Thief of Cahraman Read online

  I wondered when was the last time someone had treated Ella like that.

  Now in my room, I was trying to kick the overfilled backpack under the bed, when the door swung open.

  Though I had been living here for over three months, old habits clung tighter than limpets. I still behaved like I was squatting in someone’s summer cottage, jumping at the smallest sounds and diving into hiding spots when I heard people pass by, scared of being caught. It was hard to accept that I was wanted here, to the point that Mr. Fairborn refused to let me pay rent. As a compromise, I helped around the house and his workshop, ran most errands, and kept an eye out for Bonnie, because someone as petite and pretty as her was a prime target to get carried off by a fairy knight.

  Not that I had ever seen a fairy, despite the frequent complaints about them here, and the belief that they filled the Hornswoods, riding unicorns and leaving rings of mushrooms in their wake.

  “Ada?” Bonnie stuck her head into the room. Tucked under her arm was the book Lady Dufreyne had knocked into the puddle, its pages brown, bumpy and wrinkled. “Where were you?”

  Breathing out a sigh of relief, I sat on the bed and took my time properly unlacing my boots. “I just left to get something.”

  “Get what?”

  I reached into the leather backpack and took out the two books, both leather-bound tomes. One was a dusty, plain blue hardcover with no visible title, and the other was even dustier, coppery, and had gold-embossed letters proclaiming it The Known World.

  “I found these, one to replace the one that got wet, and the other because it has all the old stuff you like to read about in it,” I said. “Or at least I think it does. I don’t know, I flipped through it and found a lot of maps and engravings and such. Figured you’d like it.”

  Bonnie took The Known World with gentle reverence, fascination glimmering in the depths of her large eyes like twin flames.

  She carefully flipped the big, yellowed pages, eyes running back and forth over the words as she mouthed them under her breath. “Where did you get this?”

  “It was personally delivered by Saint Alban himself, courtesy of his impending festival.”

  Her wondering expression fell into a flat-browed stare. “Ada.”

  “Does it matter where I got it?” I stood, busying myself with tidying my neat room.

  The Fairborn house, unlike many of the ancient stone-brick houses in this part of the land, was unworn by time. It might have been a feat of construction on her ancestor’s part, but Bonnie’s cozy little house was in better condition than most of the affluent residences in the towns I had passed through. Those houses held heirloom furniture that creaked and buckled, walls that were hollowed out to house rats and floors that groaned like they had bellyaches.

  Bonnie sat on the bed, flipping through the pages a little faster than before like she was searching for a particular chapter. “You’re really not going to tell me where you found this?”

  “I may or may not have found this near the Dufreyne mansion.”

  I hadn’t had the need to steal much since moving in with her and her father. Food was available, so were old clothes of her late mother’s big enough to fit me, and soaps and brushes to keep myself clean and neat.

  But Bonnie knew it was hard for me to let opportunities for valuables pass me by. Even though I didn’t need to take apples from someone’s orchard or look through bags forgotten at the tavern, I still had that hungry, desperate impulse.

  “Before you say anything,” I said. “She owes you those books. And it’s not like anyone in that house is using them. Their library is a mausoleum.”

  I stopped by the spotted mirror on the wall to tie up my hair. It was one of the few glass mirrors I had come across, and unlike the rest of the house, its age showed on its rusting iron frame and its rotting visage, littered with black spots and fogging up at the edges. But I could still see myself, and Bonnie, clearly in it.

  I couldn’t help comparing myself to her as I watched both our reflections.

  Bonnie’s hair was a glossy chestnut-brown, the kind that brushed itself and fell in glistening waves. When pulled back, it would end in one big curl, as her ponytail did now. Mine was so dark it absorbed rather than reflected light, and nothing could make it curl or wave. Aside from her enviable hair, she had a heart-shaped face with gorgeous, upturned features as petite as her frame. All this made my towering height, choppy hair, big mouth, and dark, hooded eyes hideous by comparison.

