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kasihyaI'm typing this up because my notebook isn't working for me these days, and I need to keep writing this. And if silly chapter titles are what it takes to make me feel better about posting a draft online, then so be it: silly chapter titles it is. Cheesy song lyrics everywhere!
Title: he's become a one-man rise in crime
Character: Neirin
Location: Dein Efyd
Date: Day One
The vase caught my eye as Taran and I made our way back from the fields. It sat in a window, second level of the draethyr’s manor house: orange and black designs, what looked like a battle scene painted onto the bottom swell. I stopped in my tracks when I saw it, and tried to make out the individual figures in the scene, see if I could tell what story it was.
‘Hey, bird brain! I’m gonna go home without you, you don’t hurry,’ said Taran.
I ignored the insult - it was weak, especially by his standards. ‘You see that?’ I pointed up to the vase.
Taran turned around and bounced over next to me, following the path of my hand. ‘Yes, that I do,’ he announced.
‘It’s neat. I like it.’ Battle scenes in our city’s art were always good; I liked the way that the draethyr’s artisans made them look. Elegant, and every piece of it had a purpose. It wasn’t like real fighting at all, which has lots of inconvenient, useless bits, and usually wasn’t conducted in fancy costumes.
Taran looked from the vase to me, and back again. ‘You think they’d give it to me if I asked really nicely?’ I snorted. ‘Yeah, maybe not.’ He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘I never got you nothing for the equinox festival, did I?’
Oh, no. I could see the thoughts tumbling around in that empty head of his. ‘Yeah, you did. Remember, we had that scrawny little dog that night, yeah?’ I grabbed his hand and made as if to drag him along, back home. He yanked away and grinned at me, wide and delighted.
‘Nah, that hardly counts. That was a present from Madoc, anyway. Here, look. Watch for me.’ Taran glanced around at the street, empty save for a few women walking together at the other end. They were far away, and it was getting dark enough that I had trouble picking out the designs embroidered into their clothing. White background, red and yellow and … blue or green. Tiroethyr either way, same as us, but with more money. If we needed help, it’d be a crapshoot whether they’d help us or not.
‘Taran, stop it. I didn’t get you nothing special, either,’ I told him.
‘So?’
‘Where would we put it, anyway?’ I could usually get through to him with practicality, but not this time. Not for the first time - not even for the first time today - I wondered how I’d ended up calling someone so boneheaded my brother.
He just looked at me like I was the brainless one in this situation. ‘We ain’t gonna keep it. You admire it for a while, then we sell it to the Cysgoth merchants next time they come through. Watch out, I’m going up.’
‘Taran, you’re going to get yourself caught, you idiot. It ain’t about the money, come on. Let’s go home.’ He turned his attention to the wall underneath the window. ‘I’m leaving, Taran. I ain’t looking out for you,’ I told him, and started to walk away. He’d come - he always came. I reached the end of the back wall of the draethyr’s manor, and snuck a glance over my shoulder.
Taran had his fingers hooked into the niches of the limestone, dangling a few feet off the ground while his feet scrambled for toeholds. With the sun nearly down, the muddy color of his skin blended in a lot better with the red of the walls than you’d expect at first glance. He was really going to do this? Really? I swore under my breath and jogged back to him.
‘You’re an idiot,’ I told him, as I took up my position: back against the wall, so that I would have a clear view of anything coming from either end of the street. My breath started faster, and I clenched my fists to keep my hands from shaking with tension while Taran scrambled up near my head. The three women at the end of the street turned right onto the road leading to the main plaza. A couple of voices inside the manor house made my heart jump, but I stood still and made myself keep calm. The walls were so thick that in order for someone to see us from inside, they’d have had to lean all the way out of the window near the far end of the wall. We’d done this before; it was not the safest thing ever, but not half as risky as some of the other things Taran had pulled. I kept that forefront in my mind as he hissed, gripping a crack in the mortar with his hands and kicking around. I grabbed his foot and guided it to my shoulder.
‘Thanks, Nye,’ he whispered.
‘Don’t break none of my bones,’ I hissed. He shifted his weight to press down on my shoulder; I brought my hands back up to steady him. With a sharp intake of breath that told me he was putting too much weight on the tips of his fingers, probably scraping back his nails, Taran pushed off me, and only the last two years of practice kept me from toppling over under the pressure.
