Thief of Cahraman Read online

  As soon as we moved past the first row of giant greyish trees and entered the woods, daylight was snuffed like a blown out candle. Dead leaves and twigs crunched beneath our feet and fog hung above us, thick as low-hanging clouds, creating a wet, chilly atmosphere that threw me back into dark autumn twilights.

  A soft breeze followed us in, rattling the branches so the leaves whispered above us. Then I felt something shift, and I heard a loud rip, like someone tearing cloth.

  My head snapped in the sound’s direction.

  I gripped the hand Bonnie kept on my arm and whispered, “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “I heard…something, coming from the left.”

  Bonnie squinted in that direction. “What did it sound like?”

  That had me stumped. What I heard didn’t make sense, as it didn’t sound like something walking.

  But since she hadn’t heard it, I might have imagined it. Or it could have been just rustling branches. Or something.

  I tried to ignore the possibilities my mind kept coming up with, about what that something could be, focusing on walking further in, keeping an eye out for deer or, hopefully, unicorns.

  We weren’t fifty feet in when I heard the noise again, a deep, eerie whooshing noise like someone sucking in air. I snapped my head to the left again, goosebumps running like wildfire through my body. This time, I found two lights hanging between the trees.

  The lights were too big to be fireflies. They quickly moved closer, getting bigger.

  I froze, my heartbeats escalating into pounding, each deep thump louder and harder than the one before, until I felt them shaking my whole body. “Bonnie. Bonnie. Do you see that? What is that? Is that a deer?”

  Unfazed, she looked back to the left. Then, when she spotted the floating lights, she stiffened up. “That’s…not a deer.”

  The lights hovered closer soundlessly getting brighter through the fog until their precise shape became clear. They were—

  Eyes!

  Something taller than me, bigger than me, was watching us.

  Watching me.

  Throughout years of constant risk and peril, I’d known varying levels of dread and desperation. This was the first time I knew what primal, bone-deep fear was.

  I now remembered this wasn’t the first time I sensed this sinister presence. But I’d never felt it this close, never been caught in its terrifying stare.

  Heart almost ramming out of my chest with the burst of panic, I grabbed hold of Bonnie’s arm with all my strength and dragged her behind me.

  But even as I ran with all the breath I had left in me, leaving the woods behind and heading back to safety, I somehow felt I couldn’t escape these eyes. Not now that they had found me.

  Chapter Two

  The glowing eyes had burned themselves behind my eyelids. I saw them in my dreams and they flashed in the brief darkness every time I blinked.

  I’d barely gotten any sleep, with nightmares waking me up three times throughout the night. They all involved the hovering eyes glaring at me from the Horned God’s mask as he stalked me through an endless wasteland.

  The last time had been before dawn, and it had taken me three hours to fall asleep again for one dreamless round. I ended up being late for work.

  It was bonfire day, the start of Saint Alban’s festival, and everyone was in a hurry to get everything ready and delivered to the campsite before late afternoon. I was in charge of the alcohol, but I had come too late to call dibs on a cart, so I was stuck waiting until someone came back to hand me the reins.

  I now stood outside the tavern, as skittish as a fox, jumping at the daily racket of slamming doors and shouted demands. And there came Bonnie, casually strolling towards me, oddly unbothered. I ran to meet her halfway, doing my utmost to avoid glancing at the woods in the distance.

  “Good morning,” she greeted cheerily, her silky hair down and crowned with a wreath of red roses, wearing her favorite green cloak and carrying a basket that had my mask peeking out of it. She dug into the basket, handed me a blueberry muffin. “I’m guessing you ran out without having breakfast.”

  I stared at the muffin, then at her, puzzled. “Are you alright?”

  “I should be asking you that. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “That’s because I have, and so did you.”

  When she only hummed, I grew a bit more concerned. She traded the muffin for my arm, linking our elbows as we walked uphill to where the unfortunately-named Poison Apple tavern sat. The welded sign perched on its black-tiled roof was shaped and painted like a red apple with a single green leaf, easy to spot from a mile away.

