The Gentleman Thief

by Kate Gragg

  “Some people call them mud pheasants,” Wart said with the careful diction of a schoolboy giving a presentation to the class, “but back in the old days they were known as beetle hawks, because they eat those shiny beetles you see in the trees.”

  “Very interesting,” Lord Saunders said, making a hurry-up motion with his hand, “but what does it do?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t do anything in particular,” Wart said, “but its guano is highly prized.”

  Half the crowd groaned, while the other half whispered to a neighbor and asked what “guano” was.

  “Its… droppings?” Argus clarified.

  “Yep!”

  “Prized for what, dare I ask?”

  “It turns you invisible,” Wart grinned. “See?”

  He held up his hand, which had a window in it, like it had been shot clean through with a tiny cannonball. Everyone in the ballroom groaned before breaking out into grudging applause.

  “Joe Thorne is next,” Argus said. “Only there seems to be some difficulty with your entry. Could you come over to the side door for a moment?”

  I followed a footman through to a service corridor, where Gladys was expressing her strong displeasure at being inside a narrow stone passageway filled with strange men trying to boss her around.

  She calmed down a bit when she saw me, which was flattering. I made soothing noises until I could get close enough to retrieve the baby bird from his cage. Once he was free the mother bird had her eyes locked on him, and it was simple enough to just back my way onto the stage, leading her all the way. Or it would have been, if the stench of two magical birds in close quarters wasn’t trying to choke the life out of me. I clapped my handkerchief over my mouth and coughed for a full minute, culminating in one last globby retch that felt like it emptied my lungs entirely.

  I wrung out my handkerchief, expecting it to be dripping with magical gunge, but it seemed to be absorbing it. Alarming, but a problem for another time. I pet Gladys on her enormous lacquered beak and asked her sweetly to follow me onto the stage. She trilled in assent and galloped onto the stage almost faster than I could follow.

  The gasp from the crowd was gratifying.

  “What is that thing?” said the Duke.

  “Is that a learhen? I thought they were extinct?” said Argus.

  “Not this one,” I shrugged. “I call her Gladys.” That just popped into my head. The longer she’d gone without eating me the fonder I’d grown of her, and it felt like she deserved a name.

  “Magnificent effort, young man,” Saunders said, shaking my hand. His demeanor was so grave it was hard to tell if he meant it. “But let’s not give the game away yet. Clifton? What do you have for us, my boy?”

  Clifton stretched and stood to his feet.

  “Well, I had a midas eagle,” he said, “but my hunt was interrupted by some unsportsmanlike conduct.”

  Hughie and Dickie conferred silently with each other on this point, then shrugged.

  “So, I captured something even rarer,” Clifton continued, hauling his sack up to the stage. “Behold, the fearsome cave bird!”

  He threw open the sack and the creature inside it took flight. Now, I’m no naturalist, so I admit I didn’t really look too critically at Clifton’s bird, and it was hard to see as it made lazy circles around the ceiling, but once it grabbed ahold of one of the chandeliers and hung from it upside-down, even I had my suspicions.

  “That’s a bat!” Wart cried out.

  The crowd roared as the judges huddled up to confer about this unforeseen state of affairs. A footman brought out an enormous rulebook, which the men took turns paging through and jabbing their fingers at different paragraphs. Finally, Argus turned to the crowd, a hangdog expression on his face.

  “I don’t know what he looks so sad about,” Dickie whispered to me. “No matter what, this is still only the second most unsuccessful competition in the history of the games.”

  “We have concluded that there has been an error,” said Argus timidly. Both the Duke and Saunders were staring daggers into the back of his head. “A misidentification, which unfortunately does, er, disqualify Mr. Crome.”

  I saw the princess betray only the slightest twitch of her shoulders. A whoop of elation, by princess standards. Lydia saw me looking and grinned at me. If this was true, I was off the hook, and I could spend the rest of the week living it up like a regular Munton brother. One of whom the princess would presumably have to marry in a few days, so bad luck there.

