dumbly.
She released him, offered him a foot-lift. He barely knew what he was doing as he gritted his teeth and scrambled upwards.
Awkwardly, he passed through the swaying lace curtains, trying to keep as silent as he could. His body trembled, and the whitewashed sill was warm against his palms. Inside, he lowered his feet towards the stone floor. His soles settled quietly, he straightened – then froze.
On the bed lay a figure clad in a dark robe.
Nico's throat made a good attempt at choking itself. His heart seemed to be causing such a racket, he was sure it could be heard by anyone within earshot. The figure was asleep, though, his chest rising and falling in a regular, shallow rhythm.
The man's skin was pure black. A farlander, decided Nico – an old farlander with a bald head and a tough, lean face etched with lines. And something else there, on the cheeks, glistening bright in a ray of sunlight that slanted through the swaying lace.
He's crying in his sleep, realized Nico.
Lena glared at him from the window. There was no way of getting past that face. Nico swallowed his fears and a sudden rising sense of guilt. He squeezed his sweating fists and stole across the room to where a chair sat. Carved from twisted driftwood, it was laden with a leather backpack. He reached it without causing noise. From the window Lena bared her teeth, her hand flapping in a signal to hurry.
It was a fumbling, sweaty business searching through the leather pack, and Nico's hands moved clumsily as the sweat stung his eyes. For a moment he heard voices outside the room, and floorboards creaking as someone walked past outside the door. That only made him work faster, till at last he found a purse, fat and heavy with coinage.
Lena flapped her hands again. The old man slept on.
Nico was just about to leave, when he noticed something hanging from the same chair. It was a necklace of some kind, though not a pretty thing fashioned with jewels or silver. This was distinctly ugly, with the appearance of a large leathery nut, and it was coated in something that looked like dried blood.
A seal, realized Nico. That old man wears a seal.
Almost of its own accord, his hand reached towards the pendant. Behind him, the old man groaned suddenly in the bed. Nico stopped himself in time, pulled his hand away. What was he thinking of?
He turned to go, and almost dropped the purse in alarm. The old farlander was sitting upright, blinking at him with strange folded eyes.
Nico felt his bowels loosen. He could not move. He looked to the door, to the window, and licked his dry lips.
The old man turned his head, looking from one side of the room to the other. It was as though he could barely see.
'Who's there?' he croaked.
Nico was past containing himself any longer. With six quick strides he was across the room, and clambering out through the window.
'He's awake!' he hissed as they scuttled back across the sloping rooftop, the lizards regarding them as they hurried from the scene.
'And half-blind by the sound of it,' Lena replied, moving onwards. 'Hurry up!'
Nico followed more slowly, focused on negotiating the tiles without slipping.
They reached the end of the rooftop, where it dropped a few feet on to that of another building.
'Here,' said Lena, turning back to him. 'Give it here,' she demanded, eying the purse in Nico's hand. He pulled up short, the purse clutched to his chest.
Nico did not want this money. Somehow, though, he did not want Lena to have it either.
She made a snatch for the purse, but Nico jerked backwards.
It was then that his left foot slipped out from under him.
He fell sideways, catching a glimpse of Lena's hands grabbing desperately towards him – for the purse, no doubt – before he slammed against the tiles in a scattering of lizards and expelled breath, and that was that – he was rolling and clattering down the side of the roof, all the way to its edge, where his legs swung out high over the cobbled street, a gasp in his throat and his fingers scrabbling for a hold that never came.
He fell off.
Nico screamed with all the remaining force of his lungs. His shoulder glanced the sign of the taverna, and his entire flopping body spun once before he continued plummeting face-down towards a canvas awning, hollering as he crashed through it, still screaming as the hard cobbled street lurched upwards, his arms throwing themselves over his face for protection as he smashed through one of the tables positioned outside the taverna.
Winded, Nico lay amidst the debris of awning and table, as chip-pings of wood and paint and fabric fell like snow all around him. After a pause, a fat old lady moved forwards to help him; other folk sat in shock with cups of chee still half-raised to their lips. Nico was stunned, unable to draw a breath. He could see his straw hat resting in front of him. He could barely believe he was still alive.
Of all the luck, though: the purse full of money must have fallen from his grasp as he slid down the rooftop, and it must have since been making its own slower, more complicated, though just as inevitable progress off the edge. As the old women bent to give aid the purse exploded on the cobbles right in front of Nico's face, its silver and gold coins scattering across the street in a horrifying riot of noise and sunlit reflections. The old woman clamped a hand to her mouth. Passers-by turned to stare at the scene. Eyes took in this boy, this fortune in money, this fall from the roof of a taverna, and within moments the cry was raised.
'Thief!' they shouted, with Nico still too winded to even move. 'Thief!' they shouted in chorus, as he flopped on to his back and stared up at the roof he had just pitched from, to see that Lena was gone, and only the sun remained to glare down at his ill fate.
In his daze, Nico was hoping that this was all a dream, a nightmare dream that he would soon awaken from. But a pair of rough hands were soon shaking that fantasy out of him. And, as he was dragged to his feet, reality impacted with a greater force than even the ground itself. Oh sweet Ers… his mind yelled at him… this is real… this is actually happening!
And then he passed out.
CHAPTER THREE
Visitations He had never seen a gaol before, let alone spent the night in one.
The place was an open affair, and most of its inmates could wander freely within its walls. There was even a taverna of sorts for those with the money to frequent it, and a cantina that sold better food than the gruel slopped out in the yard. On the whole the guards – mostly prisoners themselves – kept out of the way and left the other inmates to themselves.
Nico settled in the corner of a cell, one of many to be found in the labyrinth deep beneath the main yard. He sat on a layer of mouldy, lice-infested straw, a single oil lamp hanging above the doorway for light. The straw reeked of stale urine, and he could see cockroaches scurrying within it.
The same was occupied by other thieves and debtors of various ages, some of them as young as Nico or even younger. His fellow inmates paid him little notice; mostly they came and went and rarely stopped there for long. Nico was grateful for that as he sat in his corner, nursing his bruised and aching body, his thoughts circling like dark flapping birds intent on tormenting him. Try as he might, he could not help but think of home and his mother.
She would be distraught if she ever heard of what he had become: a common thief caught in the act. She would be angry with him beyond words.
But then, his mother was hardly without fault herself. After all, if he traced his present predicament back a whole year or more, then she was as much to blame for it as he. She was the one who had needed to fill her empty life with a string of ill-suited lovers. She was the one who had chosen to ignore the antagonism between Los and her son, causing Nico to be driven out as a consequence; then driven to this.
Los had been yet another in a long line of his mother's poor choices. On the first night she had brought him