  “You did see it, right? I didn’t imagine that?”

  “Hmm? No, no, I saw the eyes too,” she said, her own intense eyes shining with wonder in the midday light. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them.”

  “Me neither…”

  “I can’t wait to go back and see what they actually were, and try going a bit farther.”

  I stopped dead, yanking her back. “Wait, what?”

  Now it was her turn to be confused. “We found something beyond the trees, that means there is life beyond our borders.”

  “I get that. Why do you want to go back?”

  “Did you forget our deal? If we did find anything in the Hornswoods, you and I would explore further.”

  My jaw dropped and the only sound I could manage was a croak of bafflement.

  “All these tales about fairies, goblins and motherlands, and we’ve never actually seen any of them,” she continued, unaware of my stunned state. “But last night was the first time I had ever seen proof beyond stories. There is life apart from us, and if Ericura is an island, and if the Fair-Folk’s shore—as Faerie is called here—” On cue, she whipped out The Known World from her cloak pocket. “—is across the Fair-Folk Ocean on the other side of those trees, then the rest of the Folkshore, is right across us from the South across the Forbidden Ocean. We just have to pick which end to rent a boat and travel to.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Whatever disbelief and reluctance I had tried to get across had gone completely over her head, because, somehow, she got even more excited.

  “I know, right? It would be easier if we left from here, so going to Faerie would be the shorter distance, but you never know with going to fairyland. Stories about time there concern me a little, so it’d be a safer bet to take the long route to the motherland—”

  “Bonnibel.” I cut her off firmly, feeling more wound up and anxious than I did before.

  Her grin dimmed, shrinking into an uncertain expression. “What is it?”

  That was a good question, because I had no clue how to put my many objections in order, or even in understandable sentences. All that had happened between yesterday afternoon and just this minute had my every thought running around my head, braying like a hoard of panicked donkeys.

  “I don’t—how—why would you—” I began, stopping to find the rest of the words. “Those eyes were not an invitation.”

  She resumed her pace, tugging me along. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how did you look at whatever that thing was and think ‘this is good news’? What about it convinced you that a journey through there, to another unknown world, was a good idea?”

  “If going through there is too much, then, as I said, we can go south, take a boat, and travel to Arboria, or whatever the land of the Pale Men was called.”

  “What part of Forbidden Ocean did you not understand? What makes you think crossing it would be as easy as you make it sound?”

  “Why wouldn’t it? Fishermen say travel by lake is a lot faster and easier than traveling by land, so, we ought to take the chance to sail while the summer tides are calm.”

  I couldn’t help gawking at that statement. As smart as Bonnie was, she tended to speak like she had the blind bravery of a sheepdog, when she, in fact, was deeply naïve. And naivety wasn’t some
thing you could convince people out of; they needed to experience the harshness of reality themselves. To Bonnie, all her sad experiences were limited to things like burning her hand on a hot stove or barely remembering her mother.

  But as much as I wanted her to understand what I was feeling—this overwhelming reluctance to move again—and why I felt it, I wouldn’t wish my eye-opening experiences on her. I wanted her to remain as innocent and optimistic as she was. For while the cost of retaining both was her boredom and frustration, their loss meant becoming me—forever anxious and vulnerable from years of risk and loneliness.

  Since I had no response other than a variety of frustrated noises, I decided not to answer. We could discuss this later, when my fear had subsided and her excitement had waned. Maybe I could argue for a trip to Galba and that could cure her ennui, show her that there was nothing beyond Ericura we could ever need.

  She let go of my arm as we reached the tavern, looking up at me with her head cocked in concern. “Ada, are you sure you’re not ill?”

  “Just have a lot on my mind,” I said, holding open the door for her. “We’ll talk at the bonfire.”

  Nodding, she entered and made a beeline to her usual booth by the window. She soon had her nose in her book, just like the first day we met.

