach up to tickle me as well. With a cry, I go down in a mass of arms and legs, tickling as fiercely as I can amid shouts and howls of laughter.

“Okay!” I cry as three more children throw themselves on top of me. “Mercy! Mercy!” The children take a few more minutes to calm down, but as I offer no further resistance they eventually allow me to sit up.

“She’s okay,” says the jug-eared boy. I look around at them, their thin faces and sharp elbows, their ragged clothing and unkempt hair. Their breath makes puffs of smoke before them so it is as though I look through a mist at them, as if they are fading even as I watch.

“Yeah,” Tarkit says as he picks himself up off the ground.

“And what’s your name?” I say to the boy.

“I’m Lakmino,” he says, raising his chin proudly.

I nod knowingly. “Of course. And what are the rest of your names?”

They introduce themselves in what amounts to a shouting match, jumping up and down and shoving each other. While I manage to catch at least three names, within a moment I have lost which little person each name belongs to.

I push myself to my feet. “Since I’m new to the city, why don’t you tell me what I should know about it?”

The children glance at each other, then to Lakmino.

“Well,” he says importantly, “We know everything that happens here.” The other children nod in agreement. “Don’t ever go out after dark. There are good thieves and bad thieves, and the bad ones go out at night, and sometimes they steal people.”

I flinch, even though the common room conversation last night should have prepared me for this.

“It’s true,” says one of the boys from the back. “They snatched my sister last year, and we didn’t never find her.”

“Yeah,” Tarkit says. “And they snatch children too, like Fen. So you better be careful.”

“Tell her about the guards,” whispers a girl.

Lakmino takes the cue. “Don’t go to the guards if you need help. They’ll only laugh at you unless you have money. You can come find us, and we’ll get you help. My brother’s big and strong, and so are Gira and Moté’s brothers.” The other children nod and mutter their agreement.