CHAPTER 21
There was a fish on my desk. It was a foot long with a blunt snout, small eyes, jet-black body, an asymmetric tail, and bony plates on its head.
It looked prehistoric. I had known something wasn’t right when I came up the stairs after breakfast and saw a trail of wet spots leading across the hallway to my rooms.
I picked up my reed pen and poked the fish with it, trying to get a look at the gills. Yep, pink.
The trail of wet spots stopped on my desk, right on the stack of cheap paper. I had started hiding the paper after the second fish, but we had had a late dinner last night because of the whole Drugh thing, and I’d forgotten to put it up. The stack was soaked through.
I picked it up, wrapping it around the fish, and took it downstairs, to the kitchen.
“Blackfin,” Shana declared.
“Is it delicious?”
“Yes. Where do you keep getting them?” Shana asked.
“I don’t know. I thought they were pranks at first. But now I think they’re gifts.”
Shana frowned at me. “From whom?”
“Someone who loves fish. Do we have any meat?”
I came back to my study carrying a small plate with a chunk of not-ham on it. I put the plate on the desk.
I should probably hide.
The study didn’t offer many hiding opportunities.
It was mostly shelves and small chests. There was a larger chest in my bedroom for spare linens and blankets.
I went into my bedroom, pulled the linens out, and climbed into the chest. From there I could see a chunk of the study with my desk and the plate of meat on top of it.
I closed the lid. Claustrophobic, but tolerable.
I climbed out, got the knife I used as a bookmark, and wedged it between the lid and the rim. The lid closed, leaving a half-inch gap. I checked it from my desk. It didn’t look suspicious. You would have to really pay attention to notice the lid.
I got into the chest, stuffed some linens into it to make a cushion, and closed the lid. Good enough. Comfortable even.
I settled in to wait. Sunshine flooded the study. The sounds of Reynald and the Magnar brothers sparring floated through the open window.
When we were in high school, Cheyenne had planned on being a high-powered business executive with cutting-edge fashion sense and an office in a skyscraper.
She’d listen to this business guru motivational speaker who talked about “ideating” and thirty-thousand-foot views.
One of his favorite mantras was “Stop. Look around. Take a deep dive and understand that your choices brought you where you are.”
I was sitting in a wooden chest in a house once owned by slavers in the middle of a magical city watching a plate with a chunk of meat because someone kept leaving fish on my desk. Which of my choices had landed me here, exactly?
I hadn’t thought about home once since I saw the body in the Dog Market. Guilt landed on me like a brick.
So much had happened.
Back home, having a stressful day had meant a customer got annoyed or one of the food delivery apps sneezed, so I had to hustle to make up the money. Here a stressful day meant trying to stop a serial killer and bargaining with a mercenary for the lives of your friends.
Were the Magnars my friends? I didn’t even know.
Sitting in the chest wasn’t good for my mental health. I dealt with anxiety by doing something: making soap, writing down scenes from the books, plotting, sneakily cleaning my room, reading the books in my study. Derog had a remarkably varied library.
There was nothing to do in the chest but contemplate the confrontation with the Butcher. I just sat here and marinated in apprehension.
A faint creak announced my door swinging open.
Here we go.
Kaiden walked into the study. He moved completely silently, walking on his toes. He hadn’t knocked and he didn’t seem to be in a hurry, so he wasn’t looking for me. He was sneaking in. Why? Everybody else was in the courtyard.
The boy glanced at the bedroom. He seemed to be looking straight at me.
I held my breath.
Kaiden turned away and went to my desk. He looked at the plate, tilted his head, looked at the not-ham from the side, frowned, and moved on. His hand glided over the desktop. He picked up something, looked at it, and walked out the same way he came, silent like a ghost.
Well then.
I gave it five seconds, climbed out of the chest, and checked my desk. My favorite reed pen, the one that didn’t scratch the paper, was gone.
I slipped my shoes off and padded down the hallway toward Kaiden’s room barefoot.
His door was cracked open. He must’ve thought he was completely alone up here, so he hadn’t bothered locking it.
I pushed it with my fingertips, revealing a simply furnished room: a bed sitting against the wall, a desk with a chair, and some shelves Will had installed.
They were mostly bare except for a single book and a weird rock.
Several locks waited on the desk with the lock-picking tools Gort had made neatly arranged in the lower right corner.
Kaiden sat on his bed with my reed pen in his fingers. A large chest stood open by his feet.
He looked up. Panic shivered in his eyes. He stared at me like a frightened rabbit.
I kept my voice soft. “Want to tell me about it?”
He sighed and pushed the chest toward me. I came over and looked. An assortment of items lay inside: a worn knife sheath, a random lock I’d found in the study, a whetstone, a shaving brush, an arrowhead, one of Shana’s wooden spoons, a wooden hairpin I’d seen Clover use . . .
I pointed at the sheath. “Is that Reynald’s?”
He nodded.
“And the shaving brush? Will’s?”
He nodded again.
Shana had a small basket in the kitchen where Clover put the week’s grocery budget. The coins were in plain view, but he hadn’t taken any. None of this stuff was valuable. They were just small mundane objects we had handled.
We looked at the collection some more.
“Kaiden, how did your parents die?”
He looked down at his feet. “Mom got sick. She came home and her skin was burning up. She went to bed. In the morning there were circles of welts on her face and her breath whistled.”
