Chapter Fourteen #2
Leif was the next to move on from the urchins, though that change happened quicker.
One night when he and Mavis were walking after supper, a middle-aged man started to follow them, making lewd comments at Mavis that grew increasingly angry when she ignored them.
When he finally lurched at her, grabbing her arm, Leif calmly and clinically delivered a punch to the man’s face that left him laid out on his back, unconscious.
People had seen, whispered, and word about Leif’s skill at brawling was embellished with each retelling until it reached Minstead’s ears.
Three days after, Leif was pulled from the urchins just shy of his seventeenth birthday, and he began fighting in the weekly brawling bouts Minstead organized, where people from the High and Low City alike would gather to watch the fights and bet on their outcomes.
By the time both brothers were gone, Mavis was comfortable enough with the urchins that she no longer needed their protection, though she missed their company.
On rare occasions, they managed to get away from their duties and brought her sweets that they could now afford with the small stipend Minstead gave them.
As she grew older with each passing day, Mavis wondered where Minstead would place her.
She thought she would make a good card sharp in his casinos, though it was likely she’d end up face-to-face with her father if she went that route, and she wasn’t keen to see him again.
When Rafe and Leif both came to visit the dormitory before breakfast one morning, she knew something was wrong.
In the months and years since they’d left the urchins, they belonged to the shadows, rarely seen during the day, and sure enough both brothers had bleary eyes and haggard expressions, as if they would have much preferred to still be sleeping.
“Come up to the roof with us, Magpie, we have to talk,” Rafe said.
When they reached the privacy of the roof, Rafe told her what Minstead decided to do with her.
“He wants me to kill a man?” She looked between the brothers, sitting on the ledge of the roof as she always did, her bare feet dangling over the city below.
They were four floors up, and the people bustling down on the busy sidewalk below looked like the sort of dolls she used to covet from shop windows.
Leif didn’t look at her, his gaze focused over her shoulder to the east, where the sun was rising over the buildings. Rafe, however, did.
“You’ve gotten too old to get away with pickpocketing the way you used to. You’ve become too . . . noticeable,” he said carefully.
No one was more aware of how her body and face had changed over the last year than Mavis herself.
Seemingly overnight, she had breasts that strained at the buttons of her old shirts and hips that caused Leif’s hand-me-down trousers to pull taut, making the shape of her obvious no matter what she did with her hair.
She couldn’t stay an urchin forever, but this?
“Who?” she asked.
“A barkeep at the Pearl,” Rafe said. “It’s better not to know his name.”
Mavis swallowed. “Why?”
Leif grimaced. “Better not to know that either. All that matters is Minstead wants him dead, and he trusts that you have the best chance of getting close enough to do the job. Apparently he likes redheads.”
“It’ll be easier than it sounds.” Rafe gave her what he likely thought was an encouraging smile. “Much the same as pickpocketing, really—make up a story, get him to lower his guards, then . . .”
Mavis rolled her eyes when he trailed off. “Yes, it’s the then that I’m having trouble with.”
Rafe swallowed, glancing away from her. “I recommend poison for your first time. It’s less messy.”
Mavis had laughed—she couldn’t help it. “I hope you know me well enough to know that I’m not concerned about the mess.” She paused. “I can’t do it.”
Rafe and Leif exchanged a look. “I can get one of the other assassins to cover for you—Yeardley owes me a favor—but even he can only borrow you a few weeks, Magpie.”
Mavis stared down at the city below, the streets that had raised her at her feet.
This was to be her fate, then. It shouldn’t have surprised her—Mavis’s whole life had been about survival.
She existed to get from one day to the next without a thought about what might lie beyond or, even more inexplicably, what she wanted to lie beyond.
She turned her gaze north, seeing where the stark, utilitarian buildings gave way to the stately roofs and ancient, sprawling manors of the High City.
She tried to imagine what her life would be like if she’d been born there, in a warm home with a soft bed and a life of possibility spread before her.
Mavis had long accepted she would die in Minstead’s employment.
It seemed far more likely than paying off five thousand solas.
