by Unknown
“Don’t want to give her that much rope.”
“Prob’ly smart.” He shook the jug. It sloshed in a mostly-empty way. “Yesterday she told me she’s the long-lost daughter of Sudala royalty, and if I let her go, she’d see us all richly rewarded.” He mimicked the thief’s townie accent.
“Where in the world is Sudala?”
“No idea. After that, she told me there’s a dragon after her, and that it’ll destroy the village if she’s not gone by the new moon.”
“No such things as dragons.”
“I know,” Deke said.
There was a distant “Ouch!” from the goat pen, and a curse.
“Just about enough for another cup in here,” Deke said thoughtfully, and looked up the hill.
Zair snorted. “You’re the one who picked the berries. If you want to waste all that effort, who am I to say?”
She fed the fire and then stumped up the hill with Deke behind her.
“Come to mock?” the thief said tartly, sucking her burnt wrist. “You both stink of fish, by the way. Burnt fish.”
Deke topped off the cup and set it in the mud. An interested goat lipped at it through the rails; the thief snatched the cup before the goat could get its tongue past the rim. After squinting at the wine and sniffing it suspiciously, she said, “And here I thought fish-boiling parties were the height of the local night life.”
Deke laughed. “You should see the young folk dance around the bonfire at the festival after the linget run. It’s enough to make an old man’s heart beat fast.”
“You guys have a fish festival? Somehow,” the thief said, “I’m not surprised.”
“What better reason?” Zair asked. “Gods just sit on their heels and collect offerings. Fish, on the other hand, are useful.”
The thief blinked at her, then sampled the wine. “What should I know. I’m just a thief.”
“And not a very good one,” Zair said.
“Hey!”
“If you were a good thief, you wouldn’t be wearing a patched coat and stealing tableware from fishing villages.”
“I like my coat,” the thief snapped, drawing it closer about her pointed knees. “It’s stylish.” After a pause, she added, “I’m very good at card games and sleight-of-hand. It’s what I do. But there’s not much call for that sort of thing in little coast towns like Trenza.”
“So you came to a much smaller town instead?”
The thief tipped back the rest of the wine, her long throat working, and wiped her mouth. “No, if you must know, I got lost. I thought I was on the road to Bonolevi, which at least is big enough to have a night life that doesn’t involve fish. Instead I found myself here, and figured I’d make the most of it.”
“Your sense of direction must be terrible,” Zair said, “if you thought you were going to Bonolevi and ended up here.”
“I’m sure it’s quite obvious to you, but to a stranger, one little muddy coast road looks much the same as another.” The thief rolled the cup between her long fingers. “Does your town have a name?”
Zair looked at Deke; he looked back at her. They both thought about it. “Folks in Big Crossing sometimes call it Little Crossing, I guess,” he said.
“But it isn’t really,” Zair explained to the thief. “And what do they know; Big Crossing’s all the way to the other side of the Scarp. Can’t even get there in the wet season.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” the thief groaned. “Er, you don’t have any more of this wine, do you?”
She must be desperate. Two good things could be said of Deke’s wine: it was very strong, and (mostly) nonpoisonous. “Got another jug aging out back,” Deke said. “Prob’ly ready tomorrow night, maybe the night after.”
The thief gave him an incredulous look. “Your wine’s vintage is measured in days?”
“There’s a fine timing to it.”
She stared at him a moment longer, then shuddered and drained the sludgy dregs in her cup. “You can call me Shadow,” she said in a rush.
“Oh, really?” Zair said. “We can, can we? Does anyone else?”
“It’s what I always wanted people to call me. My thief name, if you will.”
Zair cleared her throat. “That’d be a ‘no’, then.”
“But it’s what you can call me in this village, if you like,” the thief said, and she smiled with wine-stained lips. “I swear I’ll answer to it if you do.”
#
After that, the thief was less sullen and even talked to people on occasion, although some of the parents began to complain when they caught her teaching the children simple tricks with her deck of cards.