  For a treacherous second, my mind wandered to my mother. My heart squeezed, making it hard to breathe as I tried to remember her face. I knew I resembled her more than anyone else in Ericura, but I couldn’t recall much else. Had my mother’s eyes been blue or grey? Or had they been blue-grey? I couldn’t remember. Even though she’d died five years ago, my memories of her were somehow fading as fast as sunlight died at twilight.

  Then my mind swerved away from her memory as it always did, turning back to Ella. I wondered what had happened to the original Lady Dufreyne, and what Ella’s life had been like before she died.

  Shaking off the saddening thoughts, I said, “By the way, I’ve invited Ella to join us tomorrow.”

  That made Bonnie look up, mouth half-open in shock. “And she said yes?”

  “Well…” I stopped messing with my hair, meeting her eyes in the reflection. “I didn’t give her the chance to say no.”

  Bonnie snorted fondly. “I’ve been trying to get her to visit me for years, or just accompany me anywhere. Yet one run in with you and you get her to accept. With me she always says she’s busy, I don’t know how.”

  “Her witch of a stepmother always keeps her busy with inane chores, like cleaning the chimney on the verge of summer,” I said bitterly. “Do you think if we accuse Lady Dufreyne of being a witch Ella will be free of her?”

  She looked up, her button nose, small chin, and big, upturned eyes—the same shade of cornflower-blue as her dress—all crinkled in unease. “That’s a serious accusation.”

  “How she treats Ella is also very serious. We ought to help her out of there.”

  Thoughtfully, she twisted her lips from one side to the other, like she was carefully choosing her words. “You can’t force someone to do something they don’t want to.”

  “Are you telling me she likes being treated like a slave in her own home? Why is the heiress herself tending to the orders of the woman invading her space?”

  Bonnie sighed, checking the nameless blue book now. “Ella won’t inherit much, not unless she marries a man who will continue Lord Dufreyne’s business, making him the heir. Other than that, Lady Dufreyne is still young, and could give him a son any day now.”

  True as that was, the thought of Ella forever being a servant in her own home stoked the raging fire in my head, feeding the headache that had begun to form at my temple.

  But Bonnie was right. I couldn’t force anything.

  Aside from trying to make Ella’s life more bearable, giving her friends who cared about her for a change, I could do nothing.

  I let my shoulders slump and sighed. “Want to get started on the masks?”

  As if she had been waiting for me to bring it up, Bonnie hopped to her feet and preceded me out, still focusing more on the pages rather than the hall ahead. “I have everything set up downstairs. When do you have to go help transport the mead again?”

  “Tomorrow.” I went down the stairs first, to prevent any possible trips. Bonnie tended to walk around with her nose in a book, which sometimes led to heart-stopping stumbles like her missing three entire steps and diving at the floor like a clumsy hawk upon its prey. “Etheline expects me at the back of the tavern by the afternoon. I’m going to be carting all the barrels of beer, mead and even wine down to the festival stands, so I need to make use of light.”

  “Can I come with? Perhaps we can pick up Ella ourselves and bring her back with us.”

  Reaching the ground floor, I turned, arms out. “That’s a great idea.”
/>   As predicted, she moved to turn a page and missed the last two steps with a surprised squeak. I caught and swung her off the stairs, setting her near the sitting room.

  She breathed out a relieved sigh. “Wooh! Thank you.”

  I tutted. “You really need to be careful, Bon.”

  “And you need to stop swiping, but, as you always say, old habits are hard to buck.”

  “Me not wanting to scrape by is a tad different than you falling down the stairs daily.”

  Her vivid blue eyes rolled up to the side in mock-thoughtfulness. “Is it really? How many times have you almost fallen off roofs?”

  I was about to argue then remembered my climb down the second-floor window today, which almost ended in disaster.