I risked a glance away from the deserted street - most people would be in their homes, eating the evening meal by now - to check on him. He held on tight to the carved faces underneath the window ledge, sticking his fingers into the eye holes of the Enwythau god we liked to call Old Goggle Eyes in order to keep himself steady. He paused underneath the windowsill, listening for people in the room instead of charging ahead like he usually did. A little bit of tension unknotted in my chest; no matter now many times he proved that he was able to stay quiet and sensible, I always got afraid that he’d forget and get one of us hurt.
‘Anytime you want, you can come down,’ I said, as loud as I dared. Taran kicked the wall over my head in response.
‘Ain’t no one here. Catch, will you?’
I stepped back from the wall and turned around. Taran had his elbows hooked onto the windowsill, hands around the vase. It was a little bigger than his head, not too heavy, but he was at an awkward angle. I held out my hands to let him know that I was ready.
Taran twisted around, still clinging to the windowsill on one side, and held out the vase. I bent my knees to absorb the impact as it fell into my hands. ‘Got it,’ I said. Above, I heard his hiss of delight as he climbed down to head height, then jumped the rest of the way to the ground. In spite of myself, and how dumb the whole thing was, I had to laugh at how giddy he looked, like a little kid or something.
I passed him the vase, because I didn’t want to carry it all the way back to our house. He took it with a grin, like it was the biggest joke in the world.
‘Let’s go now,’ I said. It was still a stupid idea, even if he managed to get the thing off of the second floor windowsill. He nodded, and I walked away, towards home. After a few steps, I looked over my shoulder to make sure that he was behind me, and that was when everything went to hell. In the first floor window, a man in the heavy padding and the armbands of one of the draethyr’s guards looked out. If I’d have just kept going, he might not have seen us, but as it was, I froze. Just for an instant, long enough for Taran to notice and take action — “action” meaning that he stepped up to say ‘See you back at the house’ and prod me with a finger before taking off; at the same time, the guard and another one came leaping through the window after us.
I swore under my breath and took a running start in the opposite direction from Taran. The streets were more or less deserted, like I said, which would work against me until I managed to get somewhere more crowded. The guards shouted after me, like that would make me stop. Like I didn’t already have two strips of writing running down my arm, always a warning that the next time I got caught, I’d be sent to the market. No way was I going to give myself up.
I ran down the street past the smaller thatched houses for the draethyr’s household. The narrow paving stones sometimes stabbed into my bare feet, but I ignored them as best I could because I could hear the slapping of sandals on the street behind me. They started out a respectable distance away, but one set drew closer. I made sure there were no immediate obstacles ahead before I risked turning around. Just a glance — not enough for anyone to memorize my face — just enough to tell me that I had one man after me, ten feet behind and carrying both rope and an obsidian dagger.
‘Stop!’ he cried.
I didn’t answer. I said the quickest of prayers to the Shapeshifter, for speed, and pushed myself to go faster as I rounded the corner and made a beeline for the farther parts of the city. A half-second later, the guard behind me swore, and I heard the scraping noise of leather sandals skidding on cobblestone.
And that, I thought to myself, is why I don’t try to take sharp corners in shoes. (Or wouldn’t, if I’d owned shoes.) It’d only buy me a yard or so, but thirteen feet was a huge difference from ten. The fear flooding my body settled back to good, energy-giving levels, and I pushed forwards to the Mud District with slightly higher hopes.
My chance came when me and the guard, I led him down the first tiroethyr-owned street. Home. I saw flickering firelight in the big inn there, heard voices, and ran inside with fifteen feet to spare.
The inn was oddly lit and smoky, three fires in the main room and only one exit for the smoke. Perfect. I picked a group of boys about my own age, who sat on the floor playing dice, and rolled into a sitting position to join their group.
‘Guard’s after me,’ I explained.
The boy next to me nodded, and handed me the dice, throwing an arm around my shoulders while someone else yanked off my head cloth and stuffed it under his knees. When the draethyr’s guard burs through the door a moment later, I was rolling the dice for a shouting group of tiroethyr my own age, everyone bent over together, with my back to him. The boy across from me gave a shout of triumph and leaned across the circle to snatch up the stone chips and muss my hair with more force than was strictly necessary.