“First you complain that I keep myself apart, and now it’s a problem when I try to make friends.”
“The problem,” Zair said, “is some of the good folk in this village think you’re corrupting their children.”
“In my experience, most children are born corrupted. It’s only the adults who think otherwise.” She took out the cards and spread them with a practiced snap of her wrist. “Would you like to learn a trick?”
Zair had a strong suspicion that the thief had switched from sulking and simple lies to working a longer con, but there was little to be done short of hauling her into Trenza. In any case, Zair’s fingers, despite the twists of age, were strong and nimble from working with ropes. She quickly picked up the tricks that Shadow called the Conjurer’s Crimp and Axti’s Overhand Swap.
“Guess it’s not just the children in danger of being corrupted,” Zair said thoughtfully, trying a sideways shuffle and sending a card spinning into the bushes.
“Watch it, old woman, that’s my only deck and it’s not like I can buy more from the goats.” But Shadow smiled. It softened the edges of her long, bony face.
#
The moon passed full. The summer tides ran high, the second wave of linget came in, and storms hovered on the edge of the sky, purpling the horizon. Nets frayed quickly, and tempers likewise. Zair was too busy to learn card tricks, and she kept the thief too busy to teach any.
Still, on a sultry afternoon when the promise of coming rain lay heavy across the marsh, Zair discovered Shadow waiting for her when she went to milk the goats. The thief was leaning against a fencepost and pensively studying the green stone that she wore around her neck. Zair had never gotten a good look at it, but it didn’t seem to belong to anyone in the village, so she didn’t bother herself about it.
Shadow dropped it down her collar as Zair approached, looking guilty.
“If you’ve time to woolgather, you’ve time to make yourself useful.” Zair shoved a milking bucket into her hands.
The thief sighed, but she grabbed Liddy-goat’s rope halter and dragged her to the milking stake. Zair looped the goat’s tie-rope briskly around the stake, and Shadow watched with interested eyes.
“What sort of payment would you want to teach me that?”
“Milking?” Zair asked, crouching by the goat’s hindquarters with a hand on her flank. “Start learning now, if you want.”
“No, no—I’d like to learn to tie knots like you do.”
“You don’t know how to tie knots?” Zair nodded towards the woven belt around the thief’s waist. “What holds up your pants, then?”
“Magic knots, old woman.”
“You’ve got some things to learn about asking for favors,” Zair said. “It’s not magic, anyway.”
“Knot magic? Cute.”
“Not magic. It’s just tying knots. We tie better knots than most people, but like I said, a fisherman has to know how.”
“Whatever. It looks like a useful skill, and I may never get another opportunity to learn.”
Zair looked over her shoulder, studying Shadow’s suspiciously guileless expression. “I’ve a feeling it’s not the tying you’re interested in, so much as the untying.”
“Fine,” the thief said loftily. “Don’t teach me, then. I’ll find someone else to do it.”
“Good luck finding someone w
ho likes you enough.”
“Really? I think a lot of people here like me.” Shadow’s smile darted across her homely face, quicksilver-fast but warm. “I think you like me more than you’ll admit.”
Zair snorted and handed her the bucket of fresh, frothing goat’s milk. “Take this down to Mairna the cheesemaker.”
The thief took the bucket, but made no move to leave. Instead she stood looking down at the winding channels of the marsh and the ruffled ocean beyond. “How can you build so close to the water? Don’t you get storms here?”
“You’ll see one soon,” Zair said, unlooping Liddy-goat’s tether. “There’s heavy weather moving in tonight. We’ll bring the nets in early.”
“But—all that water.” The thief waved her free arm, clutching the bucket in the other hand. “And your buildings are—no offense—somewhat substandard. What if the whole place is swept away?”
“It’s not usually a problem. When really heavy weather moves in, we take the children to the caves.” Zair pointed to the distant Scarp, a dark line along the northern edge of the estuary. “This is just a regular squall. We’ll get through it fine.”
