The Thief Queen's Daughter (14 page)

“How—how do you know my name?” he stammered.

The young woman looked for the first time at Ven, then at Clemency. Then she shook her head.

“No, I’m sorry, I have nothing for you two,” she said briskly. “You must both have had happy childhoods—or acceptable ones.” Her attention returned to Char. “But you, now—you were robbed of yours fairly early, weren’t you, Char?”

Ven glanced at his friend. Char was trembling violently.

“Let’s go,” he said, taking him by the shoulder.

“Wait!” said the young woman quickly. “If you leave now, Char, you may never get the chance to find it again.”

Char’s eyes were focused straight ahead. He shrugged off Ven’s hand and walked slowly up to the booth.

The woman within the stall smiled again. She reached under the counter and pulled out a tiny glass box with a purple oval stone set in the top.

“How—how much?” Char asked, his voice shaking.

“Char—don’t,” Ven said, but his words seemed to be swallowed again by the mist in the alley.

The woman’s smile grew brighter, and her cheeks took on a rosy glow. “For the whole box—one thousand gold crowns,” she said sweetly.

Char’s face went slack. “I—I don’t have that kind of money,” he whispered. “I prolly won’t see that much in my whole lifetime.”

The woman nodded. “Some people are willing to spend everything they gain in a lifetime to recapture their lost childhoods,” she said. Her voice was smooth as caramel candy. “That’s a high price to pay. But for a single gold piece, I would be willing to let you see a moment of yours.”

“I—I—”

“Leave him alone,” said Ven angrily. “You’re a cheat and a charlatan! Nobody can buy back childhood. Come on, Char, let’s get out of this place.”

“Shut up!” Char snapped; his eyes were glowing with interest and fear. He fumbled in his pockets and produced the single gold piece the moneychanger had given him, then held it out, his hand quivering, to the young woman.

Her hand shot out quickly, like all the other hands of the sellers in the market, and snagged the coin. Then she slid the box with the purple stone forward on the counter.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Have a peek.”

Slowly Char took hold of the top of the box and raised it.

Ven looked inside. There was nothing in it, just a velvet lined bottom the color of a cloudless sky.

“You tricked him,” Clemency accused. “Give him back his gold piece.”

The woman’s smile grew brighter still. She looked at Char, who was staring into the box, his eyes glistening.

“Do you want your coin back, Char?” she asked, amused.

“No!” Char gasped, his voice harsh. “Shhhhhh.”

“That’s all one gold piece buys you, I’m afraid,” she said to Char regretfully. “But you can take it if you want.”

She opened the box again. Char reached in quickly, and pulled his hand back as she closed the top again, gently this time.

“I—I could work for it,” Char said. Ven was alarmed by the intensity in his voice. “I can cook, an’ I have experience as a deckhand—”

The woman nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose we could arrange something like that.”

“No! Char, snap out of it!” Ven shouted, shaking his roommate by the arm. With Clem’s help he dragged Char, struggling, away from the table, away from the woman with the warm, black eyes, down the street of the Stolen Alleyway, and back into the bright light of the late afternoon in the open air of the Outer Market.

Ven did not stop until he had reached the well in the center of the street. He pushed Char down onto the well’s rim, then hauled up a bucket and splashed the water from it in his friend’s face.

“What happened?” he asked as Char shook his head, spattering drops of water everywhere. “What did you see in that box?”

Char looked down at the cobblestones of the street.

“I can’t explain,” he said finally. “Happy times, the warm grass—maybe a picnic. Images of things in my memory that didn’ make no sense at the time, and don’t now. But they were
real;
she wasn’t fakin’ me. Especially this.” He opened his hand.

In it was a red glass bead.

“I remember this,” Char continued. “I’m not sure how, but I remember being held and playing with this. Maybe a whole string of ’em.” He turned the bead over in his hand. “And the smell of lemon and roses. I remember that still, too. Whoever was holdin’ me smelled like lemon and roses.”

“Did you see anyone’s face?” Clem asked.

Char shook his head.

In the distance, near the main gate, a bell clanged harshly.

All around them, the visitors to the Gated City looked up, checked the tokens around their necks, and began finishing up their shopping.

