David Chandler - Den of thieves

He had to admit it was going to make the wedding night complicated. But perhaps they could find a way to release her from her magical burden.

“Come away with me,” he said. “Tonight. Get away from the villa and meet me. We’ll be on a ship, sailing for some pleasant southern beach before he even knows you’ve left him.”

“You think it’s that simple?”

“I think it can be, if we choose it.”

She lowered her crust of bread to the table and looked at it very carefully, as if she could read the future there. Perhaps she could. “He would not allow it. I must be near him for our connection to work. He would grow wroth.”

“Let him pout! What harm can he do us? He wouldn’t dare hurt you.”

“It’s not myself I’m worried about,” she told him. She looked up into his eyes. Her own were untouched by magic images. They were clear and very honest, and brooked no falsehoods. “He has my mother under his thumb. Should he desire it, he could extinguish her life with a wave of one hand.” She reached toward his cheek but did not touch him, only mimed the gesture, her palm hovering a fraction of an inch above his skin. She’d had a long time to learn how not to touch other people. A very long time to live with no one touching her. “Oh, Croy. You should never have come back.”

He stood up quickly from the table, scattering the crumbs of cheese he’d been toying with. “You said you needed to report in. That it would mean trouble if you were late.”

“So I did,” she told him. She rose from the table and wrapped her cloak tightly around herself, furling it over her arms so her hands were safely inside the garment. “You can’t escort me any further, of course, or he’ll see us together.” She headed for the door, but turned before she slipped through it to take one last look at him. “Try to forget me. I’m lost, Croy.”

“You’re enslaved. Which is exactly what your mother was trying to protect against when she enchanted you. Hazoth is precisely the kind of enemy she wanted to forestall. Yet now he uses her against you. You’ve been captured by him as easily as if he had used sorcery to compel you.” The words were harsher than he’d meant them to be. He had no right to speak to her like that, he thought, and shame burned in his cheeks.

“It’s like I said,” she told him. “Not every trick he pulls is by magic.” And then she was gone.

It took Malden the better part of the day to scrub the shit out of his clothes. He couldn’t afford to hire a washerwoman, and he certainly didn’t want to answer any questions she might have had, so he did it himself down by the river Skrait, rubbing his cloak against smooth rocks until its color was almost back to normal and it didn’t stink. When the time came, he told himself-when he was in Cutbill’s firm employ, and able to earn for himself-he would never have to wash his own clothes again.

Perhaps it would happen tonight.

He had been very worried after leaving Castle Hill that he might be arrested at any moment. The torturer got a good look at his face, after all, and could have reported his description to the watch. So he had spent the predawn hours slinking from one darkened part of the city to the next, spying on every cloak-of-eyes he could find, watching them to see if they were alerted and searching for a thief. And they had been-a woman, in a velvet cloak, in a little boat. Cythera. They were looking for Cythera.

Which perhaps explained why she had not been waiting for him when he left the pipe and unceremoniously fell into the filthy river. He supposed he could not blame her for fleeing once the guards spotted her. In the midst of the confusion in the palace above, they would be unlikely to listen to whatever story she spun for them. She could have ended up in the strap herself.

He would just have to make contact with her or with Bikker somehow, and make proper arrangements for handing over the crown. Which might be difficult if they were being sought by the watch-most likely they would have gone to ground. Still, he possessed ways to find them the authorities lacked. It would just take a little digging.

On his way back from the river he decided, though, that he could afford to rest and lie low for a day. He was exhausted from his nocturnal jaunt, and his hands ached and desperately needed to be idle for a while. He was also starving, as he hadn’t eaten since the day before.

So he took his time heading home. Down in his part of the Stink, the river ran flat and wide through a district of fishermen’s homes, all built on stilts to weather the annual springtime flood. He climbed up a bank thick with salt grass, where coracles and punts lay overturned, the tar between their timbers softening in the sun. The fishermen sat in their boats, to keep them from being stolen, waiting for the tide to turn. In the meantime they laughed and joked amongst themselves as they repaired their nets with thick, scarred fingers. They eyed him warily but without comment. Surely it wasn’t the first time they’d seen a furtive figure, his clothes drenched with river water, come up the bank and slinking away in the early morning light. He hoped it happened often enough they wouldn’t remember him when he was gone.

A short flight of stairs brought Malden up to the high street, where he bought a day-old loaf and three gulps of wine ladled out of a barrel. It was better fare than he often ate, but he was hungry enough to spend the extra coin. He picked apart the bread as he wended his way up the street, careful not to step in anything that might ruin his newly clean shoes. The houses here leaned over the roadway, their upper stories built out so far they were nearly touching. Even in the midday the shadows were thick under the eaves. He sat for a while on a horse trough to finish the meal, and watched the comings and goings of his neighbors.

The people of the Stink dressed plainly, and few among them had clean faces-in fact, most bore the pockmarks of long-healed disease, or other signs of bad diet and unsanitary living. None of them could read or write, and by the age of twenty-five even the most comely of girls looked old and stooped.

“ ’Ware below,” someone shouted from above his head, and a cobbler’s apprentice in the street had to dodge a cascade of garbage and filth poured out a second floor window. His leap sent him sprawling into a sawyer and they both went down in a heap, the woodchopper’s load of firewood spilling out onto the cobbles. The man pulled the boy’s ears for that, and demanded that he help pick up the wood, but the boy merely made a rude gesture and hurried on. Across the street a goodwife stepped out into her dooryard, her face flushed from the heat in her kitchen. She fanned herself with her apron for a moment, then hobbled back inside and back to her endless tasks. She had to work constantly to feed her family, and to have enough left over to sell so she and her husband could make the rent.

These people were miserable, and their lives meant nothing. Malden had never felt like one of them, even if he lived among them. And yet he wondered, as he often did, what his life could have been had he tried to be an honest man.

Not, of course, that he’d had much choice in the matter. The son of a whore-the bastard son of a whore-could never rise far. He had learned both letters and figures as a child, and kept the books for his mother’s house, but such skills were useless to one of his station. No merchant would ever have trusted him to add up accounts. By the time he’d left the brothel, he was too old to apprentice in any lucrative trade. He could have given himself over to unskilled labor, and broken his back unloading ships or carrying goods to market for farmers too poor to own a cart. He thought he would not have lasted long at that business, though. He would have turned to drink, to soothe his sore muscles, and wasted that tiny pittance of money he earned.