#
As predicted, by dusk the moon was long gone behind a black wall of thunderheads. Rain lashed the side of Zair’s house, and the rendering fires had been extinguished, the nets pulled in. The thief had taken refuge in the goatshed.
“Are you really going to leave her out there?” Zair’s niece Linnie asked when she stopped by to drop off some damaged nets for Zair to work her talents upon.
“She has the goats to keep her warm. She’s prob’ly better off than the rest of us.”
But as the wind and rain picked up, banging the shutters and battering her small, snug house, she did feel a tug of guilt. Finally she wrapped her oiled leather slicker around her and stepped out into the slanting rain. At the goat fence, she stopped to retie the thief’s knot, granting tether enough to reach the first row of houses.
The goats were huddled in the three-sided shed. Zair banged her walking stick on the side. “Alive in there?”
“Come to see if I’ve drowned?” the thief’s sulky voice issued from somewhere behind the damp mass of goats. “Thanks for the concern.”
“Well, if you’d rather stay...”
“Wait, is that an invitation? To somewhere warm and dry?” The thief tumbled out of the shed in a lanky tangle of arms and legs. The rain soaked her instantly, but at least it washed off some of the mud. She followed Zair to her usual limit and then paused.
“Come on, I’ve given you more rope.” Enough to hang yourself if you steal anything from me, she thought. The thief scowled as if suspecting a trick, and took a few cautious steps forward, then lengthened her stride when nothing happened.
Inside, Zair gave her a blanket, and hung the thief’s sodden coat, shirt and trousers by the fire. It was the first time she’d seen the thief undressed. Shadow had a curling tattoo all up one arm, black and red ink on the supple brown skin. She also wore a few hidden items of jewelry: a silver chain on her upper arm, a jeweled anklet, and the green pendant. None of it looked too familiar, though Zair would lay odds it was stolen from somewhere.
“You’re being awfully nice to me,” Shadow said, stretching out her skinny legs and wiggling bare, dirty toes in front of the fire. “Did tormenting the thief get boring?”
“No one’s been tormenting you. You’ve only yourself to blame for your problems, and you know it.”
The thief opened her mouth to reply, when a thunderclap shook the house. She jumped and then squinted at the seaward wall. “Are you sure the ocean isn’t about to invite itself into your living room?”
Zair rose to stir the fire. “I told you, we don’t often get a storm that big. Might see one this year—the weather’s been rough. But we normally have enough warning to get to high ground.”
“Warning from what, the little weather birds?”
“You don’t live by the ocean all your life without learning to read it.” Zair frowned down at the thief. “You aren’t used to the water. You must come from someplace inland.”
“Very clever, sheriff,” the thief said, but there was no rancor in it. “Yes; I grew up in a little dirt plot in the middle of potato fields. Nothing for miles but potatoes.” She shuddered. “Sometimes I still have nightmares about sorting potatoes. Just piles of potatoes without end.”
Of all the things the thief had said about her past, Zair believed this one. “You left to seek your fortune elsewhere, did you?” she asked, and the thief nodded, so Zair pushed a little. “Is this the life you wanted?”
The thief looked up, and for a moment her face was open and hurt. She really was quite young, Zair thought. Then her eyes shuttered and her mouth quirked in the familiar mocking smile. “No. I learnt I was a baron’s long-lost daughter, and he sent a carriage for me. Couldn’t stand the life of luxury for more than a night, though. I stole a casket of gold and my father’s finest horse, and took to the road.”
Zair’s lips pressed to a hard line. “You wouldn’t have so much trouble in life if you’d give back a little.”
Nothing seemed to change in the thief’s posture, and yet it was harder, somehow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She smiled thinly. “Do you want to hear about my flight from my father’s captivity? The children liked this story.”
“Not tonight. I’m an old woman and I have work to do in the morning.” Turning away, Zair said over her shoulder, “You can sleep by the fire tonight. If you take anything of mine, you’ll learn some other knots I can make. You won’t like them.”