  Clifton didn’t look troubled by this. He finished his glass of beer, placed the cup down on the table, and sauntered to the doors of the great hall.

  “Have you, er, anything to say about the conclusion of your eligibility, Mr. Crome?” said Argus.

  “Only this,” Clifton said, resting a hand on one of the enormous doors. “I invoke the heroism clause.”

  He swung the door open, revealing the lost contestants Lydia and I had freed from the crystal ravine. They ran in grinning, embracing the crush of the cheering crowd.

  Lydia met my horrified gaze.

  “He’s lying!” I mouthed.

  She shrugged at me. We had a quick silent argument, me imploring her to tell the truth and her looking at me like I was asking her to cook her pet cat and serve it to me for dinner.

  I’m a bit thick, but roll your eyes enough at me and I’ll get the point eventually. There was no way to tell the truth about who rescued them without revealing that Lydia had snuck into the forest and interfered with the games.

  “Seven lost knight aspirants, adrift in the terrible woods for a year to this very day, until I happened upon these wandering wretches and brought them home to, as you can see, their grateful public.”

  The princess half-stood, searching the faces in the crowd.

  The Duke shrugged. “Seems pretty heroic to me.”

  Argus sighed. “Mr. Crome is back in, however, as he did not catch a bird, he does not rank in tonight’s competition. The winner of the first round is… Joe Thorne!”

  The crowd cheered again, and I felt congratulatory pats on my back and people urging me to go up onstage to accept my honors, but I was frozen in place.

  I had found my handkerchief, you see. It was in my glass of beer.

  And it was drinking it.

  I watched, amazed, as the little rag soaked up the last drops of beer and slid down the side of the glass, hiccupping. It staggered to its… well, not feet, but two corners of the cloth that it used to take lurching, meandering steps, exactly like every drunk I’d ever seen.

  It looked up at me, if a thing without a face can be said to look, and gave me a soggy salute.

  “Joe, aren’t you going to go up there?” Wart prodded me. “You won!”

  I looked up, finally, and saw that the leaderboard had already been updated. Now Clifton and I were both ranked at 25 to 1, tied for favorite.

  Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed the handkerchief, tied a knot in it, and shoved it in my pocket. I got up on the stage, let everyone shake my hand, and looked out over the crowd. Most everyone was still focused on the long-lost competitors. Only Clifton was giving me his full attention, and I didn’t like the look in his eyes.

  I realized suddenly that I’d seen that look once before, in the vision I’d had earlier. His was the face that had peered down into the well. His was the hand that reached down and ripped… something… away. His chainmail glinted in the candlelight, as cold as the gleam in his eyes.

  Chapter Eleven

  I woke up with a headache, a backache, and several more acute pains where I’d banged into pieces of furniture in the night while I chased around the linen demon my handkerchief had turned into.

  Hank, as I’d decided to call him, had spent most of the night doing anything he could think of to try and escape. Slipping under the door, through the keyhole, stuffing my nostrils until I gave in, all sorts of fun tricks. I’m tougher than a handkerchief though, demonic possession or no, and after tying him in a few
knots, I found a bottle of gin hidden in the nightstand and stuffed him in there to drown his sorrows. He’d crept out while I slept and was now draped wantonly over the headboard, silent snores rippling through the stitches on his hem.

  Some soft-shoed servant had crept into my room while I was sleeping and readied things the way I guess gentlemen in big houses like things to be when they wake up. The windows were flung open, letting in an outrageous quantity of fresh air and sunshine, and my clothes had been laundered and hung up on a peg above the washbasin, alongside which someone had arranged a lot of soaps and scented oils that I wasn’t sure the purpose of.

  I got dressed, splashed some water on my face, and mixed up a drop of each of the oils and ran the combination through my hair. I took a moment to admire my work in the mirror. If I sneered enough, I almost passed for a lord.

