A Thief in the Night

Chapter Sixteen

The band of adventurers passed through King’s Gate without any trouble-none of the guards were interested in stopping such a dangerous-looking crew from leaving the city-and before Malden knew it he was out in the world.

His reaction was immediate, and visceral.

Never, in his entire life, had he set so much as a foot outside the walls of the Free City of Ness. He was for the first time seeing that there even was a world beyond.

And it terrified him.

The land rolled like the waves of a vast ocean, a sea of tawny grain that never stopped moving under the lowering gray sky. In the distance the clouds broke and sunlight streamed down in impossibly long, straight rays to flicker on golden fields. A small army of peasants worked out there, bent over with sickles to harvest the glowing treasure. To the northeast a church stood white and straight, its spire pointing upward like an accusing finger. It looked terribly alone in that open space, its right angles and distinct shape like some piece of his life cut loose and cast down carelessly like a plaything by some cyclopean child.

Every hour of Malden’s life to that point had been spent in narrow lanes, or climbing over rooftops, or in well-mannered parkland hampered by walls. Now there was nothing on any side of him that he could reach out and touch. If I were plucked up into the sky by some violent wind, he thought, and tossed out into the middle of the ocean with no land in sight, this is how it would feel. He felt exposed, naked, vulnerable in a way he distinctly disliked.

Over time this unease ebbed, though it never left him.

For hours they ambled through the fields under the blustery rain, never seeing more than the occasional distant group of laborers. The only way to measure the distance they covered was to count the mile markers that stood by the side of the road, simple piles of stones marked with the sigil of the local nobility: a crudely drawn stork or a pair of chevrons or just a simple crown. To Malden the symbols meant only one thing, really: all this land belonged to someone else. He was trespassing on someone else’s property, and if they wanted to, they could run him off.

It seemed there was no place outside the city where a man could be free after all.

Despite his unease he soon found himself drowsing in his seat. He worried that if he fell unconscious he would slump and fall from the swaying wagon, and so was almost grateful when Croy began to sing a traveling song. It was a rather sentimental tune about a knight who went out riding to do battle for his lady’s honor. Malden knew a far different version, a much lustier tale of a farmer’s lovely daughters and dragons that disguised themselves as naked women (and only gave themselves away by a certain scaliness of their skin), but he knew there would be plenty of time to sing his version later. This journey was likely to take more than a week-no need to use up all his songs on the first day.

After about an hour’s travel Cythera dropped back to ride beside the wagon. “I’m surprised to see you here,” she told him, “though I’ll admit I’m rather glad.” She reached across to touch Malden’s face. “Oh. You’re hurt,” she said.

Malden shrugged, even though it pained him to do so. “ ’Tis a trifle only,” he told her.

“What happened?” she asked.

He puffed himself up and said, “A host of villainous assassins came upon me in the dark. Now, normally I would have been ready for them, but I was busy at that moment stealing the silver out of the moon, so they got first licks in before I knew what they were about. After that, of course, it was a done deal, and I left them in far worse shape than I found them.”

She laughed, which made him smile for the first time in a day.

“Boasting’s not your strength, thief,” she said. “Regardless, I’m glad you weren’t killed. Or arrested, for that matter. Was there much silver in the moon? It looks no bigger than a single coin held out at arm’s reach.”

“When matched with the gold I took from the sun, that’s still a sum worth stealing.” He glanced sideways at Croy but the knight made a good show of paying no attention to their talk. He was busy singing anyway, and was deep into a verse about the virtue of courtly love, so Malden felt he had a little liberty to spend. “I must say, if you’re surprised to see me, I’m doubly so to see you. I didn’t think you were prone to Croy’s nature of folly.”

“I’ve spent my whole life working for my father or my mother, almost every day of it inside Ness’s walls. I wished to see the world one time before I was married. Once I am pregnant with Croy’s get, there will be no more opportunities of this sort.” She looked away from him and added, “Besides, there were certain temptations I wished to leave behind me.”

“Like me,” he said.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she told him, looking straight ahead.

Malden shook his head. “I saw the way you hesitated when you tried to sign the banns. You aren’t sure of your own heart, are you?”

“Malden… we’ve spoken of this before. You know my mind’s made up. When we return to Ness I’ll marry Croy. My life’s course is sure and steady before me, straighter even than this road.”

“I’ll believe it when I see you wed,” he told her.

Her eyes flashed when she turned to look at him. Her mouth set in an angry line. If she’d possessed her mother’s gift for magic, he imagined she might have cursed him until his skin turned inside out, then and there. Instead she could only glare.

He met her gaze, measure for measure. When she refused to take the bait, however, he eventually looked away. After a bit of riding in silence alongside him, she spurred her horse and went back to riding in front of the wagon, by Morget’s side. It seemed their conversation was done.

The day passed, as days spent traveling in the rain will, with little talk and much brooding. When no one joined his song, Croy eventually fell quiet, though still he smiled as the road passed beneath them. Malden had never seen the knight happier. Even Morget seemed listless and irritable when faced with the prospect of endless miles of plodding through mud and cultivated fields. Of them all, only Croy kept his spirits high, despite the rain.