  “And many people die in their own beds,” I said instead, which didn’t do much to strengthen my initial point.

  “That’s what I keep telling my father, but he still won’t let me travel, or stay out past sunset, or even work outside the house.”

  “I don’t blame him. What if someone steps on you out there?” I teased.

  Dropping her books on the couch by the low, polished wooden table crowded with all our needed supplies, she threw herself beside them. “I’m not that small.”

  I folded my legs on the floor by the redbrick fireplace, picking up the wooden mask Mr. Fairborn had brought home for me from among the jars of paint, beads, candles, and feathers, and chuckled. “I’ve seen garden gnomes taller than you.”

  She stuck out her tongue. “And I’ve seen trees shorter than you. But just you watch, I’ll put the fluffiest feathers on my mask and stand taller than you.”

  She settled on the couch, gaze flitting from the illustrations in the open book to her white porcelain mask, a scary, ghost-like thing that I recognized as an Eastern import from the strange seaport town of Galba. I had spent three months there as a waitress in a seaside restaurant, and just the memory brought back the smell of brine, fish and dirty ice.

  According to common belief there, one night every year, the fog that hung over the waters there would clear up and weaken the barrier between our world and Faerie–what they called Man’s Reach. On that night, the people would put on those terrifying white masks, and run around scaring each other and presumably whatever would come through the barrier.

  It wasn’t much unlike what we were doing now, which made me wonder...

  “Bonnie?” I began, holding a candle over the lit lantern with one hand and picking up my swan feathers with the other. “What is the purpose of all this again?”

  Bonnie broke her staring contest with the book’s pages just long enough to give me a wide, excited grin. I was in for a passionate lecture.

  “Well, you remember how I said that I want to leave, right?”

  “Something I will never understand, but oh yes, I remember.”

  Since I had met her, she had quizzed me about my travels, following each recount with a probing question, asking for descriptions so detailed it was like she was trying to pry the memories out from my mind and brand them in hers. She’d been compensating, since the most she could get to see beyond this town was through the pages of her prized storybooks.

  But it was better that way because my journey from South to North had less adventure, romance and magic and more biting hunger, cold nights and fearful scurrying than her boundless imagination could conjure.

  While I hoped to never travel again, to make this town the place I remained for the rest of my life, there was nothing she wanted more than to leave. To where? She didn’t know and didn’t care. And that upset me, because she couldn’t comprehend that there was nothing more nerve-wracking than aimless, perilous wandering.

  She dipped her brush in the gold paint bottle and began to carefully outline the mask’s hollow eyes. “The origin of St. Alban’s festival is lost to time, but some stories say that around that time centuries ago, Alban led the Pale Men out of their land, across the sea and onto Ericura, where they traveled north to escape the Sun until they hit Man’s Reach.”

  “Which is the Hornswoods around here.” That was the forest that covered the end of this town, marking it as the last frontier of our world. Common belief in Ericura was that beyond it lay the fairy world.

  “Correct,” she said with a flourish, flicking droplets of gold paint into the air. “The story goes that they wanted to go through the woods to reach Faerie, but something kept them out. They also couldn’t reach it through the sea, thus naming all the points where men could go no further, Man’s Reach. They were either unable or unwilling to go back to their motherland, and that made them stay and settle the North. In time, those settlers’ descendants spread all over Ericura.”

  I nodded along, still confused. “Nice story. And you want to leave why?”

  She did a little, frustrated shimmy in her seat. “Ada, don’t you see? These stories prove that there are other lands out there! We aren’t of Ericura, not truly. Our ancestors came from somewhere else, somewhere we, for some reason, never hear or speak of. Doesn’t that make you curious?”

  Unease crept up from my guts like bile, turning down my mouth in a grimace. “Not really.”

  She crossed her arms, pouting. “Haven’t you ever wondered where you got your black hair from? It’s quite a rare trait, I’m told. Even in the South.”