‘Quiet!’ shouted the guard to the inn at large. Everyone fell silent and looked at him — me included, from underneath the thick fringe that now fell over my eyes. ‘I’m searching for a fugitive from justice — a thief who thought to steal from the draethyr herself. I saw him enter here.’
The man’s face was menacing, and the knife hung meaningfully in his hand, but the inn stayed quiet. The guard growled. ‘I know you would protect your own, but it will go harder on you if you do.’
More silence. A little girl with her parents dropped an empty bowl on the ground with a thump. She giggled with nerves, and her mother hushed her. I didn’t even dare to hold my breath, for fear that it would draw attention to myself.
The guard breathed heavily into the silence. And then — across the inn, a woman stood. Her friend tugged on the cloth of her dress, shaking her head, and the woman slapped away her hand.
‘He went out the back,’ she said, pointing at the window onto the next street over. ‘It … it looked like he was heading left.’
‘No, no, it was right, sir,’ said another man, without any real conviction but with a hopeless glance at the woman.
The guard smiled. ‘Thank you. I will pray that the Four Armed Deity doesn’t punish you for your faithlessness to your own people.’ He pushed through the knots of people around low tables and sitting on the floor, and vaulted through the window with a clatter of necklaces against his chest. The inn stayed quiet for as long as it took for his footsteps to fade to the left; then the conversation and chatter resumed, with a few curious glances in my direction.
‘Did you really?’ asked the boy with my head cloth.
I brushed the dirt off as he handed it over, and tried to tie it back into my hair — without much success. Taran usually did mine in the mornings. ‘Kind of. My brother’s idea, not mine, but you know, I still had to go along with it.’ I smiled.
‘Where’d your brother get to?’ asked someone else.
I bit my lip. ‘Dunno. We split up as soon as he saw the guards.’
The boy who’d messed with my hair furrowed his brow. ‘Just a question, and this is a long shot, but your brother … he’d not happen to be called Taran, would he?’
‘Who wants to know?’ I leaned forwards to see him better in the smoky light, and then he tilted his head just so and I recognized him. ‘Oh! Other Neirin!’
Other Neirin grinned at me. ‘I thought that was you. Couldn’t afford to be too sure.’
‘You know the thief?’ asked the boy sitting next to me.
‘We met once or twice.’
‘He’s Taran’s family,’ explained Other Neirin. And there was a loud chorus of ‘oh’ and ‘sure’ from the rest of the group.
‘Funny coincidence,’ remarked the other boy. ‘You both being Neirin.’
I had to shake my head and grin. ‘Believe me, I’ve done a hell of a lot of poking him, trying to figure out why, out of all the tiroethyr in the city, my brother’s gotta see something in the one with my name.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s got nothing to do with you, and everything to do with me being charming.’ Other Neirin stuck out his tongue. His circle of friends roared with laughter.
‘Yeah, I ain’t so sure.’ I passed the dice back to their original owner, and stood up. ‘Listen, I got to find my way home, make sure that Taran got back all right. I owe you all; so if you ever need anything in the way of small stuff, or a place to stay overnight, you can find me, yeah?’
‘Appreciate it,’ said the other boy. ‘We’ll remember.’
‘Neirin,’ said Other Neirin. ‘Tell Taran I said hey, and also he needs to stop doing stupid stunts.’
‘I ain’t telling him nothing. It’ll just make him go all moony-eyed, and then I got to put up with that shit,’ I retorted, but I’d probably end up telling him anyway. He thought it was hilarious when I met up with his friends, or vice versa.
Before I left, I went around to the woman and man who had lied to the guard for me. They sat around a table raised a foot off the muddy ground, eating quinoa bread, and looked startled when I dropped down between them. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Yu didn’t have to do that.’
The woman glanced down at my left arm, with its bright green writing. I couldn’t read, but I knew well enough what the curling scribbles meant: thief, first day of the fifth month, year 5171; and below it, from elbow to wrist, assault on an Enwythau merchant, twentieth day of the first month, year 5172. ‘You’re tiroethyr, right?’ she said. ‘You didn’t kill anyone this time. It’s good enough for me.’
