The Legend Of Eli Monpress

by Rachel Aaron

  Gin eyed her up and down. “Like a librarian.”

  “Such flattery!” Miranda folded her hands over her chest dramatically. “Be still, my trembling heart!”

  “What? That’s the point, right?” Gin said, getting up.

  Miranda grinned at his confusion and tucked her discarded clothes under her arm before pushing her way through the giggling trees. Gin padded after her, muttering under his breath.

  The tiny clearing outside the hut that served as Eli’s hideout had become quite crowded since Nico and Josef had returned. Most of the space, however, was taken up by the new additions. Laid out on a ratty blanket, two men and a woman, dressed only in their underclothes, were sleeping peacefully in the tree-dappled sunlight—castle servants, the sources of the costumes. King Henrith was crouched beside them, his hands moving in worried circles on his knees. He had traded out his filthy silk clothes for what looked like a set of Josef’s spares, though it was hard to tell without the knives. The bad fit and the king’s dour expression as he hovered over the unconscious servants made him look like a refugee from a tragedy play.

  “I don’t see why you had to knock them out like this,” he muttered.

  “It was the simplest way to get the sizes correct,” Josef said in a bored voice. He was lounging beside the hut, with his back propped against the ever-present camouflage thatch of branches provided by Eli’s arboreal admirers. His enormous sword was stabbed into the ground beside him and a pile of throwing knives was spread out in the grass at his feet. His normal array of cross-belted sheaths was gone, and in their place he wore the chain and blue surcoat of a House Allaze royal guard, which, judging from the gaps at the shoulders, had recently belonged to the narrower of the sleeping men. “They’ll wake up soon enough, no worse for wear.”

  “And you’ll be here, sire,” Eli chimed in, fastening the cuffs of his valet’s coat. “A free evening off work and a touching reunion with their monarch. I’d say we’re doing them a favor.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Miranda said, kneeling beside the distressed king, “is why we’re stealing costumes to sneak into the castle when Josef and Nico already snuck into the castle to grab these three.”

  “We did nothing of the sort,” Eli said. “Every servant doesn’t live in the palace, you know. Josef spotted this lot walking into town from the outlying village. He merely gave them an involuntary night off. Oh, don’t look like that.” He waved his hands at Miranda’s horrified expression. “If Josef says they’ll be fine, they’ll be fine. He’s a professional. He does this all the time.”

  Josef nodded sagely at the pile of knives he was polishing. Somehow, Miranda failed to find the gesture comforting.

  “Of course,” Eli put his hands in his pockets, “the real question here is why we had to resort to this in the first place. I thought you said you had a contact in the palace?”

  Miranda shook her head vehemently, making her veil fly. “There’s no way I’m letting you drag Marion into this, not after she already stuck her neck out for me once. Just look what you did to one of her coworkers.” She pointed at the unconscious girl, whose librarian uniform dress Miranda was now wearing. “Besides,” she muttered, “I spent a good deal of time correcting her ideas about wizards. I don’t want her meeting you lot and getting the wrong impression all over again.”

  “You cut me to the bone, lady,” Eli said, clutching his chest. “Are you implying that I blacken the reputation of wizardry?”

  Miranda cocked an eyebrow at his theatrics. “The Rector Spiritualis wouldn’t have sent me out here if you were doing it a benefit, Mr. Monpress.”

  “Ah yes, the great Etmon Banage.” Eli smiled. “How nice of him to draw the line between good wizard and bad wizard so clearly. Truly a civic-minded man.”

  “Master Banage is twice the wizard you are, thief,” Miranda hissed, leaping to her feet. “How dare you even mention—”

  A black blur shot in front of her face, and Miranda flinched as the long, pitted blade of Josef’s sword came into focus an inch from her nose. The swordsman was lounging against the hut with his arm extended, holding the enormous blade between Miranda and Eli with one hand.

  “Children,” he said, “not now.”