  As one of the newest establishments in this whole area, the tavern didn’t have the rundown appearance of all the other pubs, lodges and inns I briefly worked in over the years. It was a long and wide three-story building with whitewashed walls, a red door, and green-framed windows with shutters only on the bottom floor.

  I took a deep breath and walked in, expecting the usual stench of spilled beer and pipe smoke to hit my nose along with the tone-deaf chatter of tipsy patrons, but it was surprisingly empty. The only people around were staff members and volunteers who were loading food into multi-layered carts as soon as the cooks flung them out of the kitchen, and rolling them out the double-door entrance, ready to stack the tables near the bonfire. Henny, the bartender I was meant to help today, was notably absent, and in his place, to my surprise, was Bonnie’s father chatting up the owner.

  Miss Etheline sat on the bar in a puffy, glossy, fuchsia dress, idly kicking her legs in the air. Her pink-rimmed, cat-eyed spectacles were perched on her curly red hair that was arranged in a towering hairstyle, her brilliant seafoam-green eyes squinting at the list she was going through. Mr. Fairborn, a sturdy, middle-aged man with a kind face, grey eyes and thick, greying hair, seemed to be trying his hardest to get her attention.

  From all the stories Bonnie had mentioned about him trying to bring home replacement mothers, Etheline would be both the oddest yet safest choice. She was a charming, soft-spoken woman who always seemed to be distracted and had eyes so bright they practically glowed. Her fair skin shone like a lustrous pearl. I had figured she was a foreigner and a newcomer, like myself, but some of our patrons and staff acted like she had been here for most of their lives.

  I returned Mr. Fairborn’s greeting wave as I picked up my work apron.

  Etheline looked up from her list, not seeming surprised or even bothered by my tardiness. “Ah, there you are. Business run a bit later than usual yesterday?”

  For a moment it seemed as if she knew exactly what I’d been doing yesterday. Then my anxious thoughts came to a screeching halt, only to kick back into gear as I focused on seeming as calm as possible. “No, ma’am, I just forgot today was a half day-off, not a full day.”

  “Oh, well, that’s what I get for employing flighty girls,” she said good-naturedly, jabbing her thumb towards the storage room door, almost hitting Mr. Fairborn in the face with her writing quill.

  “Is there anything else I can still do?”

  She ran her bright eyes over her list. “Let me check.”

  In the rare emptiness of the tavern, I found myself reflecting on the three people left around and how I had ended up here with them.

  It had all started a year ago, when I’d remembered one of the few answers my mother had allowed me. Usually, my efforts to pry into her past, to find out who we were, where my father’s family was and why they wouldn’t house his widow and child, had all been rebuffed. But she’d once let slip where she had come from in Ericura. Somewhere near the border of Man’s Reach. She had also once mentioned a woman, a cousin of sorts, named Belaina Fairborn.

  Once I’d spotted Alban’s Lair, now Aubenaire on a map, I’d known that had to be my mother’s hometown and high-tailed it here, for the hope that I’d find her relative and maybe a new home to settle in.

  When I had arrived asking for Belaina at the Poison Apple tavern, Etheline had pointed me to the cemetery where her grave sat beneath an effigy depicting her as the Field Queen, with wheat in her hands and flowers in her hair. It had been a stroke of luck that Bonnie was the spitting image of her mother’s effigy, and that she’d sought me out right before I had planned to leave again.

  Etheline tapped her list with the feather pen. “Henny has already taken the wine bottles down, so you have barrel duty. Four meads, two beers.”

  “Yes, ma’am, right away, ma’am.” I rushed into the storage room, avoiding her eyes.

  If I centered all my thoughts on my task, my mind wouldn’t have time to wander towards scary what-ifs and theories about those eyes.

  Before Aubenaire, my height and strong bone structure had made it easier to pass myself off as an adult. But the day I walked in here asking about the Help Wanted sign lodged in the grass, Etheline’s only question had been, “When do you turn eighteen?”

