The Water Thief

by Jane Kindred

  It takes a con to expose a con. But this con could strip their secrets bare.

  Framed for his twin sister’s murder, Sebastian Swift has been kept drugged in a mental institution since age thirteen, aware of only one horrible fact—every night in his dreams, he drowns.

  After a freak storm frees him, Sebastian learns the truth. His guardian, Emrys, has been siphoning off his inherited magical power over the waters of Cantre’r Gwaelod—one gruesome vial at a time. And the man’s bastard son, Macsen, has been raised in his place. Determined to find his twin’s killer, Sebastian assumes her identity.

  Macsen Finch isn’t about to give up his guise as the young earl—and not just because of the fortune. His cousin’s return from the dead threatens Macsen’s own efforts to undermine his father’s evil plan. Yet he can’t deny his inexplicable attraction to the imposter.

  Acting on their mutual desire puts them both at the mercy of a madman’s wrath. To stop Emrys from stealing his power, Sebastian will have to learn how to use it—and whom he can trust.

  Warning: May contain copious exchange of fluids, men in corsets, and dirty dancing. Apply liberally before bedtime.

  The Water Thief

  Jane Kindred

  Chapter One

  Through the density of something thicker than air, words carried to me like the garbled warnings of a faceless oracle in a dream. The sort of warning that seems terribly important but can’t be made sense of, no matter how one strains to understand—human speech, to be certain, even if it sounded like hounds baying through a vat of black pudding, or the grumbling of a bear disturbed from hibernation in the depths of a humus-rich den.

  My head felt like mud.

  The words chased one another in almost-understandable fragments, poking at me like a finger to the temple, an irritation that kept intruding into my consciousness with the persistence of a scraping branch against a window no matter how I tried to ignore it.

  “Hold the…down. I don’t think he’s…enough yet.”

  “I swear, he…little blighter.”

  Something tugged me in the opposite direction, urging me deeper into the heavy medium through which these sounds flowed, and I wanted to follow. I wanted to leave. I needed to leave. But they wouldn’t keep quiet. They wouldn’t let me be.

  “He definitely…last much longer.”

  “Hold him.”

  “Don’t you…enough?”

  They curled about me now like wisps of brightly colored smoke, snatches of awareness and memory trying to worm their way inside through any available orifice. I swung my head to shake the thoughts out, and in the process, reality rushed in—reality being a tub of freezing water in which my entire body was submerged. My lungs rebelled.

  Powerful hands held me under with a grip I couldn’t break as the frigid liquid began to surge into me. I could see them above me through the wavering substance: my tormentors—the orderlies at All Fates Lunatic Asylum. I thrashed, panicking, and managed to wrest my arm from one of them, lunging upward and breaking the surface of the water before my lungs filled.

  The bigger of the two yanked me up by the scruff like a drowned pup as I retched and scrabbled over the tub’s edge. “Calm down, you, or you’ll go again.”

  Deposited ungently on hands and knees, I vomited on the tile, knowing I’d probably be assigned to clean the toilets for a month for it. My lungs and throat were burning, and I’d wet myself, judging by the warmth in that single area of my clothing.

  “Never learn your lesson, do you, boy?” said the other. “Obey the rules and you don’t get dunked.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I managed.

  “Right. Never do.”

  Ignoring me, the orderlies stripped me of my institution-gray cotton gown, and one of them threw a bucket of the icy water on me to wash away the remains of my accident. I hugged my chest, shivering and still sputtering. Shoved toward a bin of freshly laundered gowns, I took one without question and pulled it on. This was a sequence of events I’d long since gotten used to, even if the near drowning was something to which my reflexes could never become accustomed. The next bin over held the cotton slippers. I had barely pulled a pair onto my feet before I was being hauled from the hydrotherapy chamber and back to my room.

  “Behave yourself,” the orderly growled before he pushed me inside and slammed and locked the iron door. The little metal window in the iron that was just half a head too high for me to see through was closed. The lights were out. I’d missed supper again.

  I didn’t bother to question this routine. I could hardly remember a time when there had been a different one. Questions and resistance never garnered positive results. I sat in the center of the cot and pulled the rough blanket around my shoulders, shivering too much still to try to lie down. A storm buffeted the building, rain hammering the roof and wind howling. This too seemed almost routine.

  What was not was the sudden shuddering beneath my feet, as though the foundations of the hospital were being shaken, or the ground beneath it. An ominous rumble accompanied the disorienting movement. I stood, reeling, uncertain what constituted behaving oneself in these circumstances. Other inmates—patients—were screaming and shouting, rattling their doors. I reached for mine. The floor slid out from under me, sending me tumbling into the corner, while above me, something cracked, and I covered my head just in time for a shower of plaster to rain down on me. And then actual rain followed, ice cold as the therapeutic bath.

  I gasped in the torrent. It seemed the end of the world.

  Then my door made a terrible noise, yanked from its hinges by the battering wind.

  “Sebastian.”

  It took me a moment to realize this meant me. No one had said my name in the eight years since I’d first entered these walls. I looked up toward the gaping hole where my door had been. My sister August stood staring at me.

  “Come with me.”

