Chapter Fourteen
It had taken some getting used to for Mavis, who had spent so much of her early life alone with her mother at work and her father gambling away most of the money she brought home, to suddenly find herself surrounded by other children.
They all slept in the same cramped room, filled with so many cots there was scarcely room to walk between them, each with matching threadbare blankets and thin pillows.
At the time it had seemed decadent compared to what she was used to.
As the newest urchin, she made for easy prey.
On her first morning, she awoke to find her braid cut off, lying severed on the pillow beside her head.
The best parts of her meals were taken, too—the crusty bread and the pat of butter, the pieces of meat out of her stew.
Another day, someone stole her shoes, leaving her forced to run through the streets of Strall in her socks, wearing holes through them and cutting up the soles of her feet until she finally returned in the evening, wincing with every hobbled step.
She remembered that night in particular, how she turned over the meager treasure she managed to steal from a drunken man who had, by pure luck, stumbled out of a pub and fallen unconscious at her feet.
Unluckily, he’d spent all his pocket money on his drinks, and the jewel-encrusted pocket watch she’d taken had earned her a disapproving sigh from Rafe, who by then was the eldest of the urchins and begrudgingly responsible for wrangling the rest of them.
“Shiny, but worthless. If you can’t bring in more, your meal rations are going to end up halved,” he warned her, barely sparing her a look as he tossed the pocket watch into the rucksack of stolen treasures he delivered to Minstead at the end of each day.
Mavis said nothing, barely able to register his words through the throbbing pain of her feet, but she nodded before pushing past him and sitting down on her cot.
The rest of the dormitory was empty, with the other urchins at dinner, but Mavis felt Rafe watching her as she gingerly peeled off her socks one at a time and assessed the cuts on her feet.
When he saw them, he let out a low curse.
“Davy again,” he said, making his way to another of the cots and crouching down to search beneath it, where the urchins kept their few belongings for as long as they could manage to hold on to them.
When he stood up, he had her shoes in his hands.
He brought them to her, dropping them on the floor beside her.
“Go see Molly in the kitchens—she’ll get you bandaged up. ”
Mavis didn’t trust herself to do more than nod, keeping her attention on her feet.
If she looked at him, if she opened her mouth, she would start crying, and she didn’t know when or even if she would be able to stop.
She expected Rafe to go then, to leave her.
Though she had only been there for a handful of days, Rafe hadn’t spoken more than a word to her—or to anyone apart from his brother.
At sixteen, he viewed himself as above the rest of them, eager to leave behind the urchins and move up on Minstead’s ladder.
But Rafe didn’t leave—and he seemed just as surprised by that as she was.
“Davy will get bored with you before the week’s out,” he told her. “It’s Estrid you need to watch out for.”
The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Mavis had met so many people over the last few days that she couldn’t summon a face to match.
Rafe sighed. “The one who cut your hair.”
Mavis’s hand went instinctively to where her braid had hung just days ago, so long it had reached her waist, but her hair now barely grazed her shoulders.
“Oh, her.” She remembered another girl a couple of years older with black hair and a sharp smile, laughing with her friends a few cots away when Mavis had woken up to find her hair on her pillow, fighting back tears as she realized what had happened.
“She’s a mean one. I’d advise making yourself more trouble than you’re worth to her.”
That was far easier said than done.
“Of course, it’s a moot point if you starve to death because you can’t steal for shit,” Rafe added.
Mavis only shrugged, her annoyance with him climbing the longer he lingered, with his pitying eyes and condescending words.
“I suppose you have some brilliant wisdom to solve that too?” she snapped. “Let me guess: Steal better? Lighten my fingers? Be harder to notice?”
She regretted the words as soon as she said them.
She hadn’t learned much in the last few days, but she knew that while there were no rules among the urchins, Rafe was always treated with respect and reverence.
Even his own brother didn’t talk to him the way she just did.