  As much as I hated being reminded of my difference, she was right. And it wasn’t only my hair. I looked nothing like those in the South…or the North. I’d always wondered about that.

  Southerners with dark hair were a minority. And they always grew it in big waves or curls. They also had warmer complexions than mine, but easily tanned and almost always had colorful eyes. In the North, people were like Bonnie, with very fair skin that would freckle or burn in the sun, had all hair colors but black, and vivid eyes, too.

  Yet my mother, who’d looked the most like me, apart from colored eyes, had claimed to come from this part of the North.

  I removed the candle from the fire, dripping the wax along the rim of the mask to quickly stick on the feathers and beads. “I’m all ears.”

  Bonnie abandoned her mask, picking up the book to show me the illustration of a landmass with islands and seas dubbed THE FOLKSHORE.

  One of the isles on the top left was marked HERICEURRA. Right across a vast sea dubbed The Forbidden Ocean to the east was a land called ARBORIA, which she tapped for emphasis. “This! This is what I believe is our motherland.”

  I scanned the map skeptically. “I don’t know, Bonnie, that whole book could be some bored old monk’s fantasy.”

  “Why would it be called The Known World then?”

  I had no good defense against that. In fact, I felt a bit cornered. “Don’t you think we’d know about other lands if they existed? I mean, the story of Alban and the Pale Men sounds like a silly folktale. Why would you want to escape the sun? And we didn’t escape it, it’s still here, every morning without fail, shining into my eyes and burning crops in the summer.”

  “How about this? We go and check the Hornswoods, and if we find nothing but a dead end, we turn back.”

  I readily nodded, hoping that that would be the end of this idea of other lands and her obsession with leaving.

  “And then I will travel south to cross the sea and search for our motherland.”

  Fear flared up within me like oil had been splashed onto a tiny flame, sending it roaring into a fire. “You will do no such thing. You wouldn’t make it past the town limits alone.”

  “I won’t be alone if you come with me.”

  Though it was a relief that she wouldn’t mind my protection, and wanted me to accompany her, I didn’t like this. If this was about a daytrip to another town, or even just to the South, then it wouldn’t have been a problem. Even if I abhorred traveling, I would have done it gladly for her, especially if she agreed that in the end, we’d come back. But she wanted to try leaving Ericura altogether. I certainly didn’t want that.

  There was also the fact
that no one had ever managed that before.

  And since no one had, there was no harm in letting her realize the futility for herself, so we’d finally let this topic of leaving die.

  I abandoned my mask, dusting the glitter from my hands. “Alright, let’s go check the trees before sundown.”

  Faster than a startled cat, she jumped to her feet and shot out the door. I chased after her, hopping over the many mechanical parts Mr. Fairborn left strewn about the front yard, before launching into my second harsh sprint of the day. I was soon out of breath with the cleaved stitch back in my side. Even my longer legs were no match for Bonnie’s eagerness. No matter how fast I ran, she remained a shrinking blue dot in the wide-open, verdant distance.

  The road ended in a sea of tall, damp, grass and I had to stomp through it, the pungent scent of crushed blades and soil rivaling that of my sweat.

  At the end of the field in a clearing, towering above the wildflowers was the nightmarish statue of the Horned God. It was hunched over menacingly, with a visible ribcage, huge clawed hands, a masked face and twisted reindeer antlers that cast long shadows on the ground. Seeing it up close more than unnerved me.

  Steeling myself, I took the last few steps past the statue and towards the edge of the woods to tap Bonnie on the shoulder. “You could have waited for me.”

  She beamed up at me innocently, batting her enviable lashes. “I could have, but I also couldn’t risk you changing your mind.”

  I huffed, turning to leave. “Well, we got here. Nothing’s new. Let’s go back and start on dinner before your father gets home.”

  She caught my elbow and pulled. She wouldn’t have moved me an inch if I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t say no to her. Humoring her with this silly idea was the least I could do.