Among Thieves

by Hulick, Douglas

  No. Think of something else. Something . . .

  Athel is strapped to the barrel, head hanging to one side. He’s grinning his grin at me, knowing and mocking and ironic. His eyes are sharp and focused, questioning. What are you going to do now, Drothe? the look says. Will you die for the book, too? He laughs. Are you already dying for it?

  Am I . . . ?

  “Drothe!”

  I jerked upright. “What?” I said, looking around for the source of the voice. I had somehow slipped back into a reclining position on the pile.

  Degan was standing over me in the rain. He looked worried.

  “What?” said Degan.

  “Didn’t you call me?” I said. “I heard my name.”

  Degan shook his head. “No one said anything.”

  I blinked the rain out of my eyes. “Oh,” I said. “Fine.”

  “Drothe,” said Degan, “maybe you—”

  “Where’s Larrios?” I said, suddenly noticing we were alone.

  “He’s getting the book,” said Degan patiently. “You told him to go retrieve it.”

  “I did?”

  Degan nodded, his hat producing a small waterfall when his head dipped. “He wanted me to go instead, since he can barely see, but you said we couldn’t waste the time it would take me to search for it.”

  That certainly sounded like something I would say. And it was a smart decision. I decided to take Degan’s word that I had actually said it.

  “How long’s he been gone?” I said.

  “Not long.” Degan knelt down next to me. “Drothe, I think we should get you out of the rain and check your leg.”

  “When we have the book,” I said.

  “There’s a building across the street that still has its roof,” said Degan. “We could watch for Larrios from the doorway or a window.”

  I mustered my concentration and stared Degan in the eye. “I leave when I have the book,” I said, “not before. Everyone wants that damn thing so bad. Well, I’m going to get it. It’ll give me an edge in this whole mess. For the first time since this started, I’ll have the edge. Me. Do you understand?”

  Degan returned my gaze for a long moment. I could feel myself beginning to waver—being out of the rain did sound good, so good—but the sound of feet scrabbling on the muddy rocks of the ramp saved me.

  “Hey, give me a hand!” yelled Larrios from beyond the edge of the pit.

  Degan smiled and gave me a light slap on the shoulder. “Lucky.”

  “Stubborn,” I replied.

  As Degan stood and went to help Larrios, I let myself ease back on my rough seat. Bits of broken bricks and stone poked into my back, but it felt wonderful to lie back nonetheless. I shifted slightly so I could see the edge of the pit.

  I was watching Degan, down on one knee and leaning forward, his arm reaching toward Larrios, when I heard a splash come from somewhere behind me. It sounded too big to be a rat or a dog, and I twisted my neck to peer into the night.

  He was coming fast, sword out, cloak flying behind him. For a moment, I thought it was our dark guide, come to betray us in person, until I saw the broad swath of white around his waist.

  “Degan!” I said even as I sat up and tried to push myself into a more or less standing position. “White Sash!”

  It came out a little bit louder than a mumble.

  Somehow, I managed to lever myself upright. I still had my rapier in my hand, but there wasn’t much I was going to do with it. Nevertheless, I raised the blade’s tip as best I could and staggered my way between the Sash and Degan’s back.

  The Sash saw me and didn’t even slow down. I saw a smile form on his face, and suddenly realized this Sash was a woman.

  “Degan!” I said again, “Sash!” This time it came out louder.

  I heard a yell behind me and the sound of feet scrambling for purchase in the mud.

  The Sash was practically on top of me. Her smile was wide and genuine and cruel, and it made her beautiful in the beaded amber of my night vision. I found myself wanting to say something to the woman who was about to kill me: to tell her how lovely she was, how graceful, how much she reminded me of my sister, but reality was working faster than my mind by that point. I was still figuring out the words when she raised her sword and swatted me aside with its guard.

  The blow spun me as I fell. I caught a glimpse of Degan drawing his own blade even as his back foot slid out from under him and he began to fall down the ramp. Larrios was behind, yelling something I could no longer hear, a dripping leather sack clutched to his chest. And the Sash—she was in midleap, her sword held high, her teeth flashing in the night.

