The Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  In the city I had wanted to hug the sunlight and wrap it around myself like a blanket. I’d turned my body in the saddle in order to expose as much of my skin as possible to direct light. It was pleasant at first, but by the time the city was a single lump of gold stone behind us, I felt as if I were wearing a coat of dirt and dried sweat that had shrunk to be two sizes too small. I itched everywhere. The smells of the prison floated down the road with me, and I think that even the horse underneath me objected.

  I noticed that as the sun got hotter, the two riders on either side of me moved farther and farther away.

  I looked over the party. The magus I had already studied. On my right was the soldier who warned me about pulling on the reins. His profession was obvious, as was the sword tucked under the flap of one of his saddlebags. I guessed that he was the Pol that the magus had shouted to in the courtyard, because the other two members of the group were certainly the boys. One younger and one several years older, I guessed, than myself. Why they were with us, I couldn’t imagine. The older one also had a sword in a scabbard, and with coaching he could probably chop up a straw man, but the younger one looked to be completely useless. They were both obviously well bred, not servants, and I wondered if they were brothers. Like the magus, they were dressed in dark blue tunics that flared at the waist over their trousers. The older one had darker hair and was the better-looking. He looked as if he knew it. Riding on my left, he wrinkled his nose whenever a small wind wafted from my direction, but he never looked over at me. The younger boy rode mostly behind me, and every time I turned my head to glance at him, I found him staring back. I identified them as Useless the Elder and Useless the Younger for the time being.

  The heat grew intolerable, and I grew more exhausted with every lurch of the horse I was riding. After what seemed like hours of swaying in the saddle, I realized that a fall was inevitable if we didn’t stop. “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m tired.”

  There was no response; the magus didn’t even turn his head, so I made a decision for myself. I slid sideways down one side of the horse, trusting that the leg I left behind would come after me. It did, though not gracefully; the horse was still moving as I reached the ground, and I had to hop a few steps on one leg until my other leg caught up. Once I had both feet planted in the dust of the road, I headed for the grass beside it. I stepped into a ditch and, coming out of it, stumbled onto my knees and then onto my stomach and didn’t get up.

  The soldier must have come after me like a shot. I felt his fingers grab for my shirt as I fell. Everyone else dismounted and trooped across the ditch as well, until they were standing around me in a half circle. I opened my eyes for a moment to look at their boots, then closed them again.

  “What’s the matter with him, magus?” It must have been the younger one that asked.

  “Gods damn. We’re only halfway to Methana, and I wanted to get to Matinaea tonight. He’s exhausted, that’s all. Not enough food to keep him going. No, just leave him,” as someone prodded me with a boot.

  Oh, thank gods, I thought. They’re going to leave me. All I wanted to do was lie in the dry prickly grass with my feet in a ditch forever. I could be a convenient sort of milemarker, I thought. Get to the thief and you know you are halfway to Methana. Wherever Methana might be.

  But they didn’t leave me. They unsaddled their horses and got out their lunches and sat and ate while I slept.

  When the sun was halfway down the sky, Pol nudged me with one foot until I woke up. I twitched my eyes open and had no idea at all where I was. I wasn’t in bed. I wasn’t at home. I’d woken up several times disoriented in the prison, and I automatically stifled my first thrash of surprise to prevent my chains from grinding on old bruises, and finally I remembered that there were no chains. I crossed one arm over my face and moaned convincingly. I felt surprisingly well. I was as hungry as a donkey, but my head was clear. I sat up and rubbed at the stiffness on the side of my face where the grass had left its rough pattern.

  I groaned and complained while Pol, single-handed, pushed me back up onto the horse and we all started down the road again. The magus rode beside me and handed me pieces of cheese and lumps of bread that he tore off a loaf as we went. I ate with one hand and held on with the other. Horses are the most awful means of transport. I wanted to ask why they hadn’t brought a cart, but I was too busy eating.

