The Shadow Thieves

by Alexandra Ott

  This sounds nothing at all like anything I’ve been imagining—my mother, the one who abandoned me, worrying about me as a baby?—but I don’t dare interrupt.

  “So I got together with some of the downstairs neighbor kids, and we stole some random objects from around the house and fashioned this little barricade to block off the stairs. It was this silly, flimsy little thing, made up of pillows and pots and I don’t know what else—like the kind of thing a couple of eight-year-olds would put together, obviously—but we were so proud of it, so sure it would work. We propped it all up on the landing and then set you down in front of it, already congratulating ourselves.”

  He pauses, grinning down into his soup bowl at the memory. “You sat there for a second, taking a good long look at this obstacle in your way. Then you gave the pile this tiny little tap. And the whole thing collapsed.”

  He laughs, so I do too. This much, at least, sounds like me. The troublemaker, causing problems.

  But as nice as it is to finally have any information at all about my past, baby Alli stories aren’t really what I’m most interested in at the moment. Ronan seems to sense this; he falls silent, staring into his soup again.

  I don’t think he’s going to say it without prodding, so I finally ask out loud the question I’ve spent a decade trying not to think about. “So, what happened? To our mother? To us?”

  Ronan tucks a loose strand of hair behind his ear and takes his time responding. “A lot of things happened, I think. Money had always been . . . tight. Though I didn’t realize how bad things were at the time, it was only with hindsight—well, anyway. I think she may have worked two or three jobs at a time. I babysat you all day. But then something must have changed—maybe she lost her job, maybe the debts piled up, I don’t know. One night we packed up quickly and left the yellow house. We moved in with a neighbor family that had a bunch of kids, and slept on the floor in their living room. I don’t know how long that lasted. I don’t know when she decided . . . to do what she did.”

  None of this is exactly surprising to me. Poverty was always an easy guess. But I don’t know how I feel about having it confirmed. That maybe my mother wanted me after all, but had to give me up.

  It was easier to hate her when I didn’t know for sure.

  “The next thing I remember,” Ronan says, fidgeting with his spoon, “is a man coming to the door and asking for me. He had a little apothecary shop not far from where we lived. She’d made an arrangement for me to be his apprentice. He fed and housed me in exchange for my work.”

  “Weren’t you too young to be an apprentice?” I ask. Unless my estimate of his age was way off. It was the reason I’d always been sure that she chose him over me—I thought he was too young to be on his own. You have to be thirteen to get a job or apprenticeship.

  “Not back then,” he says. “Ruhia’s had its labor laws for decades now, but Azeland adopted them only recently, maybe six or seven years ago. I was only nine, but there was no law against it at the time.”

  Well, that would’ve been useful information. Why didn’t the Sisters ever teach us this kind of thing in history class?

  It’s the simplest part of his story, but it’s turned everything I thought I knew upside down. Maybe she didn’t choose him over me at all. We were both sent away. But he was able to get a job, while three-year-old me had no other option but the orphanage.

  All this time, I’ve hated her, and maybe I was wrong.

  Ronan continues speaking, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “I didn’t know.” He leans forward, as if this is the point he wants to emphasize. Now that he’s started his story, he’s warming up to it, the words pouring out faster. “I didn’t know what was happening. Either she didn’t tell me the truth or I didn’t understand it. I thought we’d be neighbors, that she’d come to visit, that I could come to visit both of you. When I left for the apprenticeship, I didn’t know that I was saying good-bye to both of you for good.”

  “But you were.”

  He nods. “She never came to visit me. As soon as I had a weekend off, I went back to the neighbor’s, but both of you were gone and they didn’t know where you went. I tried the yellow house, but you weren’t there either. I wrote her dozens of letters, but I couldn’t send them without an address. I had no idea how to find her. Or you.”

  “Did you ever find out?” I say, sitting up straighter. “Is it possible that she’s still out there somewhere?”