  Then I was facing the ground, watching it come up toward me. I thought I heard myself say, “Ana,” but it might have been my mind playing with me again. I hit the mud, and the world became a dark and quiet place.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was running through the forest. Trees flashed by on either side, and I leapt over roots and rotting logs with ease. Through the leaves overhead, the sky shone the brilliant blue I remembered from my youth, and I suddenly knew where I was—home, in the Balsturan Forest.

  But I was me—Drothe the Nose, older, jaded, with a rapier slapping at my side. The youth I should have been was absent, leaving me in his place. I didn’t know why, but I felt that this was a good thing—that I could do something the teen could not.

  Then I heard the screams and the sound of steel on steel, and I remembered. This was the day it all ended. This was the day my life became a twisted, broken thing. This was the day they killed my stepfather, Sebastian, and the day any hope I had ever had of family died.

  I pushed myself harder, tried to move faster, but my left leg was suddenly filled with pain. I looked down to see blood running from it, leaving a trail of red in the forest behind me. I howled and kept going.

  I limped and stumbled, ran and ducked as best I could. The cottage was too far and I was too slow. The boy I had been could run faster, but he’d be helpless once he got there. It had to be me—I could stop this. I had to stop this!

  I burst from the trees, half running, half falling, and stumbled over my mother’s grave, long overgrown with grass. My rapier fell from my hand. I pushed myself up.

  I expected to see Sebastian, my stepfather, just finishing off one assassin as a second took careful aim with a crossbow and shot him down. I expected to see Christiana, thirteen years old, lying unconscious in the doorway, blood running from her head. I expected to see the agony that had seared itself into my mind all those years ago.

  Instead, I saw a marble-paved courtyard, its walls covered with flowering vines. A fountain, carved from rose-colored stone and resembling a collection of those same flowers, stood in the center of the place. Water gurgled gently from each stone rose, spilling across the petals and collecting in the sunken pool at the fountain’s base. Sunlight spilled in from windows cut in one of the walls, turning the puddles on the paving stones to molten fire.

  The place smelled green and fresh and alive; I didn’t trust it.

  Toward the garden’s back corner stood a woman dressed in loose golden pants and a fitted brown jerkin. She was looking out the window, her back to me. Her hair was an unremarkable shade of brown, tied back in a short tail with a piece of white ribbon. Tiny silver bells hung from the end of the ribbon.

  The woman didn’t turn as I stood up. I scanned the ground for my sword, didn’t see it. Must have left it in the other dream.

  I took a step—my leg felt fine again—and another before the woman spoke.

  “Why do you want the book?” she said as she reached out and plucked a white rose from a vine running up the wall.

  Degan no doubt would have come back with a witty reply of some sort; Jelem would have replied with something caustic enough to get himself kicked back into consciousness; me, I simply blurted out, “What the hell is it to you?”

  The hand holding the rose made a dismissive gesture. “It would take too long to explain, and
we don’t have the time.” She brought the flower to her face, then turned toward me. Suddenly, we were less than a foot apart. I almost fell over as I took a hasty step backward.

  She breathed in over the rose, her eyes closed, and she smiled. “Memory always makes them sweeter,” she said wistfully. Then she tossed the flower aside and looked at me.

  Up to that point, I would have called her unremarkable—plain mouth, thin nose, small forehead, with dark brown hair tousled carelessly on top. But when she lifted her lids and displayed the gold-touched jade that resided beneath them, I knew I wouldn’t be forgetting her.

  “Frankly,” she said, ignoring—or perhaps, counting on—the effect her eyes had on me, “I’m impressed you’re still alive. It speaks well for you. But if you keep stumbling around as you have been, even that degan you have in tow won’t be able to save you.”

  “How—” I began, but my words came out slow and muffled. The woman waved her hand impatiently, twice as fast as I knew I could move my own.

  “Don’t worry about the ‘how,’ Drothe. Focus on the ‘who.’ Who else knows? Who is after you? You’re a popular boy lately, and I’m the least of the players in this game.”