  We made it to Methana as the sun was going down. It was a small town with just a few houses and an inn at an intersection of roads. We didn’t stop. We rode on until it was pitch-dark. The moon was just a tiny sickle, and the soldier dismounted to lead his horse. He walked slowly to avoid stepping into the ditch by the roadside, and the other horses followed his.

  The night air was cool, but my wonderful nap was a long way behind me. I balanced on the narrow back of my horse and wished the saddle offered more support. My head drooped forward and then bobbed back. The magus must have had eyes like a thief because he told Pol to stop and dismounted to walk alongside me, one hand resting just above my knee, ready to shake me if I fell asleep. He shook hard and resorted to pinching periodically.

  We reached Matinaea at last. It was no bigger than Methana had been, but more roads met there. The inn was two stories tall and had a gate beside it that led to an enclosed courtyard. As we rode up, a groomsman came to take the horses. We all slid to the ground, and Pol was quickly beside me with one hand firmly on my shoulder. It was an easy business for him; my shoulder came only to his chest. Sometimes it bothers me that I am so small. It bothered me then, and I shrugged my shoulder in irritation, but his hand didn’t move.

  The magus introduced himself as a traveling landholder to the owner of the inn and said that he had sent a messenger ahead to arrange rooms. The owner was delighted to see him, and we all trooped toward the doorway. As I passed the owner’s wife, her nose wrinkled, and as I reached the door, she protested.

  “That one,” she accused, pointing at me. “It’s that one that smells so awful, and he’s not coming into my wineroom and I won’t have him sleeping in any of my clean beds.”

  Her husband made futile hushing motions with his hands.

  “No, I won’t have it. Not if he’s your lordship’s son,” she said to the magus. “Although I hope he’s not.”

  I could feel my face getting hot as the blood rushed all the way up to my ears. The magus and the woman negotiated, over the husband’s protests. The magus said no, I couldn’t sleep in the barn, but I could sleep on the floor. He gave her an extra silver coin and promised I would wash immediately. She gave directions to the pump in the courtyard, and Pol led me away.

  The pump was in the middle of the courtyard behind the inn. There were stables on two sides, a wall on the third and the back of the inn completed the courtyard. It was not a private place to take a bath. When we reached the pump, Pol grabbed my shirt at the waist and jerked it upward. I snapped my arms down to prevent it from going over my head. The fabric tore in his hands. He reached for me again, but I stepped away, drowsiness gone.

  “This,” I snapped, “I can do for myself.”

  “Just make sure it’s a good job,” he said before he began to pump. The water gushed out of a pipe at the height of my waist as I stripped out of my overshirt and dumped it on the cobbles. I pulled off my shoes, I had no stockings, so the pants followed immediately after. As the water splashed off the cobblestones and onto my naked legs, gooseflesh came out under the dirt. I shivered and swore as I bent into the stream.

  While I rinsed under the pump, the younger Useless arrived. He kept well away from the splattering water.

  “Put those down in a dry spot,” said Pol, “and fetch a couple of sacks from the stable.”

  When Useless came back, Pol took one of the sacks he’d brought and handed it to me with a square block of soap. Crouching beside the water, I soaked the sack and rubbed the soap across it. It made a tremendous lather, and I stopped to smell it in surprise. I laughed. It was the magus’s scented soap. Useless
the Younger must have dug it out of one of the saddlebags.

  I scrubbed myself with the sacking, washing away what felt like years of dirt. I rubbed hard and then rinsed and soaped myself up again before Pol could stop pumping water. I dragged the sack across the back of my neck and as much of my shoulders as I could reach and scrubbed my face again and again, thinking to myself that my nose would be smaller, but at least it would be clean.

  The younger Useless stood and watched, and I wondered what he thought of me. The iron waistband had left deep bruises in a circle around my waist, and I was covered in flea bites and sores, but the ones on my wrists were the worst. Where the manacles had chafed there were raw spots partially covered in scabs that were black against my prison-fair skin. Once I had cleaned most of the dirt off myself and rinsed my hair, I squatted down in front of the spraying water and tried to find the place where the water would fall most gently on my wrists. Several of the sores were infected, and they needed to be cleaned out, but it was going to be a painful business. My whole body was shaking with the cold, and I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering while I leaned into the water.

