Tales of Ethshar

had hidden their savings, if in fact they had any. She had packed up a few belongings and fled, crying, and had come to the Field — everyone in Ethshar of the Sands knew that that was the last refuge, the place where the city guard never bothered you and nobody cared who you were or what you’d done. She’d found Mama Kilina there, sitting by her cooking pot, just as she was now, and it had never occurred to her, then or any time since, to wonder how old Kilina came there.

Even Kilina must have been young once, though.

Mama Kilina grinned at her. She still had almost half her teeth, Darranacy saw.

Darranacy did not want to ever wind up like Mama Kilina, bent and old and eating rotten cabbage.

“All right,” Darranacy said, “I’ll find a place, then. Right now!”

“How?” Korun asked quietly.

Darranacy looked up at him angrily. “Why should I tell you?” she demanded, as she stared challengingly at Korun.

He shrugged. “Please yourself, child,” he said. He squatted down by the cookpot. “Spare me a little, Mama?”

Darranacy watched as the two of them ate Mama Kilina’s cabbage stew. The smell reached her, and simultaneously revolted and enticed her.

She never felt real hunger now, but the smell of food could still affect her — even such food as this. She remembered the happy meals with her parents in the back of the shop, the pastries her father sometimes bought her when they were out on one errand or another, how she would sit and nibble at a bowl of salted nuts while she practiced her reading...

But she couldn’t eat anything now. It would break the spell, and then she’d need to find more food or starve, she’d need to find clean water — the stuff the others here in the Field drank, mostly rainwater collected from gutters of the city ramparts or from gravel-lined pits dug in the mud, was foul and full of disease. Attempts to dig a proper well had always been stopped by the city guard — the edict that had created the Field in the first place said that no permanent structure was permitted between Wall Street and the city wall itself, and that included wells as well as buildings.

Once she had a proper home again, then she could break the spell. Not before.

She thought over Korun’s words. He was right, it was time to find a proper home.

She stood up and turned away from Mama Kilina and her cookpot, and began walking.

Darranacy reached her own little shelter, built of sticks and knotted-together rags pilfered from Grandgate Market — a crude thing that could be knocked down, or simply trampled, in a matter of seconds if the city guard ever decided to clear the Field out properly. She ducked inside, shoved aside her crude bedding, and dug into the sand, uncovering the pack she had hidden there.

This pack held everything she had brought from her parents’ house that she wasn’t already wearing.

There wasn’t anything really valuable in the pack; the demon and the fire had destroyed all her parents’ precious arcane supplies, the dragon’s blood and virgin’s tears and so on that her mother had used, and Darranacy hadn’t been able to find any gold or silver anywhere — maybe the demon had taken it all, some demons did crave money, though her father had never told her what they did with it.

There was, however, her good tunic — fine brown silk with elaborate rucking around the waist, and gold embroidery on the sleeves and hem. Wearing that she would be attired well enough to travel anywhere in the city, up to and including the Palace itself.

She looked down at it for a moment.

She could go anywhere in it — but where should she go?

She wasn’t about to go to the Palace; that was too much. The overlord scared her; she’d never met him, but she had heard enough about him that she was not about to intrude on the Palace.

But she wanted to find someone rich to live with.

Well, there were plenty of big, elaborate homes around the Palace, homes where rich people lived. She didn’t know how she could get someone there to take her in, but maybe if she looked around...

An hour later Darranacy, in her fine silk tunic but still barefoot, was wandering the streets of the Morningside district, admiring the marble shrines on the street corners, the iron fences and ornate gates that guarded the homes, the lush gardens behind the fences, the lavish homes beyond the gardens.

This was so different from the crowded streets where she had always lived! On Wizard Street or Wall Street the shops were jammed against each other right along the street, with no room for gardens either between them or in front of them, and the courtyards to the rear would hold only small vegetable patches, not these great expanses of flowers in every color of the rainbow. The residents lived upstairs from their shops, or behind them — a home without a business, a building without a signboard over the door or a display in the window, was rare indeed. A block a hundred yards long would hold at least a dozen homes in a solid row, broken perhaps by a single dark, narrow alley — two at the most.

Here, such a block would have but two or three houses, each standing apart amid its own gardens and terraces, closed off from the street and its neighbors by walls and fences — if there were businesses in there, customers had no way in! Windows gleamed on every side, fountains splashed — Darranacy couldn’t quite imagine living amid such sybaritic surroundings.

And there didn’t seem to be all that many people who actually did live there. She saw a young couple on a bench in one garden, and a woman tending flowers in another, but for the most part the yards were empty, the streets almost deserted.

Darranacy guessed that there weren’t enough rich people to fill all those big houses, and that encouraged her — they must be lonely, in there.

But she couldn’t just walk in somewhere and ask to be adopted.

She walked on, and saw three little children, all of them much younger than herself, playing ball on the terrace of a particularly fine mansion.

A boy of seven or so was climbing a tree a few doors down, and she considered calling out to him, but decided not to.

She was almost to Smallgate Street, and the houses were growing smaller and squeezing in four to the block, when she saw the girl.

She wasn’t playing, or climbing, or gardening; she was just standing there, leaning on a fence, her face thrust between the iron bars, looking out at the world beyond her home. She was taller than Darranacy, and probably older, but she wore just a tunic, not a dress but a dark red tunic with no skirt, which meant she was still a child, not yet twelve — or if her parents were exceptionally old-fashioned, it meant she hadn’t had her first monthly flow yet.

“Hi,” Darranacy said, from a few steps away.

The girl blinked at her. “Hello,” she said back.

“My name’s Darranacy.”

“I’m Shala.”

“You live here?”

Shala nodded.

“You look bored.”

“I am.”

“So am I,” Darranacy lied.

“Want to do something together?”

Darranacy almost gasped with relief.

“Sure,” she said.

“Come on in,” Shala said, pointing to the gate.

This was the perfect opportunity. Darranacy hurried into the yard.

Now, how could she bring up the idea of adoption?

She thought about that as Shala took her inside and found a pair of dolls, as Shala introduced her to her mother and the housekeeper, as they went back outside and played out game after game... but as time passed, she thought about it less and less. She was having too much fun.