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Chapter 2

Chapter 2

In all the wide city, the bridge was the one thing that always seemed the same. Between the training hall and his assumed role as a guardsman, Thorat had to stay mostly to the upper part of the city, even when he was in Anamat, so this place still felt like it belonged to his scrappling days. The row of stone houses shading the canal was bright in the afternoon sunlight, even as the whitewash peeled away from some of them. Thorat leaned over to watch his dark reflection in the canal waters. Down on those banks, he’d spent every night of a too-short season curled around Iola in sleep. They’d been scarcely more than children, but they’d bonded as surely as if they’d been lovers, more surely in some ways.

Now she shared her magic with the world, with the princes, and they didn’t understand it. What if they could see her truly, could see the dragons for what they were again? The world would dance to that mystery once more, and she would be even further out of reach to him than she was now. There was no going back. For one thing, they were too old to camp on the streets anymore. For another, he could smell the cold remains of a fire. Someone else was camping under the bridge.

A trumpet sounded from the top of the soothsayers’ hill, and he turned to see that one of the princes was coming to make his petition, to lie on Iola’s altar so that she could carry his unfelt offering to the dragons’ realm. Thorat stood at attention and saluted the prince’s train as it passed, Enomaean horses bearing the dragons’ gifts, as if horses didn’t hate the dragons. The moment his back was turned, someone climbed up the canal bank and landed soft-footed on the bridge beside him.

“Why did you want to meet here?” the scrappling girl demanded. He was sure now that she was a girl.

“It’s where I used to camp, the trading season that I was on the streets.”

“Just one season?” the girl asked.

“That’s how it used to be.” Thorat looked over his shoulder. It was bad enough to linger on the bridge alone but much worse to have a conversation there. Their voices would carry up the canal, even up the streets.

“Follow me,” he said. The girl followed close behind him as he climbed up the soothsayers’ hill.

At the next corner, he turned to her. “How long have you been in Anamat?”

“Dunno,” the scrappling said. “Three years or so.”

“And no apprenticeship yet?”

“The guilds all say they’re full, don’t have enough work for the journeymen even, with so many foreign goods in the market, and them not taking so many of ours away.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t find you before,” he said.

“We? And why?” the girl said with a sneer. “I do all right. I got my trade.”

“Picking pockets isn’t a trade.”

“It is,” she said.

Thorat shrugged. He turned off the main street at the next square, leading the girl into a long alley between houses. It was so narrow that a bridge connected two of the buildings above their heads. A short distance later, counting the houses as he went, he opened a wooden gate and walked into an even darker passageway, which dipped into a tunnel under a house.

Behind him, the girl hesitated.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re safe enough here. See?”

Ahead, a dragonlet’s eyes flickered in the darkness, then disappeared.

“Maybe,” the girl said. After a moment’s hesitation, she followed him through the gate, closing it behind her.

The underground passage was only five strides long, then the light of the sunset sky shone in from above. Three broad steps led up into a sheltered courtyard bounded by the kind of tall, well-kept houses that merchants and elder guildsmen favored, except for one that seemed to be abandoned. A ramshackle stair leaned against its outer wall, running all the way up to its attic story.

The girl had stopped. She looked around, puzzled.

“What’s wrong?” Thorat asked.

“I’ve never seen this place before,” she said. “I thought I knew every inch of this city.”

Thorat laughed. “I thought I did, too.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been here a while,” she said.

“Not as long as some. Come meet my...my aunt.”

“Sure, your aunt. Right.”

§

If Squid was going to go off sailing, there really was no reason to stay under the bridge, and since the guilds wouldn’t have her, it was either this or the temple. Eppie followed the mysterious guardsman, still wondering what could possibly be mysterious about a guardsman. She didn’t have much to lose. She might get a roof over her head. He wasn’t leading her to a brothel or the fallen temple. Those were down by the harbor and a lot easier to find than this place, whatever it was.

At the top of the stair, he told her to wait on the landing. A pair of potted geraniums bloomed there, as if whoever lived here cared more for the flowers than for the staircase. She had a pretty good view out across the city. Eppie reckoned that she was about halfway between the governor’s palace and the East Canal bridge, where she lived. It was a residential quarter, not far from the metalsmiths’ guilds, and across the East Canal from the Chroniclers’ guildhall. She traced the rooflines to try to figure out how they’d gotten there.

“You won’t be able to find it that way,” the guardsman said from behind, startling her. “Come in, but give me your name first.”