  Pol stepped around the pump and leaned over me to look at the sores. The water flow slackened.

  “Leave them,” he said. “I’ll work on them inside.” He gave me another piece of sacking to dry off with, and when I was done, he handed me a pile of clothes—pants and a shirt as well as an overshirt and a pair of stout workboots. I looked around for my own clothes and saw the younger Useless disappearing into the stable with them in his arms.

  “Hey,” I yelled. “Come back with those!”

  He turned around uncertainly. “Magus told me to burn them,” he said.

  “Everything but my shoes!”

  Useless looked into the pile in his arms and wrinkled his nose. “All right, but if Magus says to burn them, you’ll have to give them back.”

  “Fine, fine,” I said as I hopped across the wet cobblestones in my bare feet and took my shoes out of his arms. The rest of the clothing I consigned to the fires without regret, but I’d had the shoes made specially. They were low boots just a little higher than my ankles, reinforced on the soles, but still supple enough to let me move unsuspected through other people’s houses. I carried them back to Pol; then I looked for a dry place to stand while I got dressed. The pants were heavy cotton and bagged at the ankle where they tucked into my shoes. They bagged even more around my waist, but there was a belt to hold them up. The shirt was cotton as well. There was something wonderful about rubbing a clean shirt against clean skin. I was smiling by the time I pulled the overshirt over my head. It was dark blue and short-sleeved. It came down to my thighs and was enough too big that when I moved my arms across my chest, it didn’t bind. I checked to be sure.

  “Gods bless that magus, he thinks of everything, doesn’t he?” I said to Pol. He grunted and waved me toward the inn’s back door.

  We went inside to the taproom, where the magus and the two Uselesses were waiting for us. There were deep bowls of stew set out on the table, but before Pol would let me have mine, he wanted to look at my wrists. The magus looked over his shoulder and then sent the elder Useless up to his room to get a relief kit with bandages and little pots of salve in it.

  Pol got one of the lanterns off the wall and put it on the table beside him. The landlady tsk-tsked and brought out a bowl of warm water, a cloth, and more soap. Pol started to work on the right wrist first, while I looked at my dinner regretfully. After he had rinsed it with the soapy water, he rubbed a little salve on top of the scabs on the two sores, one above each of the bones in my wrist. Then he wrapped the wrist carefully in a clean white bandage. It was a tidy job, and I was impressed. I was off my guard when he took up my left arm. There was just one sore, but it ran all the way across the top of my wrist. Instead of a scab it had raw patches and bubbles of fluid trapped under flaps in the skin. Without any warning, Pol slid a knife under one of the flaps and twisted it open.

  I screamed at the top of my lungs. Everyone in the room jumped, including Pol, but his knife was well away from my wrist by then. I struggled to get out of his grip, but he had his hand clamped on my forearm, and he held on like a vise. I tried with my right hand to pry his fingers loose, but they didn’t budge. As I went on yelling and twisting his fingers, Pol without a word put his knife down on the table and reached into the relief kit. What he brought out was the wooden gag they put in someone’s mouth before doing something drastic like cutting off a leg. He held it up in front of my face.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  I thought about explaining that that sore had been there for weeks. I’d been so careful not to let the manacles bang it, and I’d favored it and done everything I could to keep it from hurting anymore and he could have warned me before he stuck his great godsdamned knife into it. But I looked at the gag in his hand and shut my mouth. I contented myself with wiggling and whimpering a little as he opened each of the infected spots, cleaned the entire sore, and rubbed salve onto it. When he had it wrapped in a bandage, I sniffed and wiped my nose and turned to the table to eat my dinner.

  Useless the Elder was looking at me in amusement. “Not exactly stalwart, are you?” he said.

