Rachel Aaron: The Spirit Rebellion: The Legend of Eli Monpress: Book 2

Banage watched the door as it drifted shut, the iron hinges trained after centuries of service to never slam. When the echo of her footsteps faded, Banage let go of the breath he’d been holding and let his head slump into his hands. It never got easier, never. He sat for a while in the silence, and then, when he felt steady enough to read whatever she had written him, he let his hand fall to the letter she had placed on his desk.

When he looked at the letter, however, his eyebrows shot up in surprise. The handwriting on the front was not Miranda’s, and in any case, she never addressed him as “Etmon Banage.” Curious, he turned the letter over, and all other thoughts left his mind. There, pressed deep into the soft, forest-green wax was an all-too-familiar cursive M .

Banage dropped the envelope on his desk like it was a venomous snake. He sat there for a few moments staring at it. Then, in a fast, decisive motion, he grabbed the letter and broke the seal, tearing the paper when it would not open fast enough. A folded letter fell from the sundered envelope, landing lightly on his desk. With careful, suspicious fingers, Banage unfolded the thick parchment.

It was a wanted poster, one of those mass-copied by the army of ink-and-block spirits below the Council fortress. An achingly familiar boyish face grinned up at him from the creased paper, the charming features older, sharper, but still clearly recognizable despite more than a decade’s growth. His mocking expression was captured perfectly by the delicate shading that was the Bounty Office’s trademark, making the picture so lifelike Banage almost expected it to start laughing. Above the picture, a name was stenciled in block capitals: ELI MONPRESS. Below the portrait, written in almost unreadably tiny print so they could fit on one page, was a list of Eli’s crimes. And below that, printed in tall, bold blocks, was WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE, 55,000 GOLD STANDARDS.

That’s what was printed, anyway, but this particular poster had been altered. First, the 55,000 had been crossed out and the number 60,000 written above it in red ink. Second, the same hand had crossed out the word WANTED with a thick, straight line and written instead the word WORTH.

“Eli Monpress,” Banage read quietly. “Worth, dead or alive, sixty thousand gold standards.”

A feeling of disgust overwhelmed him, and he dropped the poster, looking away as his fingers moved unconsciously over the ring on his middle finger, a setting of gold filigree of leaves and branches holding a large, murky emerald as dark and brooding as an old forest. He stayed like that for a long, silent time, staring into the dark of his office. Then, with deliberate slowness, he picked up the poster and ripped it to pieces. He fed each piece to the lamp on his desk, the heavy red-stoned ring on his thumb glowing like a star as he did so, keeping the fire from spreading anywhere Banage did not wish it to spread.

When the poster and its sundered envelope had been reduced to ash, Banage stood and walked stiffly across his office to the small, recessed door that led to his private apartments. When he reached it, he said something low, and all the lamps flickered, plunging the office into darkness. When the darkness was complete, he shut the door, locking out the smell of burnt paper that tried to follow him.

Eli Monpress, the greatest thief in the world, was strolling through the woods. His overstuffed bag bounced against his back as he walked, and he was whistling a tune he didn’t quite remember as he watched the late afternoon sunlight filter through the golden leaves, bringing with it a smell of cold air and dry wood. So pleasant was the scene, in fact, that it took him a good twenty paces to realize he was walking alone.

He stopped on his heel and spun to see Josef, his swordsman, sitting twenty paces back in the middle of the path with Nico, Josef’s constant shadow, sitting beside him. Beside her, Josef’s famous sword, the Heart of War, stood plunged into the hard-packed dirt, and beside it lay the enormous sack of gold they’d liberated from Mellinor’s sadly destroyed treasury. Despite the fine weather, none of them looked happy.

Eli heaved a dramatic sigh. “What?”

Josef stared right back at him. “I’m not taking another step until you tell me exactly where we’re going.”

Eli rolled his eyes. This again . “I told you before. I told you this morning , we’re going to see a friend of mine about getting Nico a new coat.”

“I didn’t ask what we were going to do when we got there.” Josef folded his arms over his chest. “I asked you, where are we going ? We’ve been walking vaguely north for almost a month now, and since yesterday we’ve been walking in circles around the same four miles of woods. This is the second time today we’ve passed that beech tree, and I’m tired of lugging your ill-gotten gains.” The sack of gold jingled as his large fist landed on it. “Admit it,” the swordsman said, giving Eli a superior sneer. “You’re lost.”

“I am not.” Eli threw out his arms, taking in the scant undergrowth, rocky slopes, and slender, white-barked trees of the small valley they were in the middle of climbing out of. “We’re in the great north woods, which the Shapers call the Turningwood, and the Council of Thrones doesn’t have a name for because we left the Council maps a week ago. Specifically, we are in the Thousand Streams region of the Turningwood, a name you might appreciate, considering all the valleys we’ve had to climb through. Even more specifically, we are in the northeast corner of the Thousand Streams, where the streams are slightly less numerous. A little farther north and we’d be in the foothills of the Sleeping Mountains themselves, and a little farther east and we’d hit the frozen swamps on the coastal plain. So, as you see, I know exactly where we are, and it is exactly where we are supposed to be.”

Despite such a grand display of navigation, Josef did not look impressed. “If we’re where we’re supposed to be, why are we still walking?”

Eli turned and started up the hill again. “Because the house of the man we are looking for isn’t always in the same place.”

“You mean the man isn’t always in the same place,” Josef said, making no sound of following him.

“No.” Eli panted as he reached the crest of the valley. “I mean the house. If you don’t like it, complain to him.”

“ If we ever find him,” Josef said.

Eli shook his head and started down the other side of the hill, wishing that the swordsman would apply his stubbornness to something useful, like being a perfect gold carrier, or finding them something tastier than squirrel to eat. By the time he’d reached the bottom of the next valley, Josef had still not crested the ridge of the one before. Eli grimaced and kept walking, though more slowly and with one ear out for the sound of jingling gold, which would tell him if this was just a Josef bluff or if he was actually going to have to go back and push the man up the hill. Fortunately, the decision was rendered moot when he took another step forward and found nothing but air.

He yelped as the world spun upside down and sideways. Then, with a sharp pain in his ankles, it stopped, and he found himself hanging high in the branches of a tree. Blinking in surprise, Eli looked down, or up, depending, and saw he was strung up by his ankles in the branches of a large oak. That much he’d been prepared for, but how he was hanging took him by surprise. Instead of ropes, a knot of roots with dirt still clinging to them bound his feet, ankles, and lower legs. They moved as he watched, creaking with a sound very much like snickering. He was still staring at the roots and trying to figure out what had just happened when he heard Josef come over the hill. Eli craned his neck and started to yell a warning, but it was too late. The second Josef was off the rocky ravine, a snaking cluster of roots erupted from the ground and grabbed his feet. The swordsman flew into the air with a lurch and came to rest neatly beside Eli.