‘I just knew she would make me do the cooking at home if I didn’t help her,’ said the man. But I could see the writing on his own arm, green for stealing, and it made me feel just a little less like I owed him so much. I didn’t mention it.
‘I’m glad I don’t get to deal with that yet,’ I said instead, all seriousness.
‘Don’t press your luck,’ the woman warned me.
‘Yes, m’am.’ I stood. ‘Thanks again. I owe you.’
‘We’ll remember,’ she said.
I left the inn the same way I’d gone, just in case the guard came back, and then I hung around the house of a mute widower for a little while to be on the safe side. By the time I left, night had fallen completely, and I had to pick my way through the streets by the light of a crescent moon and just be grateful that it wasn’t cloudy. Home was another mile away, on the edge of the ‘city’ and the ‘state’ parts of the city-state of Dein Efyd. The paving on the streets stopped and turned into dirt just beyond the inn, and plots of farmland started cropping up more frequently. I’d heard that in some of the cities closer to the river, they had crops planted right up to the center of the city, but Dein Efyd was far enough out on the plain that it didn’t matter so much.
The moon had risen to silhouette the temple that rose up in a pyramid at the center of the city, outlined black against the stars, when I reached the compound where Taran and I lived. It ought to have belonged to a proper family, aunts and uncles and cousins and a storehouse, but by the time Taran and I had got there — nine years old and lost as anything — it’d been taken over by other people. The main family’s hut had been claimed by Madoc the former butcher and a trio of lame warriors missing limbs or eyes, or both. In the other main building lived a man who cared for his idiot sister: a grown woman, but she talked like a girl of five. No one had lived in the storehouse since Parry and his son got hauled off to the market at the end of last rainy season; and in the weaving house, there was me and Taran. It used to be we’d share it with Ceir, but she was gone now. Whores don’t live long if they don’t go through the right Enwythau channels.
I walked into the compound and immediately felt safer, even though I knew there wasn’t any actual difference between inside and out. But Madoc’s deep voice boomed out of his house; the simple woman sand a mindless tune while her brother accompanied her with a drum; and firelight flickered in their houses.
Our house was dark.
My mouth dried, and my pulse doubled in two seconds flat when I saw the dark entrance at the far end of the compound. Calm down, I told myself, as I jogged across the dirt. You know how useless Taran gets sometimes — he probably just forgot how to start a fire. Right. Yeah, that’s it.
‘Taran!’ I called, as I arrived at the doorstep. There was no answer. I stepped inside and away from the open doorway, letting in what light was around and checking the room to see if he was hiding in a dark corner, waiting to jump out at me. He had a habit of thinking that was a good idea. But he wasn’t there.
‘Taran?’ I repeated, and I heard the panic in my own voice. No. Maybe he just didn’t come back yet. Maybe he was being sensible, for once, and not rushing to get home before it was safe. Maybe he did get back, and went to show off his prize to Madoc. Yeah. That was it. I forced myself to walk back to his house, not run, because why worry? Nothing bad had happened.
Madoc was in the middle of telling a story to his three companions when I stuck my head in the doorway. ‘Apologies for the intrusion,’ I started, because Rhys, the one missing an arm, was a stickler for tradition, ‘but have you seen Taran recently?’
The four exchanged glances that did nothing to undo the knot in my stomach. ‘Can’t say I’ve seen him since this morning,’ said Madoc.
‘Can’t say I’ve ever seen him,’ cackled blind Sion.
‘Did something go wrong?’ asked Madoc.
I swallowed at the phrasing. ‘I … don’t know. We split up this evening, and I skipped out, but I ain’t so sure about him.’ I ain’t seen him since. I’m scared of him getting caught and sent to the market. It was all because I was too busy watching him, instead of watching out for him like I was supposed to.
(Even if it was his own stupid fault for wanting to get me that vase.)
Madoc surveyed me with the same level stare that he gave everything except food. ‘I hope that nothing has happened to him. I like that kid. I’ll pray to Four Arms for his safe return.’
‘We all will,’ said Rhys.