  I told him what he could do with his own dinner and got a poke in the rib cage from Pol’s elbow. I sulked through the first few bites of my stew before I noticed how good it was. While I savored it, I listened to the others talking and gathered that the older Useless was named Ambiades and the younger Sophos. They weren’t related to each other, but they were both apprentices of the magus. I ate until I was too exhausted to keep my head up anymore and fell asleep on the table with the last bite still in my mouth.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I WOKE IN THE MORNING in one of the inn’s upstairs rooms, lying on the floor. From where I lay, I could see the webbing underneath the bed next to me and how much it sagged under Pol’s weight. He must have carried me in and laid me out on the rug before going to sleep himself. I looked enviously at his bed, but at least I was on a wood floor, not a stone one. There was a rug underneath me and a blanket pulled over me.

  I reached up with one hand and pushed the hair off my face. I usually wore it long enough to wrap into a stubby braid at the base of my neck, but it had grown beyond that in prison. Sometime during my arrest I had lost the tie that held it, and it had been hanging down in my face and tangling into knots ever since. The previous night’s rinsing had washed out some of the dirt, but the tangles were still there. I thought about borrowing a knife from Pol and cutting it all off but discarded the idea. Pol wouldn’t lend me the knife, but he’d cut the hair off himself, and that would be painful. Besides, I liked my hair long. When it was clean and pulled back from my face, I liked to think it gave me an aristocratic look, and it was useful. I sometimes caught small items in the hair at the top of the braid and hid them there.

  Still, matted and tangled, the hair was not aristocratic. I pushed it off my forehead for the time being and sat up. Pol’s eyes opened as I moved, and I discarded any thoughts of sneaking away even before I discovered that I was chained to the bed. My ankle was padded by someone’s spare shirt, and locked around it was an iron cuff with a chain that looped around the leg of the bed. Only by lifting the bed, with Pol in it, could I have gotten free. I wondered whose idea the shirt and the blanket had been. Pol didn’t seem like a man sensitive to personal comforts.

  I had another wash, this time with warm water in a washroom at the end of the hallway outside the room. The magus and his two apprentices were already there, stripped to the waist, splashing water around as they got themselves clean. They looked up as Pol and I came in, and I could see that they all three expected me to resent more soap and water.

  “I washed last night,” I pointed out to the magus. “Look”—I held up my arms—“I’m very clean. Why am I washing again?”

  The magus stepped away from the basin that held his shaving water and caught one of my arms. He was
careful to grip it above the clean white bandages before he turned my hand over and held it up to my face so that I could see the black dirt still ingrained in the folds of my skin.

  “Wash,” he commanded, and before I could protest further, Pol grabbed me from behind and pushed me over toward an empty basin lying next to the others on a shelf that ran waist height along the wall. Holding the back of my neck with one hand, he lifted a pitcher with another and poured steaming water into the basin.

  “I can wash myself,” I pointed out to no effect.

  He added a washing cloth and soap and went to work on my face. When I opened my mouth to complain, I got soap in it. I attempted to slip away, but could not. The hand Pol had on my neck stretched easily from one side of it to the other. He was merciless to my bruises, and I did my best to stamp on his toes in retaliation. He squeezed harder on my neck until I stopped. He soaped my shoulders and bent me at the waist with another squeeze, in order to soap my back. Bent over, I saw that his knees were within reach. I might have grabbed one and thrown him to the floor, but I didn’t try. This was no time to demonstrate unsuspected abilities. Besides, if I missed the grab, I would only look silly and I had had enough of that.

  Pol rinsed off the soap with a pitcher of water. I pulled myself upright and tried to look disdainful, but the bath wasn’t over. Pol marched me across the room to a wooden tub full of water and pushed my head under while I was still howling in outrage. He lifted me out, and while I coughed, he rubbed more soap into my hair and pushed me under again.

  When the grip in his fingers finally lessened, I dragged myself away and threw myself, dripping water, to the other side of the bathroom. I watched him warily while I coughed the water out of my lungs. He stood patiently while I twisted water out of my hair. When I snarled that I could have more easily washed myself, he tossed me a towel, and then he lifted one arm and gestured leisurely with a finger toward the door.