  I was nine months away at the time, but had said I was over eighteen by that much. She’d given me a look that had said she knew I was lying, but had still hired me. She’d put me to work in the bar rather than the lodging area, where most women she employed worked. I suspected that she also somehow knew if I’d taken on maid duties, I would have ended up looking through people’s things or taking my tips straight from their pockets. I’d done that before with the traveling merchants who wouldn’t miss a few coins, but mostly with the customers who harassed me or made lewd comments or advances towards me or other barmaids.

  The way she seemed to know and see what others didn’t, among many other things, could count as evidence of her being a witch. But since she was the last person I wanted to see burn with the wicker beasts tonight, I was going to keep my silly suspicions to myself.

  I now pressed myself against the cold stonewall corridor leading to the cellar as other staff members rushed by me, and caught the only empty-handed man by the elbow.

  “Nestor, can you help me?”

  “Hmm?” He blinked at me, before his vivid blue eyes brightened even more with understanding. “Oh, sure. What do you need?”

  “Can you help me take the barrels off the shelves? I’ll carry them up from the cellar, get the trolleys and set them up, but I can’t lift them down by myself.”

  He frowned. “Why did she stick you with barrel duty? Shouldn’t you be, like, setting up the food or making the wreaths and crowns with the other ladies?”

  “I was too late for that. I think this is her way of punishing me.”

  “Oh.” He nodded and turned to head back downstairs. “Kay, I’ll get them down for you.” As I followed, he stopped a few steps down and turned to me. “But you’ll have to do me a favor later tonight.”

  It was my mind’s turn to lag, returning his earlier startled blinking. “What is it?”

  Nestor stuck his hands in his pockets with an awkward shrug, a half-smile bringing out the dimples in his flushed cheeks. “Can you…would you…you know, mind helping me set up a time for an outing around town? Maybe a picnic?”

  “Like one of the staff dinners?”

  He chuckled, shaking his head, as he ran a hand through his sweaty auburn hair, making it stick up in an effortless, rakish look that made my heart skip a beat. “No, no, I mean like I want a one-on-one thing. And I’ve been meaning to ask, you live with the Fairborns, right? They’re your relatives an
d stuff, so, do you think Mr. Fairborn would allow it or...?”

  I froze on my step, forgetting how to breathe, keeping the air trapped in my chest until it burned. My answer came out as a wheezing exhale. “I guess? He doesn’t mind what we do as long as it’s within town limits and during the day.”

  “Great! If you could talk to him about that, and tell me what time and what kind of food would suit the picnic, that’d be—that’d be much appreciated.” His laugh was nervous as he ran down the rest of the steps, stumbling into the cellar door before disappearing behind it.

  I remained stuck on the stairs, trying to piece together what just happened.

  Did he just ask to court me? It sounded like he did. Like he wanted me to go on a picnic with him in exchange for him helping me with my work.

  I had nothing to compare this to because whenever I’d asked any other boy for help, I’d returned the favor by usually filling in for them if they were late or had to leave early.

  Did he just seriously ask me out on a picnic?

  The feeling returned to my legs once the shock wore off. I went back outside in a daze, taking the trolleys left behind by those who’d come back from transporting wine and food.

  Boys had rarely paid attention to me. Most of the time I hadn’t wanted anyone, anywhere to take note of me. But even if I had wanted one to notice me, there had been no point in pursuing the idea, the same way I hadn’t been able to make friends. I’d always had to leave sooner or later.

  But I lived here now, hopefully for good.

  Was this a chance for me to be with someone? To build a life beyond this tavern and the Fairborn house? If I married Nestor I could truly become a member of the community, become part of his family, and start my own family with him.

  I would never be alone again.

  But I was getting way ahead of myself. He asked for a picnic, to return the favor with my company for an afternoon. If things went well, if he liked me that much…

  I couldn’t help falling back into the daydream of a true domestic life here. It would be like a full circle, becoming a part of the land my mother claimed to have come from, with my journey ending by naming my first daughter after her.