  I turned to close the window, not wanting to get any more of that lung-assaulting magical air in my lungs than absolutely necessary, and jumped back with a start.

  Gladys poked her giant beak through the window, staring at me with her glassy eyes.

  “Oh, uh, hello,” I said, patting her bristly head. “It’s nice to see you, actually.”

  I’d been too busy smuggling Hank back to my room last night to notice what they did with the birds after the judging. I’d been half-worried Gladys would end up on the menu tonight.

  Gladys blinked at me slowly, then buried her beak under her wing, rooting around until she plucked out three long black feathers. She waved these in my face.

  “Oh no, don’t, you’ll make me–”

  I realized I wasn’t going to cough, actually. Not a twitch in my lungs.

  “Huh. I guess maybe I’m used to you, old girl,” I said.

  Gladys chirped and waved the feathers at me again. I took them.

  “To remember you by?”

  Gladys nodded and turned suddenly, galloping off to the forest, her little chick bouncing on her back.

  The great hall was steeped in tantalizing aromas. Fresh-baked bread, grilled meats, piles and piles of fruit that practically glowed in the morning light. A breakfast fit for, if not a king, at least a duke. I spied the bearded old goat shoveling crepes into his face and talking conspiratorially with Lord Saunders and Lydia’s father, while princess Althea stirred a bowl of porridge and stared off into space.

  I was just about to try my first-ever chocolate croissant when I felt something small pelt me in the back of my head. I turned around just in time to get a strawberry right between the eyes and saw a flutter of skirts behind a column. I left the buffet line with a sigh and ambled into the skulking shadows.

  “I can’t be seen talking to you,” Lydia said. “It’ll look like favoritism.”

  “Can you be not seen talking to me after I’ve had some breakfast?”

  “You don’t have time for breakfast. We have a mission.”

  Lydia pointed to the leaderboard high on the wall. Clifton and I were still tied at the top, but there were considerably more names than there had been last night.

  “Who the hell are those guys?”

  “Those are the competitors from last year, the ones we freed from the ravine. They were never officially disqualified, so the island put them back up on the board.”

  “Wait, the island controls that board? With the betting odds?”

  Lydia waved her hand dismissively. “A wizard owed my great-grandfather a favor, he rigged something up. I don’t know how it works. You can see most of the boys from last year decided to forfeit–”

  “But not all of them,” I said.

  “Right. Karsten wants another chance.”

  While the other names were written in a dull brown, Karsten Jandal’s name stood out in the same bright gold as the current competitors. His odds of success were currently 30 to 1, just below me and Clifton.

  “Well, that’s great, isn’t it? You don’t need me anymore. The princess can marry that guy.”

  “Are you kidding? You need to- what the hell was that?”

  Before I even looked down, I knew Hank had popped out of my breast pocket. He was looking around the room wildly, like he was searching for something. I shoved him back down.

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Joe!”

  “It’s just some magic island stuff. Probably happens all the time.”

  Lydia looked at me in horror, but before she could say any more, Althea stood to the front of the stage and cleared her throat. It was a tiny sound, like a mouse shuffling its feet, but it was enough to drop the entire room into rapt silence.

  “Today is a very special day for the games,” Althea said, “for we welcome the return of those we thought had been lost. A stirring reminder that on the island of Teems, truly, anything can happen. Although not everyone who went missing last year has been found…”

  She faltered, a fleeting pained expression darting across her face before she cleared her throat again and continued.

  “In honor of this miracle, we have decided to change today’s challenge from jousting–”

  Wart and Karsten groaned loudly.

  “—to one of the most sacred and traditional challenges dating back to the very dawn of the games. Today, to prove your worthiness a knight, you must do that which is the most knightly of all: right a wrong.”

  We waited for more, but Althea simply curtsied and returned to her seat.

  “That’s perfect,” Lydia said. “I know exactly what wrong you can right. We can find more lost competitors and–”

  “Right now, all I’m interested in finding is breakfast,” I said, heading to the banquet table.