  Miranda blinked nervously. The sword hung in the air in front of her. This close, she could see the deep gouges from a lifetime of battles that ran like canyons along the blade, though the sword’s surface was like no metal she had ever seen. It was blacker than pot iron, and dull as stone. Its cutting edge was uneven, splashed here and there by a redder darkness, like old blood that could never be scoured off. The blade looked impossibly heavy, but Josef’s arm was firm as an iron beam, and the sword did not once waver in his grip.

  His point made, Josef plunged his blade back into the moss beside him and calmly resumed cleaning his knives as though nothing had happened.

  Miranda turned to Gin as much to get away from Eli’s triumphant grin as to fix the small bag containing her rings to the rope around his neck.

  “I could eat him for you,” Gin growled in her ear, his eyes on the swordsman. “It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “No,” Miranda said, adjusting the small bag, her fingers lingering over the familiar shapes outlined through the soft doeskin. “Without you around, we’ll need someone who can look threatening. Besides, he’d probably give you indigestion.”

  “Without me?” Gin snorted. “I’m going with you.”

  “No, you’re not. We’ve been over this.” Miranda pulled his head down, bringing his orange eyes level with her own. “If there’s one thing we do know about Eli, it’s that he’s a master thief. If he says he can get us in, then I believe him, but even Eli can’t work miracles, and that’s what it would take to sneak your fluffy face past the walls. No, your job is to stay and guard the king. The Powers know he can’t guard himself.”

  Gin glanced over at the king, who was prodding the passed-out guard with his finger, and gave a mighty sigh. “All right,” the dog growled and shuffled over to sit next to Henrith, who looked none too pleased by this turn of events, “but I’ll be listening.”

  “I’ll call if I need you,” she said.

  Gin snorted, but left it at that.

  “All right,” Eli said. “If the girl and her puppy are finished saying their good-byes, let’s get a move on.”

  Josef nodded and stood up, his ill-fitting armor clanking loudly. Since his outfit didn’t have room for his usual arsenal, he had been forced to make do with a knife in each boot, one behind his neck, and one at his waist. Still, he could almost pass for a normal soldier. Almost, that is, until he ruined the whole look by fastening his black sword across his back with a leather strap.

  “You can’t wear that,” Miranda said, pointing at the blade. “What’s the point of wearing disguises if you’re just going to give it away by carrying that monstrosity around? I mean, if I left my rings, surely you can go an hour without your sword?”

  Josef looked her straight in the eye and pulled the strap tighter. “If the Heart stays, I stay.”

  “I hate to admit it, but she does have a point,” Eli said, frowning. He went into the cabin and came out a few moments later, carrying a few sticks and a leather sack. “Just a second,” he muttered, laying his materials carefully on the dirt. He kneeled beside them and began to talk in a low, soft voice. Miranda tried to listen, but it was impossible to get close enough to hear what he was saying without making it obvious that that was what she was trying to do. At last, he scooped up the shortest stick and, with a few more words, bent the wood into a circle as easily as one would coil a length of rope.

  Miranda watched in amazement as Eli laid the loop of wood and the two remaining straight sticks on top of the leather bag.

  “When you’re ready,” he said.

  No sooner did the words leave his mouth than the bag sat up. With a lively wiggle, the leather sack undid its seam and began wrapping itself around the wood, forming a tube around the two longer
sticks. When the leather had wrapped itself as far as it could go, it pulled itself tight, and the thread from the seam stitched itself lengthwise up the edge of the long, leather tube. When it was finished, Eli held up a long, but otherwise perfectly normal-looking, spear quiver, the exact size and shape to hide the Heart of War.

  Eli thanked the quiver several times before handing it to Josef, who slid his sword into the leather with his own nod of thanks.

  “How did you …” Miranda pointed a limp finger at the quiver that had been three sticks and a bag less than a minute ago.

  “Easy enough,” Eli said. “I’ve had the bag for a while. He always had higher ambitions than luggage, so he was happy to help. The sticks were greenwood, and they love any chance to move around a bit before they dry brittle.” He walked over to Josef and examined his handiwork. “It’s too bad we don’t have any spears to really complete the effect.”

