Thieves at Heart (8 page)

Derk had given her money for midday meal, asking her to please pay for her food in Tyestown, at least until after the meeting. The money had been stitched into the hem of her sleeve and she bit at the string with her teeth, pulling out the two blue coins that were more than enough for anything she would want to eat. She wanted to approach the children but she hesitated. Tavera didn’t get along with other children very well and the big one did have a stick. What if they made fun of her? What if they pulled her ear? Or called her names? She recalled she had tried to punch a grown man for making fun of her pa, scratching at him with her sharp little nails. Would she defend herself the way she had defended Derk’s name? She knew how to hit. And a scrap between children probably wouldn’t call the guard’s attention, just the parents.

The bunnies were too cute. Tavera frowned, wondering why she was already thinking about fighting these children. She had the money in her hands, ready to buy one of the rabbits from them and she felt her face become hot with embarrassment, her hands both wanting to touch the soft fur of the animals and push through the children. She dropped the coins into her boot, wiggling her foot till they both lay firmly under her heel and she took a deep breath, taking a rather forced step towards the children.

One of the middle children looked up first, smiling at her happily. Tavera could hear them talking, the cadence and accents telling her they were from the country as she thought. The fat rabbit hopped forward and Tavera giggled, putting her hands in front of her mouth. The biggest girl looked to her and smiled, her front teeth making her look a bit like a rabbit herself.

“Hello,” the big girl said, friendly enough. She really was a big girl, wearing the wide belt around her middle that women wore, her small breasts already pushing past the soft leather. Her brown hair was plaited into two long braids, each one fastened at the end with carved bone fasteners. The boy had reddish brown hair and a ruddy face, his cheeks making his face teeter somewhere between childhood and adol-escence. Tavera wanted to pull at her own hair and wished it was longer. It grew in slow but thick and she wondered if she would ever be able to have fat braids like the big girl.

“Whas your name?” the middle girl asked, scratching the fat bunny on its head. Her hair was a bit curlier than the older girls, and she looked to be of age with Tavera, though Tavi was taller. The middle boy had dark curls and light eyes while the one with the doll had the same reddish brown hair of the older boy, curls piled around her head.

“Kera,” Tavera said, kneeling down besides them. “Can I pet your bunny, please?” She held her hand out as she did and the other children moved so she could reach the fat one, her fingers sinking into the fur, giving away how small the rabbit actually was under there. “I like your rabbit,” she said.

“Iss name is Burly,” The oldest girl said, smiling. The rabbit was so incredibly soft it made Tavera draw in her breath. She wanted to sleep in a pile of rabbits though she knew they could kick hard with their back legs. “I just got me rabby today,” the girl said, looking very pleased with the giant grey bulk of hair with ears. “Ee should bring a gripper of lunars, don’t yeh think?”

Tavera just nodded, petting the rabbit. All she knew about rabbits were they tasted good and were soft. How hard could it be to keep a rabbit? These children did it. “D’you live close?” Tavera asked. The big boy nodded. His stick was right by his hand and the middle boy took it up, skipping over to a little ledge made with stones and balancing there, carefully putting one foot in front of the other. Tavera could have walked it in her sleep, she thought.

“A ways away, down byern the Lady’s Necklace, in Bluegrass. Yeh heard of it?”

Tavera shook her head slowly, watching the boy try to balance on the ledge, almost falling to the hard packed ground but catching himself before he spilled. “Uh…yeah. That’s south of here, right?”

“And where yeh from, city girl?” the one that had been balancing asked, spinning on the front of his foot. All of the country folk chuckled except for the littlest, too busy playing with her doll to notice what the big kids were doing.

Tavera almost spat at him but she didn’t. The rabbit hopped gently away, sniffing the other rabbit with a bit of interest. “I’m from Portsmouth.” She left it at that.

“What’re yeh doing here in Tyestown, then? That’s a ways to come. You into fiber too?” The big boy picked up his rabbit and held it in his arms, the muscled, tanned arms of a boy who worked out in the fields. Probably herding rabbits. His rabbit seemed to want to dig inside of his shirt, its front paws scratching at his chest.