  “Okay well, meet me in the forest?” Lydia whispered, clasping my hand once before the flower-named girls swept her up and dragged her off to her own table in a tide of gossip.

  I piled my plate high with pastries and then grabbed Hank by the scruff of his… well, I guess he was all scruff.

  “No trouble today, okay? I’ve got enough to deal with as it is. If you call attention to yourself, I’ll turn you into a rag rug, got it?”

  Hank nodded and wrapped himself around a blueberry muffin, munching on it in a digestive process I preferred not to speculate about. I was so happy eating my own breakfast that I didn’t immediately notice when Clifton sat down across from me.

  “More competition, Thorne,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “More competitors don’t always mean more competition. Anyway.”

  I popped a miniature fig tart into my mouth.

  “I don’t really care if I win. Not the marrying kind. Might cut out after breakfast, actually.”

  “You’re in it for the money then?”

  “Money?”

  “Yes, ten thousand crowns a year, plus the proceeds of the estate each knight is awarded by the Duke.”

  Funny, Lydia never mentioned that.

  “Oh, then yes, I’m in it for the money,” I said cheerfully.

  I noticed two things right then. One, Hank had zeroed in on Clifton for some reason and was wafting across the table to him, trying to make it look like he was caught in the nonexistent breeze. I smacked my hand down on the table and yanked the feral little scrap back over to me and stuffed him in my pants pocket, then snuck a few morsels of chocolate in there to keep him occupied.

  Two, Clifton had his hand cupped on the table, and something trapped underneath it was vibrating, trying alarmingly hard to get out.

  The clock above us chimed.

  “Time to go forth and do good, Cliffy,” I said, standing and stretching. The others clattered to their feet too – the Munton brothers were somehow already drunk – and the crowed called out last bits of advice and luck as we strapped on our swords, tightened our bootlaces, and in Wart’s case, submitted to a last-minute face scrubbing from a doting aunt.

  “Aren’t you coming, Crome?” said Karsten, “Wrongs to be righted, what?”

  “You go ahead,” Clifton said, not taking his eyes off me. “I don’t th
ink I’ll need to go into the forest for this one.”

  Karsten shrugged and led the charge out the door. Right as I moved to leave, Clifton let his hand up from the table and a tiny projectile rocketed straight toward me, bouncing off my chest. It was the penny.

  Clifton nodded to himself. Above his head, I saw the numbers on the leaderboard change. Joe Thorne: 1000 to 1.

  Chapter Twelve

  I hiked into the forest and realized I had no idea where to look for Lydia. I wasn’t sure how far a horse could make it through the woods. There never seemed to be any paths anywhere, just roots and piles of leaves. I decided to just pick a direction and hope for the best.

  It was slow going anyway. I was mindful not to twist my ankle like yesterday, which left me looking at the ground as I walked directly headfirst into a giant flowering vine. The flower hissed and spat a puff of pollen at me, which should have made me sneeze, but it didn’t. Before I could explore that new wrinkle in my existence, an armored rider reared up on a horse and skidded to a stop in front of me.

  “You really ought to be more careful,” Lydia said, dismounting lightly. I turned watched her off her helmet and shake her obsidian waterfall of hair loose in one breathtaking motion.

  “Do all you rich girls know how to do that?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Strike those poses,” I said, gesturing to the scene before me. Lydia had found the only beam of sunlight to break through this part of the canopy, which glinted off her hair and her armor in equal measure. She had one long leg propped up on a fallen log, and her horse lapped at a puddle behind her, oblivious to the rain of tiny silver leaves that streamed down in curtains from the branches above.

  “Oh,” Lydia said, looking over her shoulder. “Everything in the forest looks like that. It’s part of how people get trapped in here.”

  I could think of worse things, I thought, watching Lydia unbuckle her armor. Underneath, she was wearing a man’s white linen shirt tucked into a pair of leather breeches. I’d never seen a woman wearing pants before, but now I was wondering if the fashion might catch on.