  He kept talking, but Miranda’s mind was too dumbfounded to make sense of it. She was still processing the enormous list of impossible things she’d just watched him do like it was nothing, like he did this every day. Talking to trees was one thing, but to make something new, just by talking, it was unbelievable. Not even the great shaper wizards could craft spirits without opening their own souls at least a little. This was like the wood and leather had decided to do him a favor, just because he asked. If she’d tried to do something like that without getting one of her servants to act as a middleman, the wood would have ignored her completely. Yet it did what Eli asked joyfully, as if he were the one who needed impressing, and not the other way around. She watched Eli as he talked, his long hands moving in elegant circles, and, not for the first time, Miranda caught herself wondering just what he really was.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  Miranda jumped. Eli was looking at her quizzically. “You were staring and not listening.”

  “It’s nothing,” Miranda muttered, fighting down her blush at being caught. “Let’s just get going.”

  Eli shrugged and turned to follow Josef as he led the way toward the castle. Nico joined them at the edge of the clearing, fading out of the woods like a ghost. Miranda jumped when she saw the girl, half because of her sudden appearance, and half because she hadn’t noticed Nico was missing in the first place. Then she realized that Nico didn’t have a disguise.

  “Wait, doesn’t she need—”

  “No,” Nico said, without stopping or looking back.

  Gin padded back over to her, his eyes on the girl. “Watch yourself,” he growled, “and don’t forget what she is. Demons can’t be trusted.”

  “Duly noted,” Miranda said, and she gave his fur a final ruffle before jogging into the forest after Eli and the others.

  Though they were only half a mile from the city, it took over an hour to reach the wall. This was mostly because Josef led them in a crazy zigzag through the brush. They crossed back over their path more than once, and he insisted on keeping to the tall undergrowth and away from the game trails, so that with every other step Miranda had to beat back a branch or untangle her skirt from a nettle bush. To make things worse, Eli stopped every five minutes or so to murmur quietly to this tree or that rock. She made it a point to listen covertly, but so far as she could tell, his little talks were of the most mundane kind, an exchange of pleasantries, maybe a comment about the weather, like a country wife chatting with her neighbors. As he talked, he would do them little favors, flicking an ant away or scraping some moss off the peak of a rock so it could feel the sunlight. That was strange enough, but the truly amazing thing was the way the sleepy spirits perked up as soon as he spoke to them. Miranda could almost feel them leaning forward, eager to tell him anything he wanted to know. Whatever brightness Gin had been talking about, it seemed to have a universal effect.

  Miranda expected Josef to complain about the seemingly meaningless stops, but he accepted Eli’s little chats with bored inertness, as if he had long since argued every point of the process five times over and couldn’t be bothered to care anymore.

  At last, they had reached the edge of the forest, where the king’s deer park met the city’s northern border. The trees ended a good twenty feet from the wall, leaving a broad swath of open ground carpeted with overgrown grass and saplings. Josef made them crouch in the scrubby bushes at the edge of the clearing as he scouted ahead. While they were waiting for the swordsman to come back, Miranda took the opportunity to satisfy her curiosity and she crept over to where Eli was crouched in the grass.

  “Okay,” she whispered, “I give up. Is the weather talk some kind of code?”

  “What?” Eli’s eyebrows shot up. “No, no, I’m just building good will.”

  Miranda gave him a confused look. “Good will?”

  “It’s a harsh world,” Eli said. “You never know when you’ll need a little good will from the local countryside.”

  Miranda was skeptical. A mossy rock didn’t seem like much of an ally. “So you weren’t doing reconnaissance or anything?”

  “Sorry, no,” Eli said, shaking his head.

  Miranda frowned. “But—”

  “Quiet.”

  Miranda and Eli both jumped at the sudden command. Josef was kneeling in the tall grass not a foot away from them, glaring icily. Miranda hadn’t even heard his approach.

  “We move now,” he said.