  * * * * *

  I stumbled with her blindly, August pulling me onward through the storm, as I tried to make sense of this. She didn’t look a day older than she had when I’d last seen her eight years past. They told me many times what I’d done, why I was entrusted to the care of All Fates, though I denied it. It was those denials, of course, that had cost me. If I’d only take responsibility for my actions, my doctors said, I could get better. If I would only admit that on the morning of our thirteenth birthday, I’d murdered my twin.

  Unlucky thirteen. Unluck had followed us since our birth, as though the world didn’t want us in it. We brought death to our mother simply by being born, arriving in distress and not expected to take breath. And yet we did—hers, I reckoned. My father too left this world because of us, taking his own life just three years later, having never recovered from the loss of his wife. We were left in the care of Great Aunt Elen. She was kind enough, if strict. We wanted for nothing material. And yet I’d repaid her generosity by drowning August in the boggy depths of Lake Iseldir.

  They described to me in great detail how I’d done it, trying in vain to stir my memories. I’d struck her on the head with an oar while we rowed on the lake, and pushed her overboard, holding her down with the oar when she feebly roused. I was, it seemed, a rather vicious and heartless individual. And not terribly logical to have killed the only person in the realm who cared about me—to have killed my dearest friend without provocation.

  Much was made of motive, sessions with my doctor insisting that I face my crime, that I own up to—jealousy? A momentary pique? A violent row? What had August done to make me so angry I’d bludgeoned her, drowned her and rolled her into the quivering bog at the edge of the lake and watched her sink? Had
I been born this way? Unable to empathize or feel for another? Had I heard voices telling me to harm her? Had there been something unnatural between us that drove me to silence her out of guilt and shame? I had become particularly uncooperative when this last theory was put forth, offended to the core that they would tarnish my memories of August to fit some psychosis with which they could explain me away.

  Of that day, I remembered nothing. Only what followed has stayed with me, impossible to forget: the inquest, the interrogation, the disbelief. The testimony of my cousin Emrys, who claimed to have witnessed my villainous actions from the shore, but had been too far away to reach August in time to save her. Her body was lost to the peat—like the realm in which we dwelt, if the bards were to be believed.

  Yet here she was, drenched in the downpour, dragging me through the rain over rocks and mud as the collapsed wing of All Fates Asylum was buried under a slide, claimed by the unstable ground of Cantre’r Gwaelod. She was eight years dead, but standing before me. I could only conclude that this August was a spirit.

  She objected to the term.

  “What else am I to call you?” I paused to catch my breath. “You appear before me just as you did on the day you died. What are you if not a spirit?”

  August considered. “I suppose I’m a ghost.” She pushed me onward when I tried to stop and rest.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Spirits are the incorporeal manifestations of the dead. I’m an echo of a moment. A memory.”

  I skidded in the mud in my institutional slippers, starting to slide backward down the hill I’d nearly mastered, and August grabbed and steadied me with a solidity belying her state.

  “I don’t remember this,” I said.

  “Of course not. This never happened before. It’s happening now.”

  My ability to speak was too much impaired by exertion to continue. I kept on, doggedly, because stopping would mean collapse. There wasn’t air enough to ask why she’d come to me, and why now, nor to ask where she was taking me. There was a distinct possibility I had at last succumbed to the madness for which I’d been so long committed. If I had, I didn’t mind. I’d missed August like one might miss a limb. Perhaps she was my phantom limb.

  We conquered the hill and found relatively stable ground, a service road full of ruts and potholes from the laundry carts and supply carriages. I followed August without question, soaked to the skin in my sleeping gown. There hadn’t been time to dress, and coats were only provided to us for excursions into the yard in winter. I usually missed these excursions, being punished for the many infractions of which I was so frequently guilty—my refusal to confess to and express remorse for my crime chief among them.

  “You’re too thin, Sebastian.” August had turned to wait for me to catch up as I fell behind. “A man grown, and you still look like a bony adolescent. Haven’t they fed you?”

  “The meals at All Saints do not inspire appetite.” There was that, and there was withholding food as punishment. I didn’t care. I hadn’t much cared about anything since I’d given up resisting my fate. For the first few years, I had railed against it, furious and frightened, appealing to anyone who would listen, insisting I didn’t belong there. There had been a great deal of “corrective procedures”—corporal punishment, restraints and isolation topping the list—before I accepted my lot.

  “I hate to think of you suffering, but it may be in our favor.”

  I stopped in front of her, having finally caught my breath. “What may be in our favor?”

  “Your appearance. Come along. We need to get you out of the rain.” August took my arm to urge me on.

  “How come you can touch me? How is it that I feel you?”

  “You ask too many questions.”

  “And you haven’t answered any of them.” Nor did she proceed to.

  I was well and truly exhausted by the time we reached our destination, so there would be no further conversation. Exercise was not easy to come by at All Fates, and I was unaccustomed to such strenuous hiking. In my exhaustion, I hardly noticed where she delivered me. Strong, kind arms took custody of me, warm blankets enveloped me, and sleep overcame me as surely as if I’d been drugged.

