(I Show a Human What's Good for Him, and Run Away)
A few people ran out after me, and I hid beneath some steps until they went away.
It began to drizzle, and I walked west along the quay. Floy broke into my thoughts: "Where are we going?" I stopped on the edge of a long square that opened onto the estuary, and she nipped my neck.
"Take care of me?" I brushed her away and walked into the square's dark center so I could avoid looking at myself in shop windows. I was an offensive sight––filthy, crawling with fleas, hair matted into webs.
"From now on," I growled, scraping up some gravel, "I'll take care of meself." And something else spoke out to the dark. Don't get too close, my spirit cried. You'll cut yourselves. I blocked her out. "Alone." I ran toward the river and threw the gravel over the balustrade.
"Ambitious of you," Floy said. We began right away with a bad night's sleep on a door stoop.
I woke with sun pooling into my mouth.
A little boy trickled dirt into my nostrils, and I jumped up spitting. He ran off into a great throng of people, and I sat back down on the step, caught between curiosity and wariness.
The curiosity won out, and I wandered nearer the crowd of Elde, and Elde they mostly were, of a truculent variety. They surrounded a gallows built on the western side of the square, near the estuary. I hadn't noticed the thing in the dark, and I shuddered, thinking of my spending the night so near to it.
I pushed my way forward and was shunted around the crowd, and after trying to resist it for a while, drifted towards a line of old, flowering fruit trees. The gallows loomed on the platform, contrasting strangely with the bright trees. Upon the scaffold, shouting something I couldn't hear, an old, blindfolded Gralde man stood between four guards in green and grey.
"See that?" said a boy into my ear. "That's where you'll end up if ye don't learn to make a living. I'll swear it."
I reached over my shoulder and grabbed Padlimaird's red hair.
"Funny," I said, "that a boy too contrary to learn a damn thing should swear so earnestly on his own death, as though he finally learnt he's gonna up and die someday."
"Oh shoot," howled Padlimaird.
"And see?" I pulled tighter and pointed to a bailiff. "He's makin a handsome livin, and he ends up at a gibbet every day."
Padlimaird honked, and Wille appeared out of nowhere and took us each by an ear. "Why, if it in't a big mean dog pickin on a little flea." Padlimaird pushed Wille away and rubbed the back of his head.
"Why are you always here?" I said to them, and marched away. I trod on the shoe of a big, red-faced woman.
"Trying to not touch the ground today?" She pushed me backward into Padlimaird.
"She didn't mean it, ma'am." Wille shoved Paddy and me out of her way. "You got to be careful with these folks, Aloren. It's crazy old Nat Breldin up there. He's getting hanged for the third time now, and they're going to make sure he's around for a fourth, or they'll revolt in all sincerity, an' the garrison in't ready for that."
"You should climb a tree," said Padlimaird, "afore you get squashed. Cause they're going to storm at some point." He jumped away when a brawl broke out behind him. "Just look at em!" He ducked an airborne whiskey jug.
"Such nobility and sacrifice," said Wille. "Come on, Paddy, let's see if we can't get closer." They bungled their way through the mob.
I shook my head and took a step, and my chemise swung forward as though the pockets were filled with stones.
"Oh," I said to Floy, "they didn't."
I reached into my pockets and dug through the coins. I squatted and took out a handful of the silver, and wondered how they had managed it. And of course they could've, and quite effortlessly, because it was that much easier to slip something in a pocket than take it out, and they were both skilled pickpockets.
My ears grew hot. "They didn't." I ripped the coins from my pockets. I flung them at a tree's stone planter, I flung them at the tree, scattering white blossoms, and I flung them at a group of brawling men.
"Reyna!" Floy flew round my head. "What in all the wide world and welkin are you doing?"
"They think I need help." I hurled another handful and pain shot through my shoulder. "I can't stand it."
"So you'll throw it all away? Stupid."
"Stupid––" I shut my mouth, refusing to argue, because she always won.
I didn't much like it when my pockets were full of Fillegal's stolen money, but I liked it even less when they were empty. I knelt, scraped celms into my skirt, dribbling the silver between my knees. The men had stopped brawling.
I stopped, and glanced up at the red faces gone completely still. The back of my neck pricked, and I took up one more coin. I jumped up and hurried away.
"They're following us," Floy said.
"Damn." I dove through someone's legs, left a pile of silver, and started running. "If they needed it that bad I would've left it there."
"Thief," someone called. I tripped over feet and knocked bodies aside, and a stream of coins fell through a hole in my skirts.
I looked round. Jeering people followed in a long train.
I broke into a sprint, neared the river, and thought of jumping the wall, into the place where the water lapped close. Then Floy noticed the next tree growing from its stone planter.