  “Wha—” Before Miranda could even form her question, Josef took off for the city wall at a dead run, Nico and Eli right on his heels. Miranda took a deep breath and charged after them, covering the space of open ground between the trees and the city wall faster than she had ever moved in her life. She slammed into the wall and dropped to a crouch just in time. No sooner had she reached the stones than a small troop of guards appeared out of the woods only a few feet from where they’d been hiding just moments before.

  Miranda clapped her hands over her mouth as the soldiers fanned out. They patrolled the edge of the forest in a wide sweep, poking their short spears into the underbrush. Finding nothing, the leader waved his hand, and the unit faded back into the woods. Only when the sound of their boots had died to a whisper did Miranda release the breath she’d been holding.

  “That was lucky,” she said.

  “Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” Josef said in a low voice, peering at her through the grass. “Those patrols have been sweeping the area all day. If it wasn’t for the fact that the forest doesn’t want them to find us, all the luck in the world wouldn’t have gotten us this far.”

  Miranda started, and Eli winked at her from his hiding place farther down the wall.

  Josef gave Miranda a look of grudging approval. “Nice sprint, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” she muttered. “What now?”

  “Now we have to find that panel,” Josef said, turning to the wall. “It should be close.”

  “It’s here.” Nico’s quiet voice made Miranda jump. Nico was crouched on Josef’s right, one small white finger sticking out of her voluminous sleeve to point at the iron square, barely larger than a laundry chute, set into the wall beside her.

  “What is it?” Miranda asked, leaning in for a better look.

  “A bolt hole,” Eli said, crawling over to crouch beside Nico, “in case the royalty need to make a fast exit. Very common in cities like this.” He gave the iron door an experimental push, but it didn’t so much as rattle. He tried again, harder this time, but he might as well have been pushing the wall itself. “Hmm.” He frowned. “This one seems to be locked.”

  Miranda gave him a puzzled look. “Isn’t this how you got in last time?”

  “Of course not,” Eli said, looking insulted. “First rule of thievery, never use the same entrance twice.”

  Miranda rolled her eyes. “How many ‘first rules’ of thievery do you have?”

  “When one mistake can mean your head on a pike, every rule’s a first rule,” Eli said cheerfully.

  The thief ran his long fingers along the door’s edge, which was set
flush against the stone. Miranda watched with growing uncertainty. There wasn’t even a keyhole, so far as she could see. When he had tapped every inch of the metal, Eli leaned back, brow knit in thought.

  “Can’t you just talk it open?” Miranda asked, moving a little closer. “Like you did with the prison door?”

  “I could,” Eli said, “but—” He reached into his coat pocket and drew out a small leather case, monogrammed in gold with an ornate capital M —“sometimes a simpler solution suffices.”

  He flipped the case open, revealing a startling selection of lock picks. Carefully selecting the longest and thinnest, he leaned down until his nose brushed the door. He held out his hand, and, without further prompting, Josef handed him a knife. Eli expertly wedged the slender blade into the hair-thin crack between the iron and the stone. Then, using the blade as a lever, he carefully lifted the door out of its niche. It opened just a fraction before sticking again with a soft clang.

  “Lever and padlock,” Eli muttered, switching out the thin lock pick for a slightly longer one with a crooked head. “Josef, if you would.”

  Josef took the knife from him and held it where Eli pointed, putting just enough pressure on the lever to keep the opening as large as possible without snapping the blade. Eli took a pair of delicate, extremely-long-nosed pliers out of his case and, using both hands, neatly slipped the pliers and the lock pick through the knife-thin crack.

  He gripped with the pliers and began to deftly maneuver the lock pick, wiggling it right, then left, then right again, like he was trying to hook something. At last there was a loud click. Eli released the pliers and a muted crash came through the iron as the padlock hit the ground on the other side. He tucked his tools back into their leather case and opened the door with a flourish. The whole operation had taken less than a minute.

  When he caught Miranda gawking, Eli’s grin became unbearably smug.

  “What were you expecting?” he said, still grinning. “I’m the greatest thief in the— ow !” He yelped as Josef punched him in the arm.