“No,” she said carefully, looking to the two girls who hadn’t said anything yet. The middle one who said hello was feeding hay to the fat rabbit, the little one making the doll walk across the grass. “My pa’s a singer and he’s trying to get work at the dance hall. Everyone knows the dance halls in Tyestown are some of the finest in the Valley.” She said it in such a way if they hadn’t known it they would feel stupid. “Anyways, what are you? All cousins?”

“Garin there’s me cousin, Bee there’s me sister,” the big boy said, pointing to the balancing boy and then the girl with the doll in turn. “Merika and Kela are cousins. We got to come along to sell the shearings, since we didn’t come to town proper for Baron’s Day.” He put his rabbit back in the case, closing it carefully. “Meri and I’s birthdays was two phases ago. We’s old enough to join the rest of the adults with the raising and breeding, finally, so she got Burly and I got Twitch.” He almost blushed, though there was a bit of pride on his face, behind his red cheeks. Tavera pet the fat rabbit again and decided that he liked Merika. They’d probably grow up seeing each other every day, raising rabbits and take vows and have their own babies who would grow up to talk strange and wear nice clothes just to go to the city.

“Yeh, Ferix is big enoof to be interested in the breedin’,” Garin said, smiling slyly at Tavera. He twirled the stick in his hand and Tavera stood up, walking over to him. He spun it in his palm and Tavera’s hand shot out, snatching the stick from him.

“Shut up,” the big boy said, the girls he was sitting with giggled behind their hands. Tavera didn’t care what the big boy wanted or was interested in. He could bed his rabbit for all she cared. She hopped up on the ledge with the stick and held the stick across her shoulders and behind her neck, draping her arms over it as she walked across.

“How much was them rabbits anyway?” she asked. A rabbit could be kept in a little hutch and they ate hay. Hay was easy to get. A live rabbit probably cost less than a dead one. You had to pay for the butcher and the tanner and all that when you got a skin. Maybe a young rabbit that had already been weaned. She could feed it until it got bigger and kill it when it was big enough to suit her needs. It couldn’t be too hard to raise one or kill one. It could sleep with her in the meantime, keeping her warm at night.

“We traded a whole year’s worth of shearings for these two rabbys,” said Merika, the big girl with the rabbit teeth. “These two’ll make lots of wool. The first shearings will go into a babe’s blanket.” She smiled at the little girl with her doll and then at Tavera, her eyes sparkling with hope as her rabbit hopped a few more steps, sniffing at Twitch’s box.

A whole year’s worth of shearings? Whatever that was, it sounded like a lot and Tavera and Derk didn’t have a years worth of anything with them in Tyestown. Tavera turned on her heel and walked down the ledge again, her mouth pulled in several directions as she thought. “How many rabbits do you have?”

“Just these,” Ferix said, putting his hand on his rabbit’s box, sitting up straight. “Just to start. But soon enough, we’ll have grips of them. They grow fast, too. But iss worth it, all the hard work, raising ‘em up, keeping ‘em safe from wild dogs and burrowbears.”

Tavera dropped one hand from the stick, letting it swing around so that she held it like a sword. Garin reached for it and she snatched it away from him, the stick whistling through the air. She wondered how many rabbits they had. Green fields dotted with small balls of hair floated into her mind, people walking around them with clubs or maybe spears, spreading hay on the ground in the winter…what would she be doing when Ferix and Merika got back to their village? She looked over and saw that Ferix was looking at the girl Meri, who blushed behind her freckles, playing with one of her braids. As much as having rabbit fur to line her clothes made her hands twitch, she didn’t feel like getting a crop of rabbits and living in a hut while the fuzzy animals hopped around, their noses twitching, their tails wiggling. They were cute and soft but it seemed very…boring. Plus, what would Derk say? He didn’t seem the kind of man to live in a hut surrounded by animals. Maybe it made other
people’s hearts beat but not her own.

“And what d’you do in the city, eh?” Garin asked, grabbing for the stick again. Tavera let him have it and she walked a few steps away from him, trying to find something else to balance on.

“I go with my pa,” she said and shrugged, feeling the two coins move under her foot as she placed one in front of the other, imagining a line in her head to follow. “But sometimes if we find a band, I dance and people pay to watch.”

“You don’t,” Garin said, cocking his head to the side. The temple bell went off in the distance, signaling that midday prayers were over and slowly more people filled the streets, those who hadn’t been to temple back from their meals. Tavera laughed, thinking how this was one of the few things she had told them that was the truth and Garin had called her false.