“That’s the warning bell,” said Clemency, looking nervous. “One hour, and the city closes for a whole week.”

“We can’t abandon Saeli here,” said Ven. “She’ll never get out on her own. We have to keep looking.”

“There’s no way Nick made it back to the inn already,” added Char. “And even if he did, no one’s gettin’ back here before those bloody gates close.”

“Where do you suppose the constable is?” Clem asked as a group of shoppers stopped for a drink at the well before heading to the gates.

“Feedin’ whoever’s in the jail supper about now,” said Char. “He’s not comin’ in here. He’s got no authority here, anyway.”

“I hope he’s not feeding Ida,” said Clemency. “If she got arrested for stealing, that would just make our day perfect.”

Ven ran his hand over his chin, stopping to rub the single whisker on it.

“She’s not in jail,” he said. “She only gets caught when she wants to.” His head began to itch fiercely. “You know, maybe she
wasn’t
lying. Maybe when she said she knew her way around the Gated City, she was telling the truth.”

“Well, that would be a first,” muttered Char. “You think a street kid with no money has been inside a market that costs ten gold crowns to get inside ‘a bajillion times’?”

“Maybe not a bajillion,” said Ven. “But maybe
once.
I don’t know—it doesn’t make sense, but there’s no harm in trying at this point. For the next hour we need every pair of eyes that we can get.”

“I’ll go get her.” Clem stood up and pulled Char up from the well’s edge with her. “I can be back in fifteen minutes. I know all her favorite hunting grounds in Kingston.” She held up Saeli’s lost token. “I’ll need to use this to get her in, so we may have some trouble getting everyone out. But we can jump off that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, you two keep looking for Saeli. We’ll meet by the soup pumpkin in the market square.”

“Go,” Ven agreed. His gaze wandered to the ladders that led to the streets in the air. “I think maybe we need to be looking at things from a new angle.”

N
OW THAT THE WARNING BELL HAD RUNG, THE FESTIVAL NO
longer looked the same as it had in the bright morning sun.

The shops and the kiosks had begun to close. The colorfully dressed street people looked sweaty and tired, their clothes soiled after a long day. Instead of the bright smiles they had worn that morning, their faces were grimly set as they worked to complete the breaking down of the festival. The streets were covered with litter.

The two boys passed the food merchants, who were putting away their wares. The appetizing smells from earlier in the day had given way to a sick, greasy stench of doused charcoal and bleach.

Two men were taking apart the soup pumpkin. What that morning had appeared to be an enormous shell of a real giant squash actually was nothing more than a big metal pot, like a tin bathtub, with molded paper around it to make it look as if it had been real.

Char sighed in disappointment.

“Well, the soup tasted good, anyway,” he said. “Even if it really wasn’t a magical soup pumpkin.”

“When I first went to see him, the king said something about court magicians and the real magic in the world,” Ven said as they hurried past barkers and street folk carrying away boxes and bins of sad-looking hats and toys. “It’s hard when you realize that most of the ‘magic’ that you see is fake.”

He thought back to the king’s words as they sat alone in the Royal Puzzle Room.

My father had a court full of magicians and conjurers, as did his father before him, and every other high king in history. I sent them all away when I became king, because I saw what they did as tricks, as amusement. I kept my Viziers
—
they are advisers who can see things that others can’t. The chief Vizier, Graal, is very old, and very wise, and Galliard is his student, also very knowledgeable. But all the men in funny hats making snakes out of silk scarves that used to work in the palace are now out there among the people, entertaining children with their tricks. Because, as king, I only wanted to see the real magic in the world, so that I could learn from it, and preserve it.

“It’s pretty weird having a friend your age who goes and chats regular with the
king,
” Char said grumpily. “Just about now, I’m kinda wonderin’ how good a friend of yours that king really is, considerin’ he sent us in here in the first place.”

Ven stepped over a mound of soiled paper cones in the street that had once held fried apples.

“No, he didn’t,” he said, his eyes scanning the buildings at the harbor side of the square in the First Row. “I think I am beginning to see why he fired me, though. Maybe he could only suggest I come here as my friend, not as the king, because he couldn’t be responsible for what might happen.”