‘Thank you.’ I bowed myself out of the house, and went back to ours. I found a collection of wood stored in its usual corner, and started a fire. I didn’t bother eating, because Taran would kill me if I didn’t wait for him. Then, with light restored, I curled up on the bed with a knife and a piece of wood to carve, and I waited.
chapter two
Title: he's become a one-man rise in crime
Character: Neirin
Location: Dein Efyd
Date: Day One
The vase caught my eye as Taran and I made our way back from the fields. It sat in a window, second level of the draethyr’s manor house: orange and black designs, what looked like a battle scene painted onto the bottom swell. I stopped in my tracks when I saw it, and tried to make out the individual figures in the scene, see if I could tell what story it was.
‘Hey, bird brain! I’m gonna go home without you, you don’t hurry,’ said Taran.
I ignored the insult - it was weak, especially by his standards. ‘You see that?’ I pointed up to the vase.
Taran turned around and bounced over next to me, following the path of my hand. ‘Yes, that I do,’ he announced.
‘It’s neat. I like it.’ Battle scenes in our city’s art were always good; I liked the way that the draethyr’s artisans made them look. Elegant, and every piece of it had a purpose. It wasn’t like real fighting at all, which has lots of inconvenient, useless bits, and usually wasn’t conducted in fancy costumes.
Taran looked from the vase to me, and back again. ‘You think they’d give it to me if I asked really nicely?’ I snorted. ‘Yeah, maybe not.’ He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘I never got you nothing for the equinox festival, did I?’
Oh, no. I could see the thoughts tumbling around in that empty head of his. ‘Yeah, you did. Remember, we had that scrawny little dog that night, yeah?’ I grabbed his hand and made as if to drag him along, back home. He yanked away and grinned at me, wide and delighted.
‘Nah, that hardly counts. That was a present from Madoc, anyway. Here, look. Watch for me.’ Taran glanced around at the street, empty save for a few women walking together at the other end. They were far away, and it was getting dark enough that I had trouble picking out the designs embroidered into their clothing. White background, red and yellow and … blue or green. Tiroethyr either way, same as us, but with more money. If we needed help, it’d be a crapshoot whether they’d help us or not.
‘Taran, stop it. I didn’t get you nothing special, either,’ I told him.
‘So?’
‘Where would we put it, anyway?’ I could usually get through to him with practicality, but not this time. Not for the first time - not even for the first time today - I wondered how I’d ended up calling someone so boneheaded my brother.
He just looked at me like I was the brainless one in this situation. ‘We ain’t gonna keep it. You admire it for a while, then we sell it to the Cysgoth merchants next time they come through. Watch out, I’m going up.’
‘Taran, you’re going to get yourself caught, you idiot. It ain’t about the money, come on. Let’s go home.’ He turned his attention to the wall underneath the window. ‘I’m leaving, Taran. I ain’t looking out for you,’ I told him, and started to walk away. He’d come - he always came. I reached the end of the back wall of the draethyr’s manor, and snuck a glance over my shoulder.
Taran had his fingers hooked into the niches of the limestone, dangling a few feet off the ground while his feet scrambled for toeholds. With the sun nearly down, the muddy color of his skin blended in a lot better with the red of the walls than you’d expect at first glance. He was really going to do this? Really? I swore under my breath and jogged back to him.
‘You’re an idiot,’ I told him, as I took up my position: back against the wall, so that I would have a clear view of anything coming from either end of the street. My breath started faster, and I clenched my fists to keep my hands from shaking with tension while Taran scrambled up near my head. The three women at the end of the street turned right onto the road leading to the main plaza. A couple of voices inside the manor house made my heart jump, but I stood still and made myself keep calm. The walls were so thick that in order for someone to see us from inside, they’d have had to lean all the way out of the window near the far end of the wall. We’d done this before; it was not the safest thing ever, but not half as risky as some of the other things Taran had pulled. I kept that forefront in my mind as he hissed, gripping a crack in the mortar with his hands and kicking around. I grabbed his foot and guided it to my shoulder.
‘Thanks, Nye,’ he whispered.
‘Don’t break none of my bones,’ I hissed. He shifted his weight to press down on my shoulder; I brought my hands back up to steady him. With a sharp intake of breath that told me he was putting too much weight on the tips of his fingers, probably scraping back his nails, Taran pushed off me, and only the last two years of practice kept me from toppling over under the pressure.