  I almost laughed at that last bit. You don’t step into another person’s dream without being someone—but I knew better than to argue. If she wanted me to know who she was, she’d tell me; and if not . . . Well, there was nothing I could do to make her.

  “All right,” I said, each word sitting like softened lead in my mouth, “who wants the book? And why?”

  Now it was her turn to stare, but only for a moment. Then she tilted her head back and laughed. The bells in her hair chimed in counterpoint to her mirth.

  “You mean you don’t know?” she said. “You have Ioclaudia’s book, and you don’t even know what this is all about?” She met my gaze, a wide smile on her face. The smile was almost as captivating as her eyes. “Oh, this is too good.”

  Ioclaudia’s book? Athel had given me the name of the author? No wonder I hadn’t been able to track her down—if the book was as old as I was starting to think, Ioclaudia had been dead for centuries.

  I looked at the woman before me. Bells. And books. And then it hit me.

  “Princess,” I said, sketching a deep, ironic bow.

  She’d been the one outside Fedim’s shop, the one who had jingled as she walked away while I crouched in the sewer. Iron Degan was hers. Which meant I was talking with a Gray Prince. Princess. The Gray Princess.

  “It’s ‘Prince,’ ” she said, sounding almost embarrassed. “And it’s nice to know you can at least figure something out.”

  “What I’ve figured out,” I said, my temper rising, “is that I have Cutters, White Sashes, a couple of Blades—not to mention your pet degan—after me. But I haven’t figured out why. Now, if you think that’s amusing, you can shut this garden down and find someone else to play dream games with, because I have better things to do.”

  I turned to walk out of the garden and suddenly found myself seated on a bench beside the fountain. There hadn’t been any benches in the courtyard before. The woman was sitting next to me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. Coming from her, the words didn’t sound so much like an apology as a simple statement of fact. “I had just figured that anyone involved this deeply would know the stakes.”

  “That would be assuming I got involved in all this by choice,” I said. “Bad assumption. Enlighten me.”

  A line formed between her brows as she frowned. She tilted her head to one side and stared past me. I thought I could hear a faint whisper on the air, as if the garden were speaking to her on the breeze. Then she nodded and focused on me again.

  “I can’t go into details right now,” she said, “but I can warn you to be very careful about whom you ultimately give that book to.”

  “What,” I said, “afraid I’ll make it harder for you to get your hands on it?”

  She surrendered a wry smile. “I can’t say that’s not part of it, but it’s not my main worry. I’m more concerned abou—”

  Pain erupted in my leg as the courtyard winked out of existence. I opened my eyes to see the back of a pair of boots moving beneath me. They were walking across wet and muddy cobbles. I realized by the motion I felt that I was slung over someone’s shoulder and being carried through the streets. I tried to shift my weight so I could fall and get away, tried to ask who the hell was carrying me. All I managed was a weak wobble of my head and a pathetic mumble. The person carrying me readjusted my body on his frame with a grunt. The movement sent fresh fire racing up my leg. I groaned and closed my eyes, fleeing from the pain and misery into darkness.

  “. . . happening?!” yelled the woman. I opened my eyes to find myself on the paved floor of the courtyard, my knees up against my chest. The woman was standing beside the bench, turned toward a shadowy, halftransparent figure that had not been there before. The figure was short—even shorter than I—but I couldn’t make out any details beyond that. It gestured as if it were speaking, and I heard the whispering on the breeze again.

  So, she’d contracted a Mouth to glimmer the dream for her. Good. The thought of a Gray Prince being able to walk into my dreams at will was just too much for me at the moment.

  My leg still hurt, but it was not nearly as bad here. I unfolded and rolled slowly to my hands and knees. I noticed that the veins in the marble tiles seemed to shift and move of their own accord. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  “How long can we keep hold of him?” asked the woman. Pause. “Well, shit.” I heard the sound of movement saw her kneel down beside me at the edge of my vision. The place didn’t smell green anymore—another bad sign, I was sure.