“I do,” she said. She spun on her heel and then leaned forward so that her body was parallel to the ground . She put one hand on the ground and shifted her weight, sending her legs over her head and then down to the ground, a one handed somersault that had Kela and Bee clapping their hands.

“That’s just a turnover, I can do that,” Garin insisted, putting the stick down before he put his left hand on the ground. He moved forward a bit, obviously reconsidering before he put his right hand down instead, trying to vault himself forward but landing clumsily on his side instead. Tavera moved out of the way of his wreckage and laughed, not putting her hands over her mouth when she did. The other girls laughed and Ferix just rolled his eyes at Garin.

“Garin, don’t ruin yer good britches, yer pa will whup you when we get back to the inn.”

“They’re fine, Fex and asides, that wasn’t dancing. What kind of dancing d’you do?”

“Any kind I please, and not no barn dancing neither. You probably hop about like rabbits!” Tavera laughed.

“Don’t mind Garin, he prolly just likes you,” Ferix said, his voice cracking slightly though he was obviously trying to sound wise. Meri put her hand over her mouth and laughed, Kela following suit. Tavera looked over to the boy who was blushing and making a face at the older boy, his hands balled into red and white fists.

“I don’t like this stupid wellie-girl,” Garin said loudly and to prove it, he turned to Tavera and pushed her. Before she could be moved she put her hands on his face and pushed back at him, his head snapping back and his push failing to shift her. Tavera ducked and the other children got up and started moving towards them, Garin’s face red where her fingers had raked his skin. He moved to strike her. Tavera beat him to it and threw her fist across his chin, not bothering to follow it up with another blow.

The other children were upon them and she ducked and skirted away from them, dodging the big girl’s grasp as she reached for Tavi. Some of the adults were looking now, a priestess walking towards the group and tripping over one of the rabbit boxes, almost falling onto the fat rabbit. She could hear Garin screaming down the street, her arms pumping at her sides as Tavi ran down an alley, into another alley past a fortune teller and two dogs that were fighting over what was hopefully a cow bone.

No one was yelling anymore except her own thoughts, her heart still stomping in her chest as she slowed down. Her breath came steady but ragged and she sat down on the ground after making sure it wasn’t too dirty, biting her lip and trying to calm down. Once her heart stopped thumping her stomach decided to growl, clawing at her insides and she realized she still hadn’t had a midday meal. Tavera looked around to be sure no one was looking and fished one of her coins out of her boot, holding it tight in her palm as she followed her nose back towards the food carts, not able to keep herself from peeking around the corner for familiar faces.

Her stomach urged her on and she walked quickly to a cart that was selling coal-cooked meat. She scanned the food square quickly and found another cart selling flat, fluffy bread and she paid for two pieces of bread with half a coin, taking it over for the other man to deposit a strip of juicy, charred meat onto, chunks of green onion dropped on top. She handed him the other half of the coin and ducked back into the alley, cramming the food into her mouth. The green onions were slippery and crunchy, still slightly raw so her tongue tingled after her food was gone.

One of the men from the next watch walked past the entrance to the alley and Tavera stood up, brushing her dress free of crumbs, deciding to see if she could figure out where he lived. She knew he usually watched the northern road leading to the lake and when he headed that way she should leave to try and find Derk. She could kill time and maybe find out something useful.

People were still walking about, getting last minute food items for the evening meal, the farmer carts having more people around them than the food carts. The man she followed bought a handful of greens, a big bone with chunks of red meat still clinging to it and a small bag of grains, already roasted. A few more errands were run: a trip to the temple, a pass by the side window of a bar for a quick cup of thinny and a talk with the woman who ran the window. Tavera realized she was thirsty and thought about getting something to drink herself but the man went on and he hadn’t noticed her yet so she put one foot in front of the other and continued.

Down another alley, past a row of stores specializing in goat wool, then a street with vendors selling threads and yarns of various thicknesses and colors for different types of clothing. They went around the edge of town where the animals for auction were held, their characteristics written out in a pictures for those perusing to see. Some of the animals looked sad and Tavera couldn’t help but feel pity for the beasts but she took a deep breath thinking better them than her. She kept on, careful not to follow too closely lest the man feel her presence.