I risked a glance away from the deserted street - most people would be in their homes, eating the evening meal by now - to check on him. He held on tight to the carved faces underneath the window ledge, sticking his fingers into the eye holes of the Enwythau god we liked to call Old Goggle Eyes in order to keep himself steady. He paused underneath the windowsill, listening for people in the room instead of charging ahead like he usually did. A little bit of tension unknotted in my chest; no matter now many times he proved that he was able to stay quiet and sensible, I always got afraid that he’d forget and get one of us hurt.
‘Anytime you want, you can come down,’ I said, as loud as I dared. Taran kicked the wall over my head in response.
‘Ain’t no one here. Catch, will you?’
I stepped back from the wall and turned around. Taran had his elbows hooked onto the windowsill, hands around the vase. It was a little bigger than his head, not too heavy, but he was at an awkward angle. I held out my hands to let him know that I was ready.
Taran twisted around, still clinging to the windowsill on one side, and held out the vase. I bent my knees to absorb the impact as it fell into my hands. ‘Got it,’ I said. Above, I heard his hiss of delight as he climbed down to head height, then jumped the rest of the way to the ground. In spite of myself, and how dumb the whole thing was, I had to laugh at how giddy he looked, like a little kid or something.
I passed him the vase, because I didn’t want to carry it all the way back to our house. He took it with a grin, like it was the biggest joke in the world.
‘Let’s go now,’ I said. It was still a stupid idea, even if he managed to get the thing off of the second floor windowsill. He nodded, and I walked away, towards home. After a few steps, I looked over my shoulder to make sure that he was behind me, and that was when everything went to hell. In the first floor window, a man in the heavy padding and the armbands of one of the draethyr’s guards looked out. If I’d have just kept going, he might not have seen us, but as it was, I froze. Just for an instant, long enough for Taran to notice and take action — “action” meaning that he stepped up to say ‘See you back at the house’ and prod me with a finger before taking off; at the same time, the guard and another one came leaping through the window after us.
I swore under my breath and took a running start in the opposite direction from Taran. The streets were more or less deserted, like I said, which would work against me until I managed to get somewhere more crowded. The guards shouted after me, like that would make me stop. Like I didn’t already have two strips of writing running down my arm, always a warning that the next time I got caught, I’d be sent to the market. No way was I going to give myself up.
I ran down the street past the smaller thatched houses for the draethyr’s household. The narrow paving stones sometimes stabbed into my bare feet, but I ignored them as best I could because I could hear the slapping of sandals on the street behind me. They started out a respectable distance away, but one set drew closer. I made sure there were no immediate obstacles ahead before I risked turning around. Just a glance — not enough for anyone to memorize my face — just enough to tell me that I had one man after me, ten feet behind and carrying both rope and an obsidian dagger.
‘Stop!’ he cried.
I didn’t answer. I said the quickest of prayers to the Shapeshifter, for speed, and pushed myself to go faster as I rounded the corner and made a beeline for the farther parts of the city. A half-second later, the guard behind me swore, and I heard the scraping noise of leather sandals skidding on cobblestone.
And that, I thought to myself, is why I don’t try to take sharp corners in shoes. (Or wouldn’t, if I’d owned shoes.) It’d only buy me a yard or so, but thirteen feet was a huge difference from ten. The fear flooding my body settled back to good, energy-giving levels, and I pushed forwards to the Mud District with slightly higher hopes.
My chance came when me and the guard, I led him down the first tiroethyr-owned street. Home. I saw flickering firelight in the big inn there, heard voices, and ran inside with fifteen feet to spare.
The inn was oddly lit and smoky, three fires in the main room and only one exit for the smoke. Perfect. I picked a group of boys about my own age, who sat on the floor playing dice, and rolled into a sitting position to join their group.
‘Guard’s after me,’ I explained.
The boy next to me nodded, and handed me the dice, throwing an arm around my shoulders while someone else yanked off my head cloth and stuffed it under his knees. When the draethyr’s guard burs through the door a moment later, I was rolling the dice for a shouting group of tiroethyr my own age, everyone bent over together, with my back to him. The boy across from me gave a shout of triumph and leaned across the circle to snatch up the stone chips and muss my hair with more force than was strictly necessary.