  “Drothe,” she said. It wasn’t kind or coddling; it was a command. I looked up at her without thinking.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “Whatever you do, don’t give that book to anyone.”

  “Except you,” I gasped. “Right?”

  She shook her head. “Not even to me. Hide it. Don’t tell anyone where it is—that’ll help keep you alive, at least for a while. I’d rather see Ioclaudia’s book lost again than in the wrong hands.”

  I was about to ask what she meant when my leg spasmed. I winced, and when I opened my eyes, most of the color had washed out of our dream. The woman reached out and put her hands on my shoulders. The fingers didn’t quite stop when they touched me, seeming instead to pass an inch into my flesh. Oddly, it didn’t feel strange at that moment.

  “Hide the book,” she said, blurring and fading at the edges. “And keep it hidden.”

  Then I was alone in a silence that quickly turned into oblivion.

  There was nothing gradual about it—no slow graying before my eyes, no buzz becoming a roar in my ears. One moment I was unconscious; the next, I was awake.

  Everything was wrong. Instead of being cold, wet, and in pain, I was warm, dry, and lying in a soft feather bed. Crisp sheets covered me. My clothes were gone, replaced with what felt like a soft nightshirt. And I was alive. It was this last bit that surprised me the most.

  Out of curiosity, I shifted my leg. A barely noticeable ache answered the movement. That wasn’t right, either; the pain should have nearly driven me to tears. I pushed against the mattress beneath me with my left leg, my teeth clenched in preparation for the agony that would follow. A sharp burning answered the effort, but nothing more.

  Glimmer—had to be. There was no other way I could be feeling this good.

  Now I was really worried.

  I kept my eyes closed and listened. The sounds of Ildrecca after dark came to me, but they weren’t the usual cacophony of screams, drunken revelers, and rutting cats I was used to. Instead, I heard night insects, fragments of rough laughter, and the light tap of fingers on a drum somewhere in the distance. Whatever cordon I was in, it wasn’t Ten Ways or the Barren, that was for certain.

  I was about to roll over, when I heard cloth rustle and someone take a wet-
sounding sip of something behind me. I froze, then forced myself to relax. Guard, nurse, or someone else? A glass clinked faintly as it was set down.

  I took a slow, deep breath and was happy to find no hints of fresh greenery in the air around me. Still, there was something else in the air—something vaguely familiar I couldn’t quite place. Basil? Crushed thyme?

  I took another breath. Yes, it was definitely coming from the sheets. And I knew only one person who scented her sheets. Christiana. And that meant the other person in the room was . . .

  “Damn it, Degan,” I said, rolling over and opening my eyes. “Why’d you bring me here when you know I don’t like—” And I stopped.

  Jelem favored me with a sly smile. “I wasn’t thrilled about having you here, either,” he said. “But once my wife saw you bleeding all over the street . . .” He shrugged eloquently. “Well, it’s not as if I have a say under this roof, anyhow.”

  Jelem was stretched out in a well-padded chair, his feet kicked out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. His dark hair was in disarray, and the long green and black kaftan he wore was uncharacteristically rumpled. A silver oil lamp sat on a table by his side, creating shadows around the room. Next to the lamp, a glass of wine glowed red from the flame. Above him, an open window revealed a fragment of the clear night sky.

  I looked around the room. No, definitely not my sister’s house. She would never stand for the plain, whitewashed walls—colored plaster was all the rage among the nobility now. Then again, she might forgive it, once she saw the woven cloths that had been hung at strategic spots around the room. Gold, green, crimson, and brilliant blue threads formed intricate arabesques and geometries, bringing color and grace to an otherwise unremarkable space.

  I noted that neither my clothes nor any of the rest of my possessions were in ready sight. I turned back to Jelem to ask about them, when I noticed the battered, leather-bound book lying open in his lap. To hell with my clothes.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I said.

  Jelem glanced down at his lap. “This?” he said as he flicked a corner of a page. “If you mean, is this the waterlogged tome I’ve taken so many pains to dry properly, then yes, it is.”