“I won’t steal from you,” the thief said, behind her.
Zair wished she could tell substance from lies in the thief’s pebble-smooth words. She lay awake for a long time as the dying fire made patterns on the ceiling, listening to Shadow’s slow breathing and the rain battering the hut’s walls.
#
“Hope we’re not making a mistake,” Deke said, leaning against Zair’s wall in a precariously tipped-back chair, balancing his wine cup on his stomach while he carved a chunk of driftwood into a new shuttle for Zair’s netmaking. “She’s got clever fingers, and she’s not stupid.”
Outside, the waning half-moon illuminated the thief leaning on the goat pen, studying the knotted rope that kept the goats in. She was just looking at it, occasionally poking one of the knots gently with her long fingers.
Zair shrugged and turned a seine in her lap, checking for weak spots with sure, callused fingers. “Worst thing, she unties herself and runs off.”
“No, worst thing she wrecks our village knots, and us with storm season coming. Or she comes back with five burly friends and cleans us out. You heard about those pirates up the coast, right?”
“Pirates again,” Zair sighed.
“My cousin heard from my nephew, heard it in Trenza. They burned out Hammer Bay, killed half the men in town, and the less said of the women, the better.” Deke twisted the knife in the water-smoothed wood a little harder than necessary. “Maybe she’s got friends like that.”
“I’ll shore up the defensive knots tomorrow. They need checking anyway.”
“Just don’t let her watch you do it.” He refilled Zair’s wine cup and his own.
Zair squinted out the window at the thief, who had given up poking at the knot and instead reached down inside her collar for whatever she wore there. Fishing it out, the thief cupped it in her hand and studied it in the moonlight.
“What’s she looking at?” Deke wanted to know, peering over Zair’s shoulder.
“Don’t know. Some kind of necklace. It’s hers, I think, not ours. As much as anything she’s got is hers. Caught her looking at it a few times—more so lately.”
“Ask her about it?”
Zair lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Not our business, seems to me.”
#
Three days before the new moon, the fall rains came, flattening the sedge and glistening on thatched roofs. Everyon
e was wet and testy.
The thief fell in step with Zair on her way to the vegetable patch beyond the midden. “I have a problem.”
“Other than being tied to a goat pen?”
“Well... no, that’s pretty much it, or at least part of it.” Shadow rubbed at the twine around her wrist, a reflexive habit she’d developed. “See, I didn’t think you’d actually—I mean, I thought I’d be long gone by now.”
“Surprise,” Zair said dryly, squatting by the turnips. “Pull some of those onions.”
The thief sighed and obeyed, but continued to speak. “There’s something after me, and it’s getting closer. Much as it pains me to admit it, I’d really hate any of you to get caught in its path if it does find me here. Granted, I’d hate to see me in its path quite a lot more.”
“Uh-huh,” Zair said. Sorrel and lambsquarters went into a pile for the stewpot, the other weeds into a bucket for the goats. “You also said your rich uncle wants to cart you off for a wedding.”
“All right, yes, granted, that one may have been slightly less than true—”
“And you have four kids about to starve without you.”
The thief sighed. “Are you going to hold everything I’ve said against me?”
“When it’s a lie, yes.” Zair frowned as something nagged at her memory. “Didn’t you say something to Deke about a dragon?”
“Yes!”
“There’s no such thing.”
“There’s no such thing as knots that can’t be untied, either,” the thief said, tensing her narrow shoulders.
“It’s just a matter of tying them properly.”
“Yes, whatever. Anyway, the point is you’re all in danger if you don’t let me go.” The thief reached down her collar and hooked the thong. Zair got a better look at the pendant this time: a stone in a roughly forged metal setting, more blue than green by daylight. The thief waved it at Zair.
“So?”
“This morning, it was green. Now look at it. There’s only one thing could make it turn this color.”
“Dragons?” Zair said.
“Yes!”
Zair sent her down to the goat pen with the bucket of weeds.
#