‘Quiet!’ shouted the guard to the inn at large. Everyone fell silent and looked at him — me included, from underneath the thick fringe that now fell over my eyes. ‘I’m searching for a fugitive from justice — a thief who thought to steal from the draethyr herself. I saw him enter here.’
The man’s face was menacing, and the knife hung meaningfully in his hand, but the inn stayed quiet. The guard growled. ‘I know you would protect your own, but it will go harder on you if you do.’
More silence. A little girl with her parents dropped an empty bowl on the ground with a thump. She giggled with nerves, and her mother hushed her. I didn’t even dare to hold my breath, for fear that it would draw attention to myself.
The guard breathed heavily into the silence. And then — across the inn, a woman stood. Her friend tugged on the cloth of her dress, shaking her head, and the woman slapped away her hand.
‘He went out the back,’ she said, pointing at the window onto the next street over. ‘It … it looked like he was heading left.’
‘No, no, it was right, sir,’ said another man, without any real conviction but with a hopeless glance at the woman.
The guard smiled. ‘Thank you. I will pray that the Four Armed Deity doesn’t punish you for your faithlessness to your own people.’ He pushed through the knots of people around low tables and sitting on the floor, and vaulted through the window with a clatter of necklaces against his chest. The inn stayed quiet for as long as it took for his footsteps to fade to the left; then the conversation and chatter resumed, with a few curious glances in my direction.
‘Did you really?’ asked the boy with my head cloth.
I brushed the dirt off as he handed it over, and tried to tie it back into my hair — without much success. Taran usually did mine in the mornings. ‘Kind of. My brother’s idea, not mine, but you know, I still had to go along with it.’ I smiled.
‘Where’d your brother get to?’ asked someone else.
I bit my lip. ‘Dunno. We split up as soon as he saw the guards.’
The boy who’d messed with my hair furrowed his brow. ‘Just a question, and this is a long shot, but your brother … he’d not happen to be called Taran, would he?’
‘Who wants to know?’ I leaned forwards to see him better in the smoky light, and then he tilted his head just so and I recognized him. ‘Oh! Other Neirin!’
Other Neirin grinned at me. ‘I thought that was you. Couldn’t afford to be too sure.’
‘You know the thief?’ asked the boy sitting next to me.
‘We met once or twice.’
‘He’s Taran’s family,’ explained Other Neirin. And there was a loud chorus of ‘oh’ and ‘sure’ from the rest of the group.
‘Funny coincidence,’ remarked the other boy. ‘You both being Neirin.’
I had to shake my head and grin. ‘Believe me, I’ve done a hell of a lot of poking him, trying to figure out why, out of all the tiroethyr in the city, my brother’s gotta see something in the one with my name.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s got nothing to do with you, and everything to do with me being charming.’ Other Neirin stuck out his tongue. His circle of friends roared with laughter.
‘Yeah, I ain’t so sure.’ I passed the dice back to their original owner, and stood up. ‘Listen, I got to find my way home, make sure that Taran got back all right. I owe you all; so if you ever need anything in the way of small stuff, or a place to stay overnight, you can find me, yeah?’
‘Appreciate it,’ said the other boy. ‘We’ll remember.’
‘Neirin,’ said Other Neirin. ‘Tell Taran I said hey, and also he needs to stop doing stupid stunts.’
‘I ain’t telling him nothing. It’ll just make him go all moony-eyed, and then I got to put up with that shit,’ I retorted, but I’d probably end up telling him anyway. He thought it was hilarious when I met up with his friends, or vice versa.
Before I left, I went around to the woman and man who had lied to the guard for me. They sat around a table raised a foot off the muddy ground, eating quinoa bread, and looked startled when I dropped down between them. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Yu didn’t have to do that.’
The woman glanced down at my left arm, with its bright green writing. I couldn’t read, but I knew well enough what the curling scribbles meant: thief, first day of the fifth month, year 5171; and below it, from elbow to wrist, assault on an Enwythau merchant, twentieth day of the first month, year 5172. ‘You’re tiroethyr, right?’ she said. ‘You didn’t kill anyone this time. It’s good enough for me.’
‘I just knew she would make me do the cooking at home if I didn’t help her,’ said the man. But I could see the writing on his own arm, green for stealing, and it made me feel just a little less like I owed him so much. I didn’t mention it.