  He pauses for too long before shaking his head, and I know what he’s going to say before he says it. “I’m sorry, Alli. She’s gone.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Another nod. “A few years later, a courier showed up at the apothecary’s door with a message addressed to me. It was an official notification from the city, informing me that my mother was dead. They didn’t say where or how she died.”

  Well. That’s still way more notification than I ever got.

  “I asked about you. I tracked down the official who sent the message and asked for more information. But all he would tell me was that he didn’t know anything about you. He said she lived alone. I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know if you were dead too.”

  Suddenly Ronan’s decision to take in his long-lost imprisoned sister makes a whole lot more sense. Finding out you have a delinquent sister is probably better than believing you have a dead one.

  Ronan might be a vague memory from my past, but I’m a ghost from his.

  An annoying lump is forming in my throat, so I swallow it and try to move the conversation to less emotional ground. “So how’d you end up in Ruhia? What happened to the apothecary?”

  “He moved here, and brought me with him,” Ronan explains, looking grateful for the change of subject. “He was always kind to me, and I appreciated it. But the truth was, I didn’t want to be an apothecary’s apprentice. Sweeping floors and brewing herbal remedies didn’t really interest me.”

  “Really? Didn’t you get to learn, like, magic potions and stuff?”

  He laughs. “Not really. We did sell some potions in the shop, but we bought them off of local magicians. We didn’t get to brew anything like that ourselves.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was much more interested in learning other subjects. I’d always been fascinated by books. I taught myself to read, with a bit of help, and spent my nights studying by candlelight, trying to learn more about the world.”

  “What did you study?”

  “Letters and spelling, penmanship, geography, history, mathematics, basically anything I could get my hands on.”

  Another way in which we’re nothing alike. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to study voluntarily. Especially stuff that’s so boring.

  “By the time I was fourteen,” he continues, “the apothecary insisted I should apprentice somewhere else, where I could read and study all the time. He spoke to one of his clients, who happened to be a lawyer. How he managed to convince him to take me on is a mystery to me, given my lack of credentials, but at any rate, next thing I knew I had an apprenticeship at the law firm Avinoch and Co.”

  It’s just as I suspected. Ronan’s leading a ridiculously successful life, all things considered. And now I come along, the wayward orphaned sister with the tragic past who took a terrible turn into a life of crime right before he met me. The sister who isn’t wanted by anyone but has nowhere else to go. Except for prison, of course.

  “So that’s it, really,” he says, smiling a little sheepishly. “So . . . what about you?”

  Now it’s my turn to suddenly find my empty bowl of soup fascinating. “You’ve read my case file,” I mumble.

  “Yes,” he admits. “But I want to hear it from you.”

  I give him an abbreviated version of my time in the orphanage, deliberately skipping the parts where I was adopted and ran away; I don’t know if that’s in my Ruhian file or not, and I really don’t want him to know how much trouble I caused with other families. Let him think this is my first chance at a new life, n
ot my third.

  I also leave out everything having to do with the Guild, carefully giving him the same story I gave the judge after my arrest. How I ran away from the orphanage and was cursed and desperate, how I came to Ruhia with a boy named “Berkeley,” how we were being paid to steal Lady Atherton’s necklace, how it all went horribly wrong. How Lady Atherton died, and how her daughter almost did too. I give a lot of emphasis to how much I regret everything that happened, and how I’m done with thieving now for good.

  It’s mostly the truth, even if it is a slightly selective version.

  Ronan listens carefully, rubbing circles into the tabletop with his index finger. He doesn’t speak until I’m done.

  “So anyway,” I finish, “then the judge contacted you, and you know the rest.”

  He nods slowly, considering.

  I reach for my glass and take a big gulp of water, because all that talking hurt my throat but also to have something to do while waiting for him to speak.

  “It wasn’t your fault, you know,” he says. “What happened to Lady Atherton. You couldn’t have known what would happen.”