“Well, that’s pretty
sick,
” said Char. “If a king can’t be responsible for somethin’, who can be? Hey—where are we goin’, anyway?”

Ven looked both ways before crossing the street to the side of the First Row that ran north along the harbor.

“Remember how I said we might need to look at things from a new angle?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

Ven stopped in front of a wooden ladder that went up to the elevated street he had seen earlier that morning. A sign next to it with an arrow pointing up read
SKYWALK
.

“How about a bird’s-eye view? What do you say we take a look for Saeli from up here?”

Char’s thin face brightened. “That’s a
great
idea, mate!” he said. “We might actually see somethin’ from above. Good thinkin’.”

“Don’t get too excited yet,” Ven said. “One step at a time.”

Quickly, like they were summiting the mast of the
Serelinda,
the two boys climbed the ladder up to the walkway above the street.

When they got to the top, they had to stop in amazement.

The rooftops of the Gated City seemed to hold a totally different world from the one that was visible from the streets. Past the beautifully carved arches at the front of the roofs that could be seen from below were gardens blooming with flowers, many with neat rows of vegetables and even small fruit trees. There were pathways between the housetops, all of which stood side by side with no alleyways between. Some of the children that had been listening to the Singer’s tales were running between the house roofs, playing.

A fresh breeze blew here that was missing in the streets, free from the walls that surrounded the lower part of the city. In the distance he could see the top of the northernmost light tower of Kingston harbor, far away.

How sad it must be to live so close to the sea, and yet be held prisoner within tall walls with archers,
he thought. The sea where he lived in Vaarn had always called to him, singing him songs of adventure, of lands beyond his hometown. He listened to it every night when he was falling asleep, dreaming of other lands, other places he wished to see. He wondered if the residents of the Gated City wished for that adventure as much as he had.

From above they could see the last of the Market Day visitors heading out of the city, while more and more workmen were taking the festival apart. He tried to look beyond the gates for a sign of Clemency or Ida, but could see nothing due to the presence of a very large guard tower near the Kingston end of the Skywalk.

Ven turned around and looked the other way, where the Skywalk led deeper in, north, toward the Inner Market.

The houses began to fade past the First Row, taking on the decaying gray look they had seen out behind Mr. Coates’s shop and in the Stolen Alleyway.

“This way,” he said to Char, who sighed and nodded.

The elevated wooden sidewalk had no handrails, no edges. It was as if a giant had ripped a pier out of the harbor and had placed it at the level of the roofs. The planking bounced and swayed beneath their feet as they walked, two floors above the street.

“It’s a really good thing you started life as a sailor, Char, and that I grew up in a shipbuilding family,” said Ven as he made his way down the Skywalk.

“Why’s that?” Char asked, hurrying after him.

“Because we’ve both had a lot of experience climbing rope riggings and on moving decks,” Ven said. “The Skywalk is clearly not intended for visitors. Regular people up here wouldn’t have a chance—between the lack of a railing and the wind, they would fall to their deaths. This is meant to be a tool for the
thieves,
not the common folks from Kingston.” He glanced around. “In fact, at this point it’s probably a good idea to hide our Market Day tokens. By now everyone who lives here expects the visitors to be gone. We probably don’t want to stand out if we don’t have to.” He took the ribbon from around his neck and stuffed it into his pocket.

“Right,” Char mumbled as he did the same. “An’ people are more likely to try an’ steal ’em from us now.”

They passed the east-to-west end of the First Row, where Mr. Coates’s shop and the fabric store stood, then the alleyway behind it, where the streets began to fade to gray.

They stopped when they came to the area above the Stolen Alleyway. Ven could see the mist from a distance of about two streets away. Even from above, it clung to the buildings there, hiding whatever was within the alleyway from view.

At the edge of his vision he could see another wall like the one that surrounded the city, this one running east to west, inside, across the whole of the Market. It, too, had guard towers. The Skywalk seemed to end a few dozen feet before that inner wall, dropping off to the cobblestones below.

In the middle of the wall was a guarded gate.

Shaped like a keyhole.

Ven’s blood ran cold.

“Oh boy,” he whispered to Char. “That’s it—that’s the Inner Market.”

