Chapter Nine I Think I’ll Call You Rory
CHAPTER NINE
I THINK I’LL CALL YOU RORY
I was a boy. A little boy, with dirt under my fingernails, a moth-eaten cloak on my back, and no shoes.
The memory was blurry. I must have been very young, and yet I was alone.
There was no hearth, no home, no mother or father to walk with me through the cold city streets.
The only true thing that stood out in the memory was discomfort.
It came from my stomach and radiated outward: a twisting, knotting pain.
Hunger.
I shoved my fingers in my pockets, fidgeting for lost crumbs. Then, in the market square, where the crowd was thickest, I dropped those fingers into a man’s coat, felt the familiar touch of coin, and grinned.
A minute later, I slapped two coppers on a stall counter I was barely tall enough to peer over. “A meat pie,” I said.
The baker leered down at me. His nose was red and mottled, and there was flour on his cheek. He looked at me like everyone else did. Like I was nothing. “Where’d you get that money, boy?”
My stomach squelched. “You a baker or a tax collector?”
“The cheek.” He slipped the coppers off his counter, looked up—whistled. “Guards! Thief.”
Two city guards pushed through the crowd, but I was gone by the time they reached the baker’s stall.
The memories came quickly—some blurred, others clear—and almost all the same.
I was cold, I was hungry, and I was alone.
Even Pupil House II, where I’d occasionally stop when it snowed in the Seacht, was not a reprieve.
The rooms were full of foundlings like me, and the mattresses had fleas, and there was no hoarding food, because the rats would see away with it.
A girl died of a cough, her skin wet and pale, and when she passed her final breath I felt an ugly shame to be glad; I might manage a full night’s sleep without her hacking.
My milk teeth fell out, and new ones came in, and I grew taller and wore out all my clothes. When I asked the house mother for more, another wrinkle joined the thousands upon her face. “Haven’t got any.”
I called her a liar. Told her I’d seen a gargoyle from that faraway cathedral come and give her twenty gold pieces not two days ago.
That earned me a slap on the cheek and a kick to the ass—I was on the other side of a slammed door in a minute flat.
“You got two thieving hands,” she said through the wood. “Use ’em.”
And I did.
I stole a blanket off a clothesline and slept in the stables.
Then I stole a belt and wore that around the blanket until I found a cloak outside a tavern.
When I stole my first pair of socks—then boots—I nearly gave them all back.
After so long being barefoot, my feet didn’t take to being confined.
Still. Blisters were better than frostbite.
The boots wore me until I wore them, and I thought, That’s what life is.
It wears you down until you get used to the discomfort.
Even so, I walked through the alleys of the Seacht jaw out, fists clenched, ready to give a little pain back for all the world had dumped on me.
The first time I was caught stealing food, the guard slapped me.
The second time earned me a clubbing over the back.
The third time, it wasn’t a Seacht guard who caught me, but one of King Castor’s knights.
I was stripped, flogged, and thrown into a cell at the back of the barracks, where I passed two days without food or water.
“Want to behave like a grubbing thief?” the knight said on the third day as I hobbled back into daylight. “Best try your hand in Coulson Faire.”
And so to Coulson Faire I went.
I went in spring, and the holloway road was in bloom.
It felt like a sign, a divine—What did those superstitious nobs call it?
A portent. I had nothing to my name, and my name meant nothing besides; Rodrick Myndacious was no one.
But the bloom of the gowan flowers that followed me along the road was like a promise, and for the first time in my life, I bloomed too, a strange kind of hope unfurling in my chest. Things would be different in Coulson Faire.
I wouldn’t steal, wouldn’t starve. I would simply… live.
And for three whole days, I did. A merchant’s cart broke a wheel, and I helped him push it all the way to that brilliant field full of brightly bannered tents, and he gave me a full meal for it.
Even patted my back when I choked for eating too quickly.
Then he tossed a silver coin at me and told me, “By gods, find a bathhouse, you smell like the undercarriage of a mule.”
I took myself to the finest inn at the Faire, where the innkeeper immediately denied me entrance.
Then I went to the second-best inn—got turned out there as well—but eventually the third inn, with peeling paint upon its squeaky door, let me in, and I took the first hot bath of my life, washing away a lifetime of coldness and grime.
Then I took a pair of shears and cut all my hair off.