  That wasn’t the response I was expecting, but since I had nothing to do in prison except think about this issue, I already know what I want to say. “I should have, though. Maybe I couldn’t have known exactly how it would all play out, but I knew that people might get hurt. I knew and I didn’t care. Not until after.”

  He considers this. “So if someone had told you beforehand that she would die, would you really have done it anyway? Would you have said that you didn’t care?”

  I have to think about that one for a minute. “Well, no. But I probably would’ve looked for a reason not to believe them so I could do it anyway. I would’ve still risked it.”

  “Exactly,” he says. “You didn’t really think anyone would get hurt. You were taking a risk and hoping it would work out for the best. That’s not the same thing as knowing—absolutely, one-hundred-percent knowing—that someone would die as a result.”

  I lean back in my chair. “Are you lawyering me right now?”

  He laughs. “Maybe a little. Sorry.”

  I sigh. “What kind of lawyer are you anyway? Like, do you put people in prison or keep them out?”

  “Neither, really. Avinoch’s handles business law. Mostly drawing up contracts for business arrangements, that sort of thing.”

  “So you don’t get to go to trials or anything? What fun is that?”

  He laughs again. “We get to go to court sometimes, when there’s a dispute over a contract.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “It’s maybe a little boring,” he concedes.

  “You should consider being a defense attorney instead. You’d be good at it.” I’m only half joking.

  He smiles. “But why handle exciting murder cases when I can fill out paperwork and argue about liability clauses instead?”

  Actual sarcasm. Now I know for sure we’re related. I grin back at him. “Well, I can’t argue with that.”

  He pushes his chair back from the table and stands. “I’d better get started on the dishes. I need to get to work on drafting the super exciting contracts for a new subcorporation.”

  I rise from my chair and pick up my plate. “Guess I’d better help. Wouldn’t want you to miss something so thrilling.”

  My brother and I stand side by side in the kitchen, cleaning the dishes and joking about his job, and maybe, possibly, it’s starting to feel like I belong here.

  Chapter Three

  The next week is a mild improvement. Having my own clothes and a few more pieces of furniture makes the bedroom feel a little more mine, even if it’s only temporary. Ronan pretty much leaves me to myself, thank God. He works long hours, so he’s usually gone before I wake up, and I don’t even see him until the evening. Most of the time Mari is off protectoring or whatever, but she does come over for dinner two more times. She and I don’t fight again, but we tiptoe around each other, as if both of us are afraid to upset the delicate balance we’ve achieved. Mostly she just visits so she and Ronan can make gross mushy faces at each other over the table.

  The lack of supervision means I have an abundance of free time and a million ways to spend it. But I’m still sticking to my pledge of keeping out of trouble. Even if Ronan plans to send me off to an apprenticeship, maybe I can convince him to let me stay a little longer, if I prove I can behave myself. While he’s working, I take over the meal preparation and shopping, haggling for the best prices in the marketplace (and not stealing anything, thank you very much). I explore the neighborhood around Ronan’s apartment a bit, roaming the streets and taking roundabout routes to the market just to see what’s there, but I don’t get into any trouble. It’s pretty quiet in this part of town, really. There’s a park on the corner, an old lady upstairs who walks her dog every day at noon, and lots of houses. Not much trouble to be found, even for me.

  Ronan and I start to develop a bit of a routine. He leaves some coins and a shopping list for me in the mornings. I run to the marketplace in the afternoon, pick everything up, and then swing by Ronan’s law office to meet him on his way home from work.

  It’s only a few blocks from the market to Avinoch and Co., but the air is bitterly cold today, and I wrap my scarf tighter around my neck. I haven’t yet braved one of the furry overcoats Mari bought me, but I don’t think I’ll be able to hold out much longer. Winter is definitely making an appearance.