Beyond that, Mavis knew he was only trying to help—that was what made it all the worse.
At least she knew where she stood with Estrid, Davy, and the other children who were cruel.
It was the kindness that threw her off balance.
For a moment, Rafe didn’t say anything, and Mavis worried she’d made another enemy, but when she looked up at him, his gaze on her wasn’t angry, it was appraising.
“Remind me of your name?” His voice was quiet, but it raised the hairs on the back of her neck, and she knew that the boy standing before her was every bit as dangerous as the others seemed to think he was.
“Mavis.”
“Mavis,” he repeated, giving a nod, as if deciding something. “Get your feet bandaged up and eat your supper quickly, then meet me on the roof.”
He was almost out the door when Mavis spoke again, surprised that she managed to form words around the lump in her throat.
“Are you going to kill me?” The building wasn’t terribly tall, but a fall from the roof would do the trick.
Rafe turned around slowly, but his expression was too closed off to offer any comfort. “No, little magpie. My brother and I are going to train you.”
That night and every night that followed for a month, Rafe and Leif taught her all they knew about picking pockets and running cons.
To everyone’s surprise, she had a skill for it.
She was quick and nimble and, once Leif suggested she wrap a kerchief around her bright hair to avoid being noticed, she was unstoppable.
The other urchins did, eventually, grow bored tormenting her, though Rafe had been right about Estrid.
It wasn’t until Mavis grabbed the other girl by the braid at supper one evening and cut her hair off while the other urchins watched and Estrid screamed that she earned their respect and sent a message they wouldn’t soon forget: Unlike Estrid, Mavis wasn’t a coward who only went after the defenseless.
Mavis, Rafe, and Leif formed a team, working together to not only steal spare change or jewelry from people pushing through the crowded streets of the Low City but also running cons on the wealthier citizens of the High City.
Sometimes, Mavis pretended at getting hit by a carriage, crying and screaming in such a dramatic fashion that a crowd would gather, flustering the carriage driver enough that Rafe and Leif could pilfer the carriage, stealing whatever was kept inside and, in one case, managing to escape with the horse itself.
Other times, Leif would act as a mark who got wise to her picking his pocket, grabbing her arm and threatening her with violence.
Even then, Leif had been an imposing figure, taller and broader in his teenage years than most men twice his age were, and so passersby took pity on Mavis, who made herself small and frightened, spewing excuses about a dying sister who needed medicine.
It didn’t always work—a few times, onlookers had allowed Leif to drag her, kicking and screaming, out of sight into a dark alley, content to let him inflict his threats, but often someone would stand up for her, offering him coin to placate his temper and extra for her to care for her fictional sister.
Mavis’s favorite con, though, involved a dress she borrowed from a dancer at one of Minstead’s higher-end establishments, which, on her scrawny frame, could be pinned to look as respectable as the dresses Lucent debutantes wore, if one did not look too closely.
And, given how Mavis batted her eyelashes and cried to the poor saps she accosted, telling them how her own carriage broke down in the park and she was hopelessly lost, no one ever looked too closely at her dress.
They were, however, eager to follow her into the dark park to where she claimed her broken carriage waited so they could help, only to find Rafe and Leif waiting instead to strip them of their valuables.
If things had only stayed like that, Mavis thought she might have lived the rest of her life content with her lot.
She understood that she was trapped in some ways, bound to work for Minstead until she paid back what seemed like an impossible sum of five thousand solas, but she had watched her mother toil away at a factory day in and day out, returning home with blistered fingers and a hacking cough that never eased.
If that was freedom, she didn’t need it.
But, in time, Minstead took a shine to Rafe, and Rafe carved out a place for himself at Minstead’s right hand, though in the brief times she saw Rafe during those years, she understood that it wasn’t the coveted job it seemed to be from the outside.
Minstead’s right hand, as it turned out, was the one that did his dirty work, and a man like Minstead had a lot of dirty work to do.