“They call me Eppie or just scrapper. Who are you?”

“Thorat,” he said, “or just ‘you there, guard!’ I often prefer it that way.”

Eppie nodded. “And this aunt of yours?”

He didn’t answer, just pulled the curtain aside and motioned for her to enter.

Eppie had been expecting some kind of cramped apartment with a low ceiling. Instead, a short set of stairs led down to what might have been the next-to-top story of the building except that it was open all the way up to the roof beams. It was a vast hall, as big as a temple sanctuary but plainer and dustier, lit by the sky’s fading light coming through broad slits under the eaves. As Eppie’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a glimmer on one of the side walls, metal reflecting the light of a lone torch. A row of swords hung there, a whole rack of them perfectly polished, at odds with their dusty surroundings. A barred set of double doors at the far end of the room looked like something out of a temple, too, but there were no priestesses there. If there were, it would have smelled better, like incense, not like dust and sweat and rot.

Someone coughed. Eppie turned to see old woman as she emerged from a back room behind a grimy curtain. A beam of light from the windows threw ridged shadows over the wrinkles around her squinting eyes. Her hair seemed to reflect the light in bursts, then fade back to reddish gray. She peered at Eppie for a long while, saying nothing and puffing on a curved pipe. She was smoking some sort of bitter, medicinal-smelling herb. The old woman was wearing boys’ clothes like hers, only a little less ragged. She beckoned for Eppie to come closer.

Eppie stepped forward, measuring the distance between them with her eyes. The old woman had a wildness about her, though mostly she looked like any other old woman: creaky knees, wrinkled hands, and sharp eyes.

“Thorat says you see dragonlets,” the old woman said. “Do you?”

“I don’t always.” Eppie let the words out slowly. What kind of person thought that it was good to see dragonlets, that it didn’t just mean you were crazy? “I don’t see what that has to do with anything. He said you need help with cleaning or something.”

The old woman shook her head at Thorat. “Is that what you told Anot, too?”

Thorat shrugged. “That was a while ago. I thought I’d be more careful this time.”

“Careful is never enough.” The old woman turned back to Eppie. “Can you fight?”

Eppie nodded. She could lay claim to some distinction in that field. “I’m not the best in the city, but I’m close.”

The old woman chuckled. “We’ll see about that.”

Something flew up into the air between them, though Eppie hadn’t seen the old woman, or Thorat, move. She caught it – just a small chunk of firewood, nothing more.

“Good enough reflexes,” the old woman said to Thorat. “You’re right about that much.”

“I wouldn’t have brought her if I didn’t think there was a chance.”

“A chance of what?” Eppie said. Outside, in the falling night, she was missing the best pickpocketing of the year. “What is this place?”

“It’s a training hall of sorts, but our requirements are different from most,” the old woman said.

Thorat nodded. “Some of the guardsmen at the palace and in the princes’ keeps learn just enough swordplay to ensure they can get the taxes from the farmers, but some of us train more, under teachers like…like this one.”

“I’ve met some of them,” the old woman said. “That’s not a flattering comparison.”

“My apologies, Your – Master.”

The old woman grunted. “We are a training hall, but we don’t brag of our existence in the marketplace, or anywhere. If you tell anyone that you’ve been here, I will not hesitate to hunt you down and silence you.”

Eppie took a step back. “But how?” she wondered aloud.

“You don’t want to know that,” Thorat said.

“I do, though.”

The old woman laughed. “You’ll have to find your way back here, then. If you can’t, there’s no sense telling you more.” She took Eppie by the arm and looked into her eyes. After a long moment, she nodded approval, then thrust Eppie away so smoothly that Eppie didn’t even realize what was happening until she landed on her back halfway across the floor, winded but uninjured. How did those old arms have such strength in them?

“Come tomorrow, then, if you can find us again,” the old woman said. “We can teach you to fight. After that, we’ll see.”

“I don’t need to learn to fight,” Eppie said. She bested Squid half of the times that they sparred, and he was the best fighter in the southeast quarter of Anamat. She did all right, just like she did with her pickpocketing, but she’d never thrown someone halfway across a room, not like that.

The old woman just laughed. “You don’t know how to fight. There’s more to it than catching blocks and not breaking apart when you land on your ass.”

“I’ll be back,” Eppie said.

“We’ll see,” the old woman replied. “Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

“Go on, now,” Thorat said. “Maybe we’ll meet again tomorrow.”

Eppie bowed clumsily to both of them and ran up the stairs. She paused on the landing and listened.