Besides, half the Low City owed debts to Minstead—she wasn’t special or different, and her life wouldn’t be special or different either.
It stretched before her now like a narrow path through a dark wood, one with no forks for her to choose, no opportunity to wander.
And Mavis realized with a sobering certainty that she couldn’t do it.
“I’ll run away.” She spoke the words so softly that the wind carried them off, and she thought, for a moment, that the Hartweillers didn’t hear her.
“Others have tried, Magpie.” Rafe’s voice was strained. “It never ends well.”
“I suppose you would know better than anyone.” Mavis looked at him and tilted her head. “If he tells you to hunt me down, will you do it?”
Rafe didn’t respond, but Mavis knew the answer all the same.
“Of course you would.” She laughed, though there was nothing funny about any of this.
A recklessness had taken hold of her now.
When she woke up that morning, there had been some scrap of hope in her, some trace of optimism and naivety that had somehow remained all these years, whispering to her that one day, she would pick enough pockets and run enough small cons to pay off the five thousand solas she owed Minstead, and when she did, she would have a say in her own life.
One day, she would have a choice. One day she would feel free.
Now that one day would never come, and she felt fractured, backed into a corner.
The chains that had bound her for so long she considered them a part of her were digging into her skin, impossible to ignore.
She glanced down again at the street below.
Four stories, she thought, remembering how the first time she’d come up here, she wondered if Rafe meant to push her, meant to kill her. Now, she wondered if she might jump.
No sooner did that thought take shape than an arm banded around her waist as Rafe tugged her down off the ledge, dragging her to the rooftop.
“Don’t you dare,” he said through gritted teeth. “It won’t be that bad, Magpie.”
Mavis shoved Rafe’s arm away from her, scrambling to sit.
She wasn’t going to jump. It had only been a single thought, dismissed before she could really consider it, but Mavis was too angry to tell him that.
When she looked up, she saw that Leif was watching her with heavy eyes, his mouth twisted into an unreadable line.
“Tell her, Leif,” Rafe said.
Leif held Mavis’s gaze. “I won’t lie to her.
The truth is that every time I’m lying on the floor of the boxing ring, bleeding and in agony, I try to tell myself it isn’t so bad—hell, every time I hobble out of that ring victorious, knowing I caused someone else pain, I try to convince myself of that.
But it isn’t enough for me to believe it.
The truth is that I want to run every damn day.
Every damn hour. And I don’t think that is ever going to go away. ”
“You aren’t helping,” Rafe snapped at him, and only then did Leif look at him.
“And you are by lying?” Leif asked, raising his voice. Mavis had never once heard Leif yell except during a con, never heard him say one cross word, never truly seen him angry, but he was angry now, and Mavis found it far more terrifying than Rafe’s quick temper had ever been.
“I’m trying to help,” Rafe countered.
“By pretending that your life isn’t so bad, just because you don’t talk about what Minstead asks of you?”
Mavis looked at Rafe with a furrowed brow. She had long given up on asking what Rafe did for Minstead, but she knew it haunted him.
“I won’t pretend anything, but I’m also not going to wallow in self-pity when both of you know as well as I do how well we have it compared to half the Low City.”
Mavis had told herself that too, plenty of times. She’d thought of her mother working herself to death in that factory, of her father sleeping who knew where, and told herself that at least she was better off than them. But they had choices—terrible ones, maybe, but choices all the same.
“Do you truly believe that?” Mavis asked.
Rafe didn’t give an answer, and after a moment of quiet she realized that he didn’t know.
“I won’t take a life.” She got to her feet and looked between Rafe and Leif.
She crossed her arms over her chest and hardened her gaze, injecting determination into each word.
“I’ll run first, and if he sends you or anyone else to hunt me down, so be it.
I never thought I had a choice in my life, but perhaps I’ve just been too afraid to make it. Running is my choice.”
Rafe reeled back like she had slapped him, and she supposed in some ways she had. She wondered if he could do it, if he would track her down, if he would drag her back to Minstead, kicking and screaming to face his wrath.
She didn’t think he knew the answer himself.