Ring fever. Highly infectious and hard to cure. Sometimes it came into the city on ships, usually from the south, and burned entire city blocks before they caught it.
“I wanted to take care of her, but Dad took me to Sart’s house.”
“Who was he?”
“A tailor.” His tone dripped hate. “He borrowed money from Dad. Dad told him he had to take me as an apprentice. Sart didn’t want to, but Dad said the debt was registered so if Sart didn’t take me, he would take his shop.
I didn’t want to stay there. I didn’t want to be a tailor, but Dad said he had to take care of Mom and he would come back for me in five days.
He said not to worry. It would be fine.”
“He didn’t come back,” I guessed.
Kaiden shook his head. “I waited five days, then I waited three more. Sart would get drunk every night. One night he forgot to lock the room, so I snuck out and went home. The door was boarded up, so I had to get in through a window. It was gone.”
“What was gone?”
He met my eyes. “Everything. Mom, Dad, all of our things. Everything was gone. And then our neighbor came out and said Mom and Dad died. The city had burned our things to stop the plague. She told me to go back to Sart because that’s what Dad wanted for me.
He signed a contract, and he wouldn’t want me to be a runaway apprentice.
She said I had to honor my father’s dying wish. ”
Oh god. His father had realized what was coming and he had gotten his son out before Kaiden either got sick or the city quarantined him in some cell while all of their belongings were destroyed.
Kaiden would’ve come out an orphan with nothing to his name.
Awful things happened to beggar children on Kair Toren’s streets.
“If you had stayed, you would’ve died, too,” I said gently.
Kaiden stared straight ahead at the wall.
“How long were you with Sart?”
“A year and a half. He was a shit tailor. He would drink and then he would beat me. I tried. I really tried because that’s what Dad wanted, but I got tired of him hitting me.”
“You fought back?”
He nodded. “He sold me to Derog in the morning.”
And we had rescued him. We were his new family. He wasn’t just stealing.
He was collecting pieces of us.
I was looking at the chest of Kaiden’s fears. He probably opened it and looked at his little treasures when he felt unsafe. If we disappeared from his life, at least he would have something.
He knew we were about to do something very dangerous. We had included him in the Butcher talks. Excluding him wouldn’t have worked—he would’ve just eavesdropped until he figured it out and it would’ve made him worry even more. But he was only twelve years old.
How to handle this . . .
“Your father didn’t want you to be a tailor. He didn’t want you to get beaten either. He just wanted to keep you safe, and he was out of time.”
“I know,” Kaiden said.
“Reynald is very skilled. Yesterday we went to confront Drugh. He brought two huge men with him. And then Reynald showed his face, and they fled.”
Kaiden glanced at me. “Fled?”
I nodded. “They were very manly about it, but yes, they escaped as fast as their dignity let them.”
My brother, who thought military slang was funny, would’ve called it a “rapid advance to the rear.”
“And he will have the Magnars with him. And me. I will be there and even if I die, I will come back, Kaiden.”
He looked down at his feet again.
Stealing was a coping mechanism. Taking it away cold turkey could do more harm than good.
“I will need my pen back. It’s the only one I have that won’t make holes in the paper.”
He handed the pen over.
“Stealing is wrong. It makes the people you stole from feel unsafe and vulnerable.”
He still wasn’t looking at me. “Will you tell Reynald?”
“No. I won’t tell anyone.”
Some of the tension went out of his shoulders.
“A good thief steals without getting caught, but a better thief can return what he stole without being discovered. It takes more skill because the target is looking for their belongings, so they will be more alert.”
Kaiden didn’t say anything.
“When you steal things from us in the future, you must return them after two days.”
His gaze snapped to me.
“If you get caught, I won’t help you. If you are going to be a thief, Kaiden, be the best thief you can be. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Just for the record, you aren’t leaving fish in my study?”
“What fish?”
“That’s what I thought.”
I got off the bed. “Would you like a hug?”
He shook his head.
“Well, if you ever need one, you know where to find me. Two days, Kaiden. Don’t get caught.”
Half an hour later Reynald found me on the floor of my study. I’d heard a noise in my bedroom when I returned, so I had moved the plate with the meat to the floor and leaned against the wall.
Reynald took it all in and sat on the floor next to me.
“What are we doing?”
“Waiting for the fish fairy.”
“I didn’t quite catch that.”
I must’ve said fairy in English. Tiny, winged humanoids weren’t a part of Rellasian mythology.
I passed him my notes. I’d finished them while watching the plate.
“What is this?” he asked.
“This is what the Butcher does.” Two scenes from the first book in nightmare-inducing detail.
He read the pages. I watched the plate.
Reynald finished and set the pages aside.
“I need to visit the Scribe Chamber,” I said.
“Why?”
I told him.
“I’ll take you,” he said.
We fell silent. Minutes stretched by.
Something rustled under the bed. I kept still.
Another rustle.
A fluffy round head poked out from under the blanket dripping to the floor.
The little red stelka looked at me, flicked her ears, and slunk over to the plate.
She sniffed the not-ham, looked at me and Reynald, showing off the white crescent-shaped patch on her chest, bit the meat, and carried it off.
As she ducked back under the bed, I caught a glimpse of my old gown. She’d made a nest out of it.
Reynald watched my new pet vanish under the bed with a stoic expression.
“That’s one thing about you, Maggie. Being with you is never boring.”