Eventually the sun sank toward the horizon as they rode away from it, into the east. The sky turned yellow, then pink, and it was getting hard to see when Croy called ahead to Morget to say they should stop for the night.

Thank the Bloodgod, Malden thought. His legs were near as bruised as his face after eight hours on the wagon, and every stone and rut in the road brought new pain. He had never imagined he could get so tired from sitting all day.

Up ahead a milehouse stood in a patch of weeds by the side of the road. Before long Malden made out its sign, a crudely painted swaybacked cow. The king’s law, Croy told him, required that houses of lodging like this be placed every ten miles on the road from Ness to Helstrow, for the comfort of travelers like themselves. Once Malden saw the place, he wondered what the legal definition of comfort might be. It was a ramshackle affair of only a single story, with a row of stalls to one side where horses could be stabled for the night. Its walls had been whitewashed with lime at some point in the past, but time and dust had robbed it of any cleanliness or cheer. Its thatched roof crawled with rats, but at least a little yellow light beamed out from its windows.

There was no stable boy to take the horses, so Morget agreed to see to them-and sleep with them for the night. “I’m used to sleeping out of doors,” he explained, “and would feel ill at ease in such a place.”

Malden was more than glad to jump down from the wagon and head inside with the others. The common room of the milehouse proved as shabby as its exterior: a long room with a low, sagging ceiling, lit only by the guttering fire in its hearth. A cowhide had been nailed to one wall, its fur rubbed off in places by years of customers brushing against it. The room was empty save for themselves and the alekeep, who looked more tired than Malden felt. The man ushered them to a table by the fire and brought them what he had to eat. This proved to be coarse bread and pottage-a thin stew of vegetables, tasteless and fit only for the peasants who patronized what was known locally as the Cow. There was ale, though, which was more than welcome.

None of them spoke much while they ate, and by common agreement they retired immediately after their meal to the small rooms provided for them at the back of the house. Cythera and Croy each got their own room, while Malden and Slag had to share.

“What is this?” the dwarf asked when he saw their accommodations. The room was barely big enough for a pair of mattresses, which proved to be sacks of straw with musty blankets piled on top. When Slag pulled the blankets off of one mattress, dark things with many legs scuttled away from the light. “This is unacceptable.”

“Call down to the master of the house, and bid him bring you a proper bed, then,” Malden said. “I, for one, could sleep on a pile of leaves just now, with a rock for my pillow.”

“Ha! Laugh now, jester. That’s exactly what’s in your future,” Slag told him. “Once we cross the river Strow, this will seem like luxury. I fucking hate traveling. Nothing for it, I suppose. That damned wagon bounced and rattled so bad I couldn’t get a wink of sleep today.” The dwarf threw himself down on the bed with a deep sigh, and in a few minutes began to snore. That was the sign Malden had been waiting for. Tired as he was, he had to answer a question or he knew it would plague his dreams. Making no noise at all, he slipped out of the door of the room and down the hallway.

Cythera had taken the room nearest the front of the house because it was likely to be the warmest. Malden tapped lightly at her door-if she were already asleep, he had no desire to wake her. He waited a long while, thinking himself a fool, before the door cracked open and he saw one of her blue eyes peer out at him. The eye went wide when she saw him.

“Malden, what are you thinking, coming to me like this?” she whispered.

“I was thinking I might be welcome,” he said.

“If Croy came in here right now-”

“He would slaughter me where I stand,” Malden said. “I deem the risk worth the prize.”

“I was going to say it would destroy him. His best friend, taking liberties with his betrothed! I ask again, whatever gave you the idea to come here like this?”

“The words you said today on the road put a notion in my mind. I could not rest until I found out exactly how you felt. You said I was a temptation.”

“One I wished to leave behind.” She reached for his hands. “Malden, I will not deny I bear a certain… affection for you. And I do owe you a debt. Without your help, both my mother and myself would still be enslaved.”

“I didn’t come here seeking payment for services rendered.”

He could barely make out her face in the darkness, but he was certain the look in her eye then was one of utter relief. Had he insisted on a reward, would she have given herself? But of course, then she could never truly love him after. Malden knew enough about women to understand that.

“No,” she said. “I know you don’t see it that way. You’re a kindly man, Malden, under all that arrogance. So-be kind. Let me repay my debt by never speaking of this to Croy. And in turn, do me another service, and forget this fancy.”

A wiser man would not have tried to kiss her then. She did not try to stop him, but merely turned her cheek so he ended up kissing the line of her jaw instead of her lips. He sighed and lifted his lips to her ear.

“I see,” he told her. “You’ve truly made up your mind.”

“I’ve never suggested otherwise,” she sighed. Was there regret in her voice, a certain heaviness, a longing? Or did he simply wish there was?

Malden nearly choked on the lump in his throat. He had hoped… well, he had hoped. And hope was worth exactly what it cost. “Very well,” he said. “I will trouble you no more.”

He slipped away from the door without a backward glance, leaned up against the wall outside his own room and waited for his heart to stop racing.