  Chapter Two

  I awoke before dawn on the floor of a pauper’s shanty, near a woodstove still warm with embers from the night before. The vague shapes of perhaps half a dozen others were scattered on the bare wood floor around me under tattered blankets like my own. But August’s dark chestnut curls were not among them.

  “Good morning.”

  Propped on one arm, I turned toward the baritone voice. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a ginger beard beneath his blond hair smiled at me from where he leaned against a rickety table, his simple canvas work shirt and trousers marking him as a commoner—and not, apparently, one of the orderlies, doctors or deliverymen who had until now comprised my world. It wasn’t a friendly smile, though not exactly unfriendly. It was the sort I’d seen many times in the asylum, a kind of challenge until the wearer of it determined whether the inmate—patient—he was dealing with could be trusted.

  “I’m Sven. Welcome to Thievesward.” He indicated the humble room, hazy with grease smoke from the previous evening’s cooking, as if it were the whole of it.

  “Thievesward?”

  “You mean to say you don’t know where you’ve stumbled into?”

  “I was with…someone. I just followed. She brought me here.”

  The smile turned downward. “I know where you come from. Won’t send you back, but I will throw you out if you’re the kind of madman actually belongs there. There was no woman with you. You came on your own, escaped outta that place—I can tell by what you’re wearing.”

  I looked down at the filthy rag, stitched with “ALL FATES” in block letters on the back of it. Of course he could.

  “What do you want to be called?”

  “My name’s—”

  “Not what I asked. Don’t want to know your name. If you don’t fancy going back, I’d say you don’t want me to know it neither.” His blue eyes were sharp, saying more than his words. Though his words said plenty.

  I pondered a moment before answering. “You can call me Sylvester.”

  Sven snorted rudely. “Ain’t gonna call you Sylvester.” His eyes seemed to lay me bare as he scrutinized me. “Call you Sly. That’ll do.”

  I shrugged. “What’s Thievesward?”

  “You truly don’t know?”

  When I shook my head, Sven sat on the unvarnished bench and motioned for me to join him. Hesitantly, I rose and came forward, the rough basket-cloth blanket wrapped around me like a defense, but remained standing. A board of dried sausage lay on the table among a stack of unwashed dishes, and Sven took out a pocketknife and cut off a chunk, offering it to me. I snatched it with all the grace of a caged animal and bit into it heartily, causing my host to raise an eyebrow. I’d forgotten my manners—several years back. Hesitation at the dinner hall meant going without.

  I swallowed, feeling my face redden, and sat subdued on the bench opposite him. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to be rude. Thank you.”

  “Don’t care if you’re rude, boy.” He cut himself a piece and talked around it as he chewed. “I suppose if you’ve not heard of Thievesward, you’ve been locked up quite a while.”

  “Eight years.”

  Sven whistled softly. “How old are you, boy?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “What did you do to be locked up at”—Sven paused, fingers moving as if he was using them to count—“thirteen? Kill someone?”

  When I didn’t answer, Sven’s large fist tightened around his knife. “Maybe I should put you back out in the rain.”

  It had been so long since I’d spoken to anyone who didn’t know the story—who didn’t know more about me and what I’d done than I knew myself. “They
say I killed someone. I didn’t.” I cringed automatically as I spoke the last two words, conditioned to expect a beating.

  “So who did?”

  No one had ever asked me that.

  “I don’t know. But I didn’t kill her.”

  “Her. Young lovers’ quarrel?”

  “What’s Thievesward?” I met his eyes, unblinking, to let him know his questions were done.

  Sven nodded his understanding and cut off another piece of sausage for me. “Thievesward is where the forgotten and unwanted congregate. Been a lot more of those since his lordship came of age.”

  “His lordship?”

  “The earl of Cantre’r Gwaelod, Sebastian Swift. His cousin was bad enough, running things until the boy reached majority, but the earl has taken things to a new low in the Lowland Hundred, if you take my meaning. Driving his own tenants to penury.”

  It was all I could do not to gape at him, dumbfounded. Someone had taken my identity.

  All the odd punishments and isolation began to make sense. I hadn’t been punished merely for refusing to acknowledge my guilt. The punishments came about whenever I spoke of my former life, of who I was, of my sister or myself by name. I’d been in a haze of laudanum more often than not, but I realized now my doctors—jailers—had never once called me by my name. They spoke of me in a sort of proper third person: the Patient, the Inmate. And on the rare occasions they spoke to me, it was always “you, there” and “young man”. There had been no trial, I realized now. Only an inquest before a “judge”—and Emrys Pryce.

  Sven was eyeing me peculiarly. “You feeling all right?”

  I found myself on my feet, not knowing what I meant to do. “I can’t… I have to…”

  “Need the outhouse?” Sven rose, his unruffled manner calming. “I’ll show you.”

  He went to the door and drew back the long bolt, causing the bodies on the floor to stir. I stepped out, expecting him to close the door on me, having deemed me mad enough to belong at All Fates after all, but he followed me out and led the way around the side of the shack to a wooden outbuilding. I went obediently, used to being led to the toilet and eliminating on command. Resisting the asylum’s schedules—and random changes to them—meant enduring unpleasant disruptions to one’s system.