“I don’t know about this one,” the old woman was saying.

“What else do we have?” Thorat said.

“Nothing, or only a little more than nothing.”

“A bit more than nothing.”

Eppie felt sure that if she lingered any longer, they would find her there, so she hurried back to the bridge. On the way, she lifted a large bead from a country tanner’s pocket. It stank of dyes and lye, and she bought a whole loaf of festival bread with it, plus a jug of ale at the corner tavern. When she got back to the bridge, Squid and three new scrapplings were crouched beside the sputtering campfire, poking at it with sticks.

“Who are they?” Eppie asked him.

“Bunch of green-knees. I told them they had to get out of here, but then the watch came by. Are they gone yet?”

Eppie shrugged. “I didn’t notice. I brought some bread. You got anything?”

The green-knees leaned forward. Eppie could practically see their mouths watering. They were just scrawny kids from the provinces, their tunics in rags already. They shook their heads.

“You can’t live on nothing,” Eppie scolded them. “It’s Midsummer, best begging of the year.”

“We just got here,” one of the green-knees said.

“All right, here, have some bread. There’ll be more tomorrow at the temple. What do you have?” she asked Squid.

He held his hands out. “I got nothing. I spent the day at the docks, getting the lay of the land for that ship. I’m going tomorrow.”

“You really are going, aren’t you?” Eppie said.

Squid nodded.

“Well, I got enough to share,” Eppie said. “And I’ll be going too.”

“Where to?” one of the green-knees asked eagerly.

“Nowhere much,” Eppie said. “I got a job cleaning, big house.”

“Ha!” Squid said. “The only thing you know how to clean is the lint from peasants’ pockets.” He leaned toward her, reaching for her pocket with a strange, blank look in his eyes.

“Who’d bother with a peasant?” Eppie said, latching onto the insult, which galled her but wasn’t as unsettling as the suddenly predatory look in Squid’s eyes. He’d gotten like that once or twice before, but then he’d been normal again. Picking pockets had to be better sport than dusting out an old attic, even if it was full of swords. She reached for familiar ground. “Wanna fight about it?”

“Yeah.” Squid backed off so he could get to his feet, and they squared off across the open space. The green-knees backed away under the arch, watching as the two older scrapplings circled each other. Eppie and Squid knew every inch of the space, every dip and bump in the ground, where the bridge arched too low to walk beneath and where the wet stones would be slick on the edge of the canal bank. Eppie let Squid land the first punch – almost. Then she tried to grab his wrist, something like what that guardsman, Thorat, had done to her at the temple. She wrestled with it and he straightened up, then bam! He was on the ground and she punched him lightly on the ear for good measure.

“Ow,” Squid complained as he reached up to wrap an arm around her to help himself up. “You take that round.”

“Only fair,” Eppie said. “You’re the one who got the apprenticeship. Here, have some ale.”

§

The next morning was Midsummer Eve. Eppie left Squid and the green-knees still sleeping and set off to find the place that Thorat had led her to. She found the right alley – she was sure of it – but as much as she looked, she couldn’t find the right gate. Every one she tried opened onto a small garden or to laundry hanging in an alley. She paced up and down. The streets were garlanded with flowers. All the princes in the whole land of Theranis had gathered at the governor’s palace for their annual council, while every peasant, merchant, and guildsman had come to celebrate the ambassadress’s crossing by dancing around the bonfires until dawn. It was the best pickpocketing of the year, but there she was, pacing up and down an empty side street, wondering where in all the realms that gate had gone.

After a while, she gave up and went scavenging. By the time the gates reopened after midday, she’d found a heavy blanket with a hole burned in its middle and a broken-lipped clay jar. She carried them back to the bridge, where she found Squid collecting his things into a rough bundle.

“What did you get?” he asked.

“Just this.” She set down the jar and blanket.

“It’s not much.”

“So, what’d you get, then?” Eppie asked.

“This and that,” Squid evaded. “I don’t really need much, since I’m getting on that boat.” He settled his bag of loot under his head and closed his eyes.

Eppie tried to sleep too, in preparation for the night’s vigil – no one slept on Midsummer night – but she just couldn’t. She kept thinking about Squid’s stash of loot resting under his head, just near her, purses and coin and credit notes. Would he really get onto a ship? She probably would, if she were Squid, if she were dragon-blind and a boy. At least she was in Anamat, though. Better than being back in Lemirun, herding her older sister’s goats with no future to call her own. Her sister was probably married by now, maybe with a baby or two. She wondered if they even kept the Midsummer vigil there any more.

