On the Streets

by jilla kala

a/n: ::passes out smelling salts:: i think you guys might need these… because, yes, i, jilla kala, have UPDATED, in a relatively short time, compared with my other chapters ::readers faint:: i know, shocking isn't it?? well, i didn't want to wait too long, (although, it did take me longer than I wanted) some readers are threatening me… anything you can think of has been used to threaten me… *grinz* ok, i know some people are confused, if this chapter does not clear things up for you, please, email me (insane_fairy_chica@hotmail.com) because i really don't want people to not understand what's going on, there is nothing worse than reading something and not getting it… ok, well, i'll stop talking now, because, even though i know you guys *love* to listen to what i have to say (hey, i can dream can't i?) i know that what you really want is to read this chapter. Oh, and this whole chapter is practically dialogue, so bear with me. And HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOGSYCAT!! Hehe

reminder: i want feedback on what people want me to do in regards to romance… do you guys want it? or not? who should it be between? i would like to know… so, please, tell me in your reviews or email me about it…

disclaimer: what you recognize belongs to Tamora Pierce… I only own the plot, Jua, her housemates, and umm… that's it so far…

dedication: this chapter is dedicated to jon25me and Jarna, thanx for telling me what you want on the romance thing,

criteria: someone asked me to tell them what the criteria for getting an ffn account is… if you've already got one, go ahead and skip this *grinz* anyways, you need to agree to the terms of service thingy… and you need a pen name (which can be anything, doesn't have to be relate to your name or sn) and you do need an email address, cuz if i remember right (someone correct me if i'm wrong) so that they can send you a conformation email, but that's all they send you, (at least, i haven't gotten anything else) and you need to give your email when you sign in…. but you can just delete it from your bio so that other ppl can't get it. if that's a problem, you can do what i did, i got another email addy (from hotmail, so its free) and gave my name as jilla kala (i eventually changed it, but that's not important) oh, and you just need to be over thirteen, but i've seen ppl who aren't, so its not a big deal. hope that helped, and if you get one, lemme know what ur penname is, cuz i wanna read your stuff.

Chapter Seven (two weeks later, after George has been back for about a day or two)

Jua sat on the floor of her room doing some sewing, she was trying to mend a shirt that had been ripped in a fight, but so far, it was not working. She growled with frustration as she pricked her finger, yet again, with the needle.

~*~

In the next room over Jon lay on his bed trying to sleep. He would get about halfway there when he would be woken up by a curse from the other room. Although she was keeping him awake, he had to smile every time he heard Jua's muffled curses through the wall. With a sigh he rolled over, burying his head under the covers to block out the outside noises.

~*~

Jua was almost done with the shirt; three more stitches should do it, she said to herself, when she was interrupted by a knock on the downstairs' door. She paused in her work, waiting to see if someone else would get the door. When the knock came again she stood up, throwing the shirt onto the floor with a curse; she didn't even bother to stifle it this time, forgetting Jon was trying to sleep in the other room. Stalking over to the window she looked down at the door to see who it was. George stood on the step with Gary, Alan and Raoul close behind him.

"Coming, coming!" she yelled down as George knocked again. "Impatient little bastard," she mumbled to herself as she trotted down the stairs. She pulled the door open just as he was about to raise his hand to knock again. "You knock one more time and I'll make sure you can never knock on anything again, and I mean never," she warned him as she turned and walked into the house, George and the others followed her in. "I'd offer you a seat, but as you can see, we don't have any," she said with a wave around the bare room. This was Gary, Alan and Raoul's first time in the house.

"That's alright," Gary told her.

"So, what can I do for you boys?" Jua asked as she leaned against the doorframe into the other room.

"Well, we figured this was as good a time as any, and if it was alright with you, we wanted to tell Jon now," Gary explained.

Jua was silent for a moment before, with a sigh, she answered him, "Well, he's sleeping right now, and I don't want to wake him up."

"I'm not sleeping," a drowsy voice from behind her said. She turned and looked at Jon, who was leaning against the rough railing on the stairs rubbing his eyes, "I'm not asleep," he said again, "did you need me for something?"

Jua turned and looked at the people standing behind her, they all nodded. With a sigh of resignation she turned back to Jon, "We need to talk to you."