‘I’m glad I don’t get to deal with that yet,’ I said instead, all seriousness.
‘Don’t press your luck,’ the woman warned me.
‘Yes, m’am.’ I stood. ‘Thanks again. I owe you.’
‘We’ll remember,’ she said.
I left the inn the same way I’d gone, just in case the guard came back, and then I hung around the house of a mute widower for a little while to be on the safe side. By the time I left, night had fallen completely, and I had to pick my way through the streets by the light of a crescent moon and just be grateful that it wasn’t cloudy. Home was another mile away, on the edge of the ‘city’ and the ‘state’ parts of the city-state of Dein Efyd. The paving on the streets stopped and turned into dirt just beyond the inn, and plots of farmland started cropping up more frequently. I’d heard that in some of the cities closer to the river, they had crops planted right up to the center of the city, but Dein Efyd was far enough out on the plain that it didn’t matter so much.
The moon had risen to silhouette the temple that rose up in a pyramid at the center of the city, outlined black against the stars, when I reached the compound where Taran and I lived. It ought to have belonged to a proper family, aunts and uncles and cousins and a storehouse, but by the time Taran and I had got there — nine years old and lost as anything — it’d been taken over by other people. The main family’s hut had been claimed by Madoc the former butcher and a trio of lame warriors missing limbs or eyes, or both. In the other main building lived a man who cared for his idiot sister: a grown woman, but she talked like a girl of five. No one had lived in the storehouse since Parry and his son got hauled off to the market at the end of last rainy season; and in the weaving house, there was me and Taran. It used to be we’d share it with Ceir, but she was gone now. Whores don’t live long if they don’t go through the right Enwythau channels.
I walked into the compound and immediately felt safer, even though I knew there wasn’t any actual difference between inside and out. But Madoc’s deep voice boomed out of his house; the simple woman sand a mindless tune while her brother accompanied her with a drum; and firelight flickered in their houses.
Our house was dark.
My mouth dried, and my pulse doubled in two seconds flat when I saw the dark entrance at the far end of the compound. Calm down, I told myself, as I jogged across the dirt. You know how useless Taran gets sometimes — he probably just forgot how to start a fire. Right. Yeah, that’s it.
‘Taran!’ I called, as I arrived at the doorstep. There was no answer. I stepped inside and away from the open doorway, letting in what light was around and checking the room to see if he was hiding in a dark corner, waiting to jump out at me. He had a habit of thinking that was a good idea. But he wasn’t there.
‘Taran?’ I repeated, and I heard the panic in my own voice. No. Maybe he just didn’t come back yet. Maybe he was being sensible, for once, and not rushing to get home before it was safe. Maybe he did get back, and went to show off his prize to Madoc. Yeah. That was it. I forced myself to walk back to his house, not run, because why worry? Nothing bad had happened.
Madoc was in the middle of telling a story to his three companions when I stuck my head in the doorway. ‘Apologies for the intrusion,’ I started, because Rhys, the one missing an arm, was a stickler for tradition, ‘but have you seen Taran recently?’
The four exchanged glances that did nothing to undo the knot in my stomach. ‘Can’t say I’ve seen him since this morning,’ said Madoc.
‘Can’t say I’ve ever seen him,’ cackled blind Sion.
‘Did something go wrong?’ asked Madoc.
I swallowed at the phrasing. ‘I … don’t know. We split up this evening, and I skipped out, but I ain’t so sure about him.’ I ain’t seen him since. I’m scared of him getting caught and sent to the market. It was all because I was too busy watching him, instead of watching out for him like I was supposed to.
(Even if it was his own stupid fault for wanting to get me that vase.)
Madoc surveyed me with the same level stare that he gave everything except food. ‘I hope that nothing has happened to him. I like that kid. I’ll pray to Four Arms for his safe return.’
‘We all will,’ said Rhys.
‘Thank you.’ I bowed myself out of the house, and went back to ours. I found a collection of wood stored in its usual corner, and started a fire. I didn’t bother eating, because Taran would kill me if I didn’t wait for him. Then, with light restored, I curled up on the bed with a knife and a piece of wood to carve, and I waited.
chapter two