Eppie got up. She would just have to stay awake through the night somehow. Meanwhile, there were purses to be snatched, at least for one more day, before she fell into whatever new life was waiting to trap her. She set off toward the front of the temple, tempting fate. What if the priestesses saw her? She could run faster than they could, couldn’t she?

In the wide avenue before the temple gates, a group of men waited to be admitted for their audiences with the priestesses. Others sat in the nearby taverns, playing dice to try to raise their pile of beads high enough for the gate priestess’s approval. A crowd of half-drunk men should be easy pickings. Still, most of the trade beads and foreign coins in those pockets were meant to be offerings for the dragons, and it didn’t seem right to take them, even if the priestesses kept more than their share.

Sounds of the ceremonies inside drifted out over the walls, a gong being struck, drumbeats, singing. Eppie wandered away, up toward the palace. The palace hill temple was far less devout. Eppie had certainly never seen Anara on those towers, or even any dragonlets on the nearby walls. When she arrived, a chorus of priestesses was dancing just inside the temple’s main gate, chanting and playing on small drums.

“Bring your beads, bring your silks, bring the fire of your heart, lay it out, pave the way, join in the rite, send her to the deeper realms, let the dragons welcome her for all you have given.” “Her” obviously meant the ambassadress, and she was at the harbor temple, not here, as even a petitioner would know.

Eppie scanned the crowd for fools. There were plenty to choose from. At the far corner of the square Eppie spotted an especially tall man wearing an embroidered cape. He cast a sharp eye at the scene around him and frowned.

“Come,” he snapped at his page, who was a sickly-looking boy about her own height. Eppie sidled over in their general direction and crouched behind a donkey cart. She paid no attention to the two half-wit bodyguards who marched behind the prince and his page.

The page boy skittered along beside the prince, glancing around, nervous under his master’s shadow. He wouldn’t last a minute on the streets of Anamat. He’d get beaten up and wind up washing dishes at some tavern for the rest of his life. He was carrying something very carefully. Not carefully enough.

As the prince’s group approached her hiding place, the priestesses’ music changed, and the page boy turned his head to gawk. Eppie’s hand slid out and relieved him of his burden. By the time he looked back, she was halfway across the square, leaning casually against a baker’s oven, hidden in plain sight. Na’s blood, but that was easy!

“Kinner!” snarled the prince. “I have told you…”

Kinner—that must have been the page’s name—had stopped in his tracks, looking bewildered. He shrank away from the prince.

“Where is my purse?” the prince screamed at him.

Even the priestesses seemed to miss a beat. Every head in the crowd turned to look at the prince and his too-small retinue. It was a good time to leave, before the watch was on her tail. Eppie slunk off into the shadows. At the last moment, she glanced back at the page. He was crying. She hesitated. That prince would probably have one of the half-wit guards flog him. It wasn’t his fault that he was dazed by Anamat – everyone was.

The watch would be on this bit of thievery before she could say “Na’s blood,” so Eppie snapped back into motion and ran down an alley, over a garden wall, up a shed and onto a rooftop. She crawled over the tiles and dropped onto a narrow path along the bank of the west canal. She found a hole in the rocks and hid. The moments dripped by. She listened. No sounds of pursuit. She knew her trade well, even if that guardsman said that picking pockets wasn’t really a trade. He knew as well as she did that it took some skill. She leaned back against the rocks and steadied her still-too-noisy breath.

Soon, she was as quiet as the rocks, but it would be safer to wait a little longer, and waiting would give her a chance to see what she’d snatched. Whatever was in the purse felt solid, a faceted ball ridged on one side. Even through the thick fabric of the purse, it felt warm, alive. Eppie puzzled with the complicated knot for a while. It kept her still while she waited for the watch to blow past. She could just about hear Squid’s voice in her head, saying, “What’s wrong with a knife?” but the cords were thick, and the undamaged purse itself might fetch a few middling beads.

She had just about finished unraveling the knot when the watch came along. She could hear them from a good ways off. There were two of them on this loop. They thundered along the canal path on their boots, muttering the usual lines:

“Quiet!”

“What’s that over there?”

“Just a dog.”

“Cursed scrapplings.”

“We should send them all back to the provinces. Jail’s too full already.”

It was as if they’d forgotten that half the city watch had been scrapplings once too, all boys, of course. Even if she could have, that was one trade Eppie would never take up: the watch were her enemy. Soon they were gone, on up the canal.