  The cobbled streets are crowded now as people rush home from their jobs or dash into shops to pick something up before they close. But it’s a pleasant kind of bustle, polite and uniform, not at all like the chaos of an Azelandian marketplace. Suddenly I miss my old city so much, it startles the breath right out of me. I never expected to miss it. Azeland never felt like home. Ruhia is clearly meant to, with all of its snug little shops and cozy brick-lined streets, but all of that just emphasizes what I’m lacking. I don’t feel at home. I just feel cold.

  I round the corner and run the last couple of steps to the law office. For a building that looks so much like its neighbors, it still manages to be imposing—long stone steps lead up to the entranceway, which is flanked by twin statues of Saint Julina, the patron of justice. The lettering on the door reads AVINOCH AND CO.

  I must be running late today. Ronan is already waiting for me, just inside the door. He walks briskly down the steps, his heavy overcoat flapping open, his dark hair ruffled as usual. “Hey,” he says, smiling. “How was the market?”

  “Busy.” I glance up at the office door. “You know, when you own this place, it’ll say Rosco and Co. Ha! Co and co, get it?”

  I expect Ronan to laugh like he usually does at my jokes, but he stops smiling.

  “No, wait, you should make it Ros and Co!”

  He takes one of the grocery sacks from my hands without responding.

  “Ros and Co,” I repeat meekly. I must’ve said something wrong, but I’m not sure what. “That’s brilliant, you should definitely use that.”

  Ronan looks down at the groceries. “Let’s head home.” He starts walking in the direction of the apartment.

  I don’t know what to do, but I feel the need to do something. So I keep talking. “If you start using Ros and Co for your company name, does that mean I get some sort of commission? For coming up with the idea?”

  Ronan dodges a couple of pedestrians and keeps walking.

  I leap forward, trying to keep up with his brisk pace. “Just a teeny, tiny commission,” I say. “How about eighty-five percent?”

  He stops walking. “I’m not going to own the company, Alli.”

  I freeze. “But you’re Avinoch’s apprentice, right? I thought you were going to be a lawyer.”

  “I am going to be a lawyer, if I’m lucky. But Avinoch will pass the company on to his son, and my apprenticeship is ending soon. Hopefully I’ll be kept on as an associate when the time comes. But that might not happen.”

  “Why not?”

&n
bsp; He exhales slowly, his breath a cloud of white in the chilly air. “Nobody picks an Azelandian orphan to be their law associate.”

  My breath joins his in the air. “Oh.”

  Ronan starts walking again, more slowly this time.

  “He could still pick you,” I say quietly.

  “He won’t.”

  “Then what will happen? When your apprenticeship is up?”

  “I might get hired by another office.”

  He probably thinks this answer is reassuring, but I’m not fooled. I didn’t miss the “might.” “But you might not?”

  He nods. “I might not.”

  “Oh.”

  Ronan’s smile slowly slides its way back onto his face. “Your sudden interest in my job wouldn’t have anything to do with your own apprenticeship, now, would it?”

  This is a favorite topic of Ronan’s. He seems to think I need to develop an interest in some kind of career path. Probably so that he can ship me off as soon as possible. “Do I really need an apprenticeship?” I say. “I mean, look at what a great shopping assistant I am. You could totally hire me to do this forever.”

  Ronan rummages through the grocery sack, checking what I bought. “Candy again?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Professional shopping assistants never buy candy they’re not supposed to buy.”

  Ronan draws the bar of white chocolate from the bag and playfully swats at my head with it.

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that.”

  I skip over a crack in the sidewalk. “Okay, but you’ll thank me when you get to eat some of that chocolate. I mean, I’m sure there will be plenty left over for you.”

  “Oh, I’m sure.”

  Sarcasm again. The one thing that makes me feel 100 percent certain we’re related. I beam at him. “I’ll just eat, like, the entire bar, and then you can have the crumbs in the wrapper at the end.”

  The wind has picked up, sending another chill through me, but Ronan’s smile makes everything seem warmer. “It’s all yours.”