City of Jade

9

BOSKYDELLS

WINTERDAY, 5E1010

[THE FINAL YEAR OF THE FIFTH ERA]

As the snow blew and a chill wind rattled the sides of the barn, with cold air drifting in through the cracks, Pipper ran up the long slant of the rope tied between the first stall and the hayloft above the far end. Binkton, not needing to look at the five balls he kept in the air, their graceful arcs crisscrossing and not colliding, watched as his cousin made the ascent.

“Well and good, Binkton,” said Uncle Arley. “Give them over and we’ll revisit your sleight-of-hand skills.”

Binkton waited until Pipper reached the top and alighted on the loft and turned and bowed to an imaginary audience below. Then, one after another, Binkton let fly the balls to Arley, the eld buccan gracefully catching each of the colored spheres and dropping them into the box at hand.

Pipper then slid down the length of the line and backflipped to the floor planks just ere reaching the end.

As Pipper stepped over to watch, Arley said, “ ’Tis claimed the hand is quicker than the eye, yet I say, not so. Instead, the art of successful legerdemain is twofold: distraction and a stealthy touch, like so.-Oops!” Arley dropped a fetter that fell with a clang, and both Binkton and his uncle bent down to pick it up. As the stripling rose with the irons in hand, Arley said, “Thank you, bucco,” and he took the shackles while at the same time giving over to Binkton the lad’s own belt.

Pipper laughed and clapped and said, “Nicely done, Uncle.”

Somewhat embarrassed, Binkton scowled as he rethreaded the belt through the loops on his breeks.

“Now, since there are two of you,” said the eld buccan, “the filcher can slip the taken object to the other, and, when accosted, the filcher can show he hasn’t got it.”

Arley then demonstrated how this was done, this time using Pipper as the dupe.

For the next candlemark or so, uncle and nephews practiced this form of trickery, until Arley seemed satisfied that they had got it right; then they moved on to other sleights of hand.

Time after time, Arley put the striplings through their paces, as he had been doing ever since they had come to him, or so it seemed. With both sets of parents lost in the raid upon Stonehill some four years back, he had inherited these two rascals, being their only remaining kin, and a granduncle at that. It was when he had shown them a few of his skills that they had insisted on learning all he knew, after which, they maintained, they would see the world.

Oh, well, perhaps someday they would, yet Arley hoped it would be in different and less perilous circumstances from those in which he had done.

And so, he set out to teach them all he knew of the picking of locks and pockets, of misdirection and stealth and guile, of walking upon ropes and swinging through the air and other feats of aerial skill, of trickery and sleights of hand, and of making something seem other than it was.

“All right, buccoes,” he finally said, “that’s enough for the day. Now, let us go have some warm soup.”

With that, they made their way through wind and snow to the stone cottage at hand, a cottage a league or two north of the small town of Rood in Centerdell, the Bosky.