She leaned a little bit out of the darkness to get some light on the last twist of the knot so she could pull the purse strings open. Inside, she found a few credit notes and bills, one from the weaver’s guild, another from the swordsmiths. She couldn’t read the marks, but she recognized the seals. A smaller purse inside held beads, about as many a prosperous journeyman might carry, not much for a prince. She transferred those to her own pocket. Finally, there was the heavy thing, wrapped in its own bag of purple-dyed glove leather. She’d never seen leather dyed purple before.

It was time to move on, to get back to the bridge for a last evening meal with Squid, but it would be the work of moments to open the bag. She untied the knot, pulled the strings, and looked in.

The stone within glowed faintly, even in the daylight. It was set in a casing of silvery metal and was heavier than she would have thought something so small could be. On the side of the casing opposite the stone was the seal, the deeply ridged pattern she’d felt through the two bags. A prince’s seal. Now, what was she going to do with that?

Eppie put the seal back into its bag and the bag back into its purse. She retied the strings as they’d been, bundled her find into her small sack, and set off down the canal to find Squid. After all, what good was getting a handful of the prizest loot in Anamat if Squid sailed off before she could brag?

A crowd swarmed along the waterfront, people staking out their places for the morning’s spectacle, for a glimpse of Anara as she flew back down to the dragons’ realm. Eppie joined the throngs, flowing along the sand. Squid never claimed a space there. Instead, he wove in and out, making fools of everyone. This year, he would be off at sea with the foreigners who fled before Anara made her yearly appearance, fearing the dragon’s curse if they breached Anamat’s seasonal ban on trade. It was Theranian tradition to stay in place during the waning year, to care for the harvest, to safeguard the ambassadress in her journey under the earth. Even the scrapplings honored it. Only minstrels and messengers traveled during the half-year when the ambassadress was with the dragons.

An Enomaean boat was tied up at the second dock, heavy in the water, its sailors checking the ropes, readying the ship to sail away. She saw no sign of Squid there, so she moved on. A Cerean boat lay at the next dock, and sure enough, Squid was perched on its bowsprit. She ran up the dock alongside.

“You’re really leaving?” she asked, shouting over from the dock.

“Hey, there! Sure am!” Squid said triumphantly.

“I got something to show you.”

“Hang on.” Squid looked to make sure that no one important was watching him, then tiptoed back along the rail to where he could jump onto the dock.

“What’ve you got?” he asked, sitting down and dangling his legs over the lapping water.

“Prince’s seal,” Eppie whispered. She loosened the purse strings so that he could see but not touch it. It glowed, even in the sunlight.

“Wow.” Squid looked at it appreciatively for a long moment. “Was it hard to catch?”

“Nah,” Eppie said. “Watch was pretty fast on my tail, though. Lost ’em quick enough.”

“Sure,” Squid said. “What are you going to do with it? You can’t hardly sell it, can you? I mean, everyone’ll know what it is and they’ll have you in the lock-house faster than you can take the money.”

“But…” He was right. “I can keep it,” she suggested.

“I got a better idea,” Squid said. “You give it to me, I’ll take it to Cerea, and I can sell it there and bring you back half the coin. You can swap the Cerean coin for Anamat trade beads, and we’ll both be rich, and not in the lock-house.”

It made a certain amount of sense, but she knew he’d take more than his share, and she didn’t like the thought of selling the seal over to Cerea, somehow. Eppie slipped it back into her pocket. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Got no time for that. We sail at midnight—foreigners don’t want the dragon to catch them.” He rolled his eyes, as if he didn’t believe in curses—or blessings, for that matter.

“You coming back?” Eppie asked.

“I dunno, we’ll see,” Squid said. “Maybe see you next trading season?” He had that look in his eyes again, but it was gone before she was sure of it. He jerked his thumb toward the shore, toward their canal as he sprang away from her. “Here comes the watch! I have to get back on board!”

With that, he jumped back onto the ship. Eppie checked to make sure that he hadn’t slipped off with anything of hers, then she sprinted the length of the dock, dodged through the crowds on the sands, and disappeared again into the back alleys. She found herself on the west canal once more and sidled along its banks until she reached the first bridge, where she strode back onto the main street as if she’d never stolen a thing in her life, and whistled on her way back toward the east canal bridge.

At the next square, she hesitated and changed course. She was going to look for that hidden courtyard again.

§

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