"The tree," she said. "Like Padlimaird said."
I turned my head and rammed into the balustrade. The coins popped over the river, flashing like jumping carp.
"Don't jump after them. The tree––it's in blossom––"
"Shove off, Floy." I swept her out of my hair, and dashed around the planter; folk were sitting on every stone of it. Two boys jumped from their place to tussle on the ground.
A third boy moved his feet out of their way, and I bounded onto the stone next to him and scrambled up the trunk. Confused, he looked behind him, but the branches were laden with white and my chemise kept me hidden. I climbed to a comfortable fork.
The wood smelled of green apples. The sun glowed through the blossoms and wore on my eyelids. I sat still for a long time, pinching myself to keep awake.
The hanging never happened––the mob locked with the soldiers in another stalemate, and the action wound down to a steady seethe that kept me in my tree and bored stiff.
I began knotting together a chain of apple blossoms. The chain soon reached a handsome length, and I absently spooled it around the head of the third boy, who had fallen asleep against the trunk. The crowd had cleared from around the tree, leaving space on the plinth; and the boy's two companions were merrily playing dice when the taller boy glanced over at the sleeper's head.
"Hark at that. It's High Lady Andrei, Duchess of the Daisies."
The smaller boy doubled over with laughter; his cloak swept chips and silver from the stone. "Forbs!" said the tall boy. "How'll I be compensated when I've proved the old duffer'll never be hanged?"
Forbs whipped a chip at him; he ducked, and the chip struck the third boy on the forehead,
He woke. "Throwing shit at me?" He looked at the chip in his lap.
"Forgive me, milady," said Forbs in a high voice. "Don't string me up with apple blossoms––I wish only that I may die with honor, struck down with a sweet blade of larkspur."
"I got something better than larkspur––" said the third boy, and a loop of the garland fell over his eyes. He pushed the flowers from his head. His eyes followed the chain up into the tree. "Look at that," he said, eyes on me. "It's more mange than person."
I dropped the end of the chain.
"Stay there," he said, standing up. "Don't want it spreading."
This struck a chord in me painful and funny all at once, and I swung from my branch and dropped in front of him. He was a head taller than me, with tawny eyes. A human.
He put his arm over his nose. "Filthy Eldine rat."
I put my fist in his mouth.
His head hit the trunk with a great crack, and he crumpled over the plinth. The smaller boy gasped and the other began to laugh. I whirled on them, "Funny, is it?"
The smaller boy whispered, "Let's go find Mir." They left, the smaller dragging the bigger by the wrist.
I looked at the boy I'd felled. He lay quite still. Between his feet a white crocus had slumped and withered. "Floy." I squatted and touched it. "Floy, I'm a woman."
"That's likely!" Floy said, and I began walking away. "Where're you going?"
"Away," I said.
"You can't just leave him there. Go and drop him in the river, at least."
"No."
"They'll strip and rob him, and trample him into a pulp."
"I hope they castrate him, too," I said.
But something niggled in the back of my mind. So I stumped back, took the boy up, one long leg under each arm, and dragged him down a flight of steps leading to the water. No one noticed, the crowd having moved away. The boy's feet stuck out in front of me, strapped into good leather sandals. His tunic darkened with muck, and his hair, too.
I dragged him across a strip of silt and pulled him into the water until it swilled over his face.
He gurgled and sat upright.
"Look at you in the mud," I said. "A high an' mighty nob."
He wiped his face with his arm. "Did the garbage pickers send you to piss all over me?"
"Aye." I watched him shake his elbows free of muck. "They picked too deep and came across your god-awful, fat, stinking arse."
He leapt up, towering over me, and I decided then was a good time to leave. He ran after me, tripping over his sandals, and I bounded up the stairs.
Old Nat Breldin had been taken away to molder for another two months in the palace oubliettes, and most of the mob had dispersed. So I ran towards the bustling quay.
The boy proved remarkably nimble, squeezing through chests of tea and heaps of coal with a determination that made me nervous.
Floy was beside herself: "Cut through those gamblers; slip into that sawyer's yard, there's an outhouse you can hide in; that gauging hut has an upper story, try the doorknob; look, a sewer-pipe."
"Ain't crawling around the sewers, Floy." I pushed through a narrow quayside street and stopped in front of another way: an alley with a collection of stinking garbage, deep potholes, empty doorways, and walls scribbled over with coarse words, all slowly disappearing under a layer of soot. It looked familiar.
"Keep going." Floy knocked against my head. "He'd have to be really thick to follow you into there."
There was a dilapidated stone arch over the entrance. I hid in the corner just behind it. The boy burst through, tunic still dripping, and sprinted down the street.
"Well," Floy remarked as my breathing slowed, "that proves he's thick."