~*~

The six of them were seated around Jua's room a few minutes later. Jua sitting on the end of the bed, Jon on a chair next to her. George was sitting up against the wall by the door while Gary had a chair in the center of the room; Alan and Raoul were seated in chairs on either side of him. No one began. Finally Jon had to prompt them to start, "Well…"

In the end, Gary started talking, "Jon, I want to tell you a story. It's a true story. You might have heard parts of it before, but I don't think you have heard all of what it is I have to tell you," he paused. Jon nodded for him to continue. And so he did…

"As you may know, my father, Duke Gareth of Naxen is Queen Lianne's brother, making me Their Majesties' nephew. My father is in charge of the training of the pages at the palace, and so when I was younger, I spent a lot of time there. When I was one, I'm seventeen now; Aunt Lianne had a baby, Prince Jonathan. I was much too young to remember when my cousin was born, but they told me that we used to play with each other all the time. I do, however, remember when I was three. Well, I remember bits and pieces of when I was three, I was still too young to remember everything, but I do remember my cousin. I remember him clearly. We used to sit in the corner of my father's office and play little games. One I remember playing, we used to play it a lot, was this game with little polished rocks. We each had this little handful of these shiny rocks and we used to play with them like they were money, and we would go and "buy" things from Father. We would give him a couple rocks and take one of his quills, or we would take a piece of paper. You know, little things. Anyway, we were very close, well, as close as young children of our age could be. Occasionally Father would watch him for the night if Their Majesties' were busy, or vice a versa.

Anyway, one night we had been up late while our parents were at a meeting. We had been playing in the hallway outside the door. I can't remember what we were playing, but that's not what's important anyway. I remember that we had fallen asleep, and when I woke up later I was in my bed. Father has since told me that the meeting had gotten out while we were asleep and our parents had brought us back to our rooms for the night. That was the last time I saw my cousin." Here Gary paused, his voice catching in his throat. Alan reached out and put a reassuring hand on his arm. He gave a weak smile of thanks before continuing the story.

"Sometime during the night someone had sneaken into the prince's room and taken him while he slept. In the morning the Queen found him missing when she went to wake him up. I don't remember exactly what happened, I was too young to understand what was going on. I just remember everyone running around frantic, looking everywhere. I think, although no one will admit it, that they had forgotten about me, because I just sat in corner of the room with no one paying any attention to me. I don't think any one had even fed me, because I was sitting on a blanket on the floor crying all morning. People realized I was there, I think, when I started screaming, asking where he was. I guess I must have known something was wrong. But when I started screaming for him, everyone in the room turned and looked at me before Father scooped me up into his arms and took me out of the room, almost at a run. Before he got me out of the room, though, I remember seeing Aunt Lianne fall into Uncle's shoulder, sobbing, then the door closed behind us.

Everyone at the palace was frantic for months. King Roald had everyone who could, out looking for Jonathan for days on end. After several months of this, Their Majesties finally gave up, convinced that he was dead. A year later they named Duke Roger the heir. No one really talks about Jonathan much, its too painful I guess. I get the feeling that they wish they could have at least found his body, but they never did. They never found out for sure that the prince was even killed."

After a brief pause Jon spoke up, "That's horrible and all, but, why are you telling me this?"

"We're gettin' t' that part, Jon," George said. "Gary thought he may have found the prince, so he asked me to find out if he was right. You know me Jon, can't turn down a friend, so I agreed. By talking to people who knew the boy we think is the prince, I figured that I should probably start in Port Caynn because he had said he had been there before. So I rode down there taking two sketches, one of the boy now, and one from right before he was kidnapped and I asked everyone I saw if they had ever seen this boy. I didn't have any luck the first two days that I was there, but on the third, just before I was about to give up, I asked this man who said he had seen the boy in the older picture, he said he had found the boy lying on the side of the road and had taken him to see a healer. He showed me where the healer is and I went in to talk to her. She said that she had healed the boy, he had had some fever, but I can't remember what it was called. I asked her if she knew where he was from. She told me that he never told her, he just said he was going to Corus. She also said that she believed he might have been from the islands, because he had an accent. So I decided that I would go to the Islands after that. Enough people who had talked to him had said he had a bit of an accent, and I myself have noticed it too while talking to him. So I went up to the islands. When I got there I showed the pictures around but no one had seen him. Finally I got to a little town, I never even found out the name of it, but when I got there I showed the picture to this girl, she seemed to be about sixteen or seventeen. She said her name was Ashley. When she saw the picture she gasped and told me that he used to live next door to her, with his parents and an uncle. When I asked her to show me where he lived because I wanted to talk to his parents she told me that they had died, about four years ago, and the uncle a year before. I asked her if she knew where he lived now and she said that he had run away a couple of months after his parents died. She invited me to come to her house so we could talk and I could talk to her family. When we got there I asked them to tell me anything they could about the boy." George stopped talking to make sure everyone followed what he was saying. He looked around the circle. Alan nodded, as did Gary, Raoul and Jua. Jon looked a little pale, as if he knew what was coming, but he motioned for George to continue anyway.