“Well, maybe Saeli’s still somewhere in this part of the Outer Market,” Char suggested. “Take a look through the jack-rule and see if you can find any more of the flowers she was droppin’ like bread crumbs.”

Ven looked behind him to make sure they were still alone on this part of the Skywalk, then pulled the jack-rule from his pocket. He extended the telescoping lens.

He scanned around the broken road of the Outer Market until he found the second of the patches of Forget-Me-Nots that Finlay had sniffed out. From there he looked for, and located, the next patch, and kept following along until he was looking into the Inner Market.

Where a small mound of them grew in the center of the street beyond the gate.

Ven sighed. “She’s past the gate somewhere. Now I have no idea what to do.”

Whatever Char said was lost in the cry of a seabird overhead.

The boys looked up. High above, the albatross swooped in from the harbor side, flying smoothly over the wall and into the skies above the Gated City.

“There it is again.” Ven crouched down on the boards of the Skywalk, gesturing for Char to do so as well.

“Why are you hiding from a bird?” Char whispered as they squatted down.

“Madame Sharra says it’s a spy for someone who is watching me from far away,” Ven replied anxiously. “I think it’s a friendly someone, but I can’t be sure. She said that person is either trying to protect me, or to keep me alive until he—or she—can kill me personally.”

“Great,” said Char. “Well, at least being your roommate is never boring.”

The bird headed to the middle of the city, then began to fly in circles over and over again. Ven sighted the jack-rule lens on it, then moved it down to see what it was flying over.

The lens reflected an up-close view of the keyhole gate.

“Oh boy,” he murmured. He looked closer.

Standing at the gate was a tall man, or what Ven assumed was a man, in a long gray hooded cloak. The garment covered him from his head all the way to the ground, strange clothing for the heat of early summer. His back was turned to Ven as he spoke with the gate’s guard, a thin, swarthy man with long black hair. On the wall above, archers in ragged leather had their bows trained on him, as they did on each person who presented himself at the gate.

Ven strained to look closer.

The gate guard finally nodded, signaled to the archers and the two huge men standing at either side of the keyhole-shaped entrance, and opened the steel gate for the man to enter. As he did, Ven caught sight of a slightly hooked nose, or at least thought he did.

A harsh bird cry sounded. Ven looked up, out of the jack-rule’s lens.

The albatross made one more circling pass, then flew out to sea again.

Behind it was a low-flying squadron of black birds, glinting blue in the late-afternoon sun. They flew as far as the harborside wall, then circled back and returned to the depths of the Inner Market.

“Did you recognize the man?” Char asked after Ven related what he had seen.

Ven shook his head. “It was just a nose—and many of the humans I’ve seen since I came here seem to have hooked noses. Lots of people in the Market do.”

“Maurice Whiting has a hooked nose,” said Char.

Ven stared at his friend. He had not thought about Mr. Whiting since they passed the White Fern Inn, but Char was right—one very prominent feature on his face was a great hooked nose.

Ven shuddered. He had hoped that he was finished with Mr. Whiting, ever since the man had accused him of terrible crimes and had had him arrested. The king had seen through Mr. Whiting’s lies, but Whiting had warned Ven that their interactions were not finished as he left the Crossroads Inn for the last time.

This isn’t over, Polypheme.

It’s never over with men like you until you die, Mr. Whiting,
Ven had replied.
Fortunately, as a
Nain,
I will outlive you by four times over.

Whiting had stared at him intently for a long moment.
Perhaps,
he said finally.
Perhaps not.
Then he stalked up the steps and slammed the inn door behind him as he left.

“I hope that’s not Mr. Whiting,” he said. “That would make an impossible situation even worse. If that’s possible.”

“We should get back,” Char said, glancing at the setting sun. “Clem’s prolly back by now.”

“You’re right.” Ven rose carefully and waited until Char was standing as well, then hurried off down the Skywalk, back into the center of the Outer Market.

Clemency and Ida were searching the alleyways of the Outer Market when they returned. The boys climbed down a different access ladder and ran to meet them.

“Don’t bother looking there,” Ven called to the girls. “She’s inside the Inner Market, past the keyhole gate.”

Clemency’s face went slack. Ida just exhaled.