When I looked in the mirror, I hardly recognized the boy I saw.
He was just as thin, just as ugly, but there was a brightness to his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
I spent the rest of that silver coin on a tunic and new socks, on a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese, and sat the day through by a fountain in a square near Castle Luricht.
I watched carriages go by—watched knights in shining armor and women in colorful dresses take the drawbridge into the castle—and for the first time in my life I felt a new kind of hunger.
Like I wanted to make something of myself; like I finally had the energy to dream now that my basic needs had been met.
And then I saw him.
It was just before nightfall, and he was wearing a long velvet cloak, the exact purple hue as the king’s banners. Someone important. And damn me, I couldn’t help myself. Instinct is an incurable habit, and by then it was instinct for me to note who in a crowd had deep pockets.
I stalked him through the square. Waited for him to step into an alley between buildings. Stuck my hand in his pocket.
And felt a coin.
A single coin, large and strange and oblong—rough on one side, smooth on the other.
The man whirled. When he caught my wrist, I noted how pale his skin was. How gnarled his knuckles. “What,” he asked, in a voice that put shivers down my back, “do you think you’re doing?”
I flashed him a smile. “Begging your pardon, sir. Lost my footing.”
“And caught yourself in the depths of my pocket, did you?” His grip on my wrist tightened. “Who are you?”
“Nobody, sir.”
That seemed to please him.
I couldn’t see his face. His hood was too low, the light in the alley too dim. I tried to take a step back. He didn’t let me go. “You have a wandering look about you,” he rasped. “Aimless and wanting. Diviners have that look, sometimes. You’re a foundling?”
I told him I was. And he seemed to like that, too, because he let go of my wrist. “Take a look,” he said, nodding at my hand in his pocket.
Hairs jumped along the base of my skull. I lifted my hand from his pocket and brought out the strange coin I’d felt there. It wasn’t like any coin I’d ever seen. I hadn’t expected it to be made of limestone.
“You want it?” the man asked, leaning closer. His voice was different now. Coaxing and low. “It’s one of a kind. Special. It’ll make you special, too.”
I turned the coin over in my palm, asking with a childlike wonderment I’d grow to resent, “You’d give it to me?”
A low, rumbling laugh slipped from beneath his hood, then he drew it back.
I held in a scream.
His face was like a skull—hollow in the cheeks and eye sockets, sharp at the jaw and brow bones. His skin was gray—or perhaps thin—I couldn’t tell if I was looking at his skin or through it to the bones beneath. When he smiled, his teeth were long and narrow and cracked.
And his eyes. No pupil, no iris—pale as the limestone coin in my hand.
“Yes,” he said, like he’d come to a decision in that horrifying skull of his. “I’ll give it to you from time to time. After all, if she can pluck foundlings from the streets and train them to fill her coffers, why not I?”
He snatched the coin from my hand. Grasped my wrist once more. Threw that coin like one throws a skipping stone over water—
And the two of us vanished.
After that, my memories became bleary, like I’d lived through my youth with something over my eyes. And the things I did recall—
Well. I wish I didn’t.
He, whose name I would not learn for a time yet, was a cruel master.
His mistreatment began quickly, when he used this coin—a magic coin, that could transport its user through walls at whim—and brought us into the dark iron vault at the bottom of the castle.
There, surrounded by cold, hard mountains of gold, he would leave me.
Sometimes for days. No matter how I shouted, no one came, the iron walls of my dungeon taking the blows of my screams without incurring a single dent.
It was cold, and the coins sucked all the heat out of my thin body, and my heart beat too fast too often, endeavoring to keep me alive despite fear and malnourishment.
Then he’d pull me out—that wretch. He’d use his coin, and we’d fly up staircases and through walls until we reached his chamber at the top of the castle.
There, he’d have all manner of things waiting for me.
Braised meats, buttered and spiced breads, flagons of cherry wine.
I’d gorge myself like a pig and he’d watch, his gray tongue darting over his lips in terrible ecstasy.
He’d laugh as I’d throw it all up.
“You eat too fast,” he’d chuckle. “What a human thing to want something so badly you let it hurt you.”
“Fuck you,” I told him, but it had no effect. I was his toy; his source of sick rapture. I only prayed it would stay like this. That his abuse would remain as it was, fixed upon my hunger.
It didn’t.