Trouble's Story - In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb

[CONTENT WARNING: descriptions of violence, graphic injuries, and medical procedures involving the body. Brief mentions of death, alcoholism, and domestic abuse.]

There was a new Mage in Ashtown, and Elden couldn’t stop thinking about her.

It was wrong to think of a patient this way, he knew. He had to be professional, clinical—gods knew he didn’t get his reputation as the best Healer in the Quarter by hounding after women, no matter how beautiful. But there was a quality to Seskel Cross that was just… addictive, was a word he could use. Intriguing. She was an enigma, foreign-accented, as if from Karzai, but she’d only smiled when he’d asked her if she came from there. “I am from nowhere,” she’d answered in her lilting voice. Her smiles were just as mysterious as her eyes, which were a pale gold, like the moons during the Time of Madness.

And it wasn’t as if he was addled for no reason. Seskel seemed to make excuse after excuse to visit him, complaining in that smiling way of a fever that didn’t exist, a sprained elbow that was better at a touch. And she made time to ask him questions, inquiring about his clinic, his work, listening with genuine interest and sympathizing when he told her about the most unruly of his patients…

“What are you standing there for, chirur? You look like a sick dog.”

Elden blinked and shook himself out of his thoughts. The boy Trouble—though he was nearly a man now, fifteen if Elden remembered correctly—was sitting on the examination cot, scowling at him as he cradled his broken left arm. He looked like a wild dog like that, glaring from beneath a mess of tousled straw-covered hair, covered in scratches and bruises. Elden had to be careful; like a stray caught in a trap, Trouble was liable to bite the hand that tried to help him if it didn’t move gently enough.

He sighed and sat down in the stool across from the cot. “How did you get into such a state, Trouble? I haven’t seen you look this bad since your gang had that war with the Serpents.”

The boy looked away. “’S none of your concern.”

Elden tutted, bending to touch his knee. To his credit, Trouble didn’t flinch. Elden flexed his leg experimentally, his magic running down the bone like water to check for cracks. “It is if I’m going to heal you,” he answered, frowning up at the stubborn youth. “You don’t want me to miss anything because you wouldn’t tell me what you were up to. Remember old Havor, who wasted away from syphilis? He didn’t tell me about the prostitutes by the docks, and so I never checked for anything like that—and now look at him.”

Trouble scowled and mumbled something.

“What was that?”

“I don’t mess about with prostitutes.”

“Of course you don’t. That’s not the point.” Elden released his leg and tested the boy’s good shoulder, the one belonging to the arm that wasn’t broken; he didn’t miss Trouble’s slight grimace. “This arm, too? Has someone tried to kill you, or did you somehow do this to yourself?”

There was a long silence as Trouble glared up at him, jaw set in that defiant way. Elden stared back, used to this treatment by now. He couldn’t see much of Tris in the boy: where she’d been all sweetness and softness, Trouble was rangy and tough, already hard angles and scrappy muscle where he should have still had the boyhood fat of innocence.

It was what a life in the streets got you, Elden