"They told me what she had said before, about his parents and him leaving. They all said the sketch was indeed the boy who used to live by them. They told me that he had been about three-ish when he and his family moved in. Which would fit right in with the age that the young prince was kidnapped. They recognized the younger sketch too. They said that the adults never talked very much, but that they had heard rumors that they were not his real parents. They told me they had always figured this rumor was started because he had looked nothing like his parents, while the boy was dark haired and bright blue eyed, the parents were blonde haired with green eyes and red haired with light blue eyes respectively. He also lived with his uncle, who again, bore no resemblance to any of the others; the way they described him made me think he may have been Bazhir.

I asked them if, besides that the family did not physically resemble each other, there was anything significant about the boy and his family. Ashley told me that, although the family was poor, the boy always wore a thin gold chain around his neck, most of the time it was covered up by his shirt, but sometimes the chain would slip out a bit. She told me she had asked him about it when he was older and he had told her that it was a family heirloom and that even though they could sell it for money, his parents said he should keep it with him. She always accepted that. I asked her if she knew what the chain looked like, if there was an amulet or locket on it. She said he had never showed her the whole thing, even though they were very close. Ashley's parents told me that the boy's parents had always seemed very nervous, always looking over their shoulder and behind doors. They told me that they were very protective of their son. Ashley's mother told me that she remembered one time they had invited him to stay for dinner and his parents had been terribly angry with him for not telling them where he was. She said that when she had seen him a couple days later walking down the street he had horrible bruises on his face and arms, and when she asked him what happened he had told her that he had gotten in a fight with some boys, but she had always suspected that his parents had punished him severely for not coming home on time."

Again, George paused in his story to let the information sink in. He looked around the room, Gary's face was tight with what George presumed to be anger over the way his cousin had apparently been treated. Jua was stony faced as was Alan. Raoul was pale and seemed angry too. George could not tell how Jon was reacting to the story.

"They told me some other things that helped prove that we were correct, little things that aren't important at the moment. The one thing, though, that will prove you were right, Gary, is if the person we think is the prince has the gold chain, which I believe is the chain that the King and Queen gave to the prince when he was born. That was supposedly the only thing, besides what the prince was sleeping in that disappeared with him," he explained to the others in the room. They all looked at Jon.

"Why did you all tell me this?" he managed to croak out after a few seconds.

"Well," Gary said, looking Jon straight in the eyes, he paused than continued, "We think you're the prince."

The room went dead silent. There wasn't a sound in the room, it was as if everyone was holding their breath to see how Jon would react to the probably shocking news, in fact, some of them were. The silence was broken as Jon stood up, with such force that the chair screeched back and fell over as he ran out of the room, slamming the door behind him and out of the house into the yard.

a/n: well?? how did you like it?? i know… another cliffish ending… they are just so much fun to write *grinz* anyway… quick explanation so people are not as confused as i think they might be, the king and queen gave the prince (jon) a gold chain with a locket on it when he was born (more about the locket later) and he was wearing it when he was kidnapped, (more about the kidnapping later) so, from the "evidence" that George gathered, Jon should still have it, which is good (a way to identify him, more on that too in another chapter) well, I might wanna shut up now, I dun wanna give away too much of the future chapters… if you have any questions, leave em in reviews or email me (email at top of page and in author's profile) remember, I still want to know what you think about the romance thing

Thank you notes:

Am: i won't stop this story, although, it may take me awhile to update it sometimes… hehe… and I hope your head gets working again *wink*

emily: thank you and I'll try

Devilkitti8: no, i'm not… its only been about two weeks, besides, I can't take too long with you always reminding me to keep going (thanx for that btw)

Jarna: don't worry, i wanna try writing romance… and thanx for the suggestions

CactusFilly: i thought i saw that you got an account, but i put the criteria up just in case, hope its helpful if you still need it *grinz* oh, and sorry bout the cliffies… hehe, good luck writing

Kell: actually, I had a touch of the dreaded writer's block… I had been on a roll… going great, than I had to get off… and the W.B. struck!! *screams* hope you can get rid of yours

Lady Knight of Kennan: sorry, I have more "evil cliffhangers" planned out…hehe… that's the fun of being the author… i sorta know what happens… mwahahahaha!!!! *grinz*

blacwolve: careful… if you bang your head into things too hard you might break something *winks* and that's ok that u did not reply, i can forgive you ^_^

MogsyCat: NOO!!! not the evil SUNLIGHT REFLECTIONS!!! AHHHHH!!! And by the way… HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! (technically, with the time stuff, i'm a day late… but still *grinz*)

MagixPawn: i'm *sob* a horrible person??? *sob* hehe… i hope this chapter cleared some things up for you about what George was saying… if not, email me and i'll explain

jon25me: thank you for the review and the suggestion on the romance…

Angelina Weasly: its ok… don't cry… I'll try not to be mean too much… but sometimes I just can't help it *wink*

Everyone Who Reviewed: thank you for your reviews… and (this is for everyone, not just previous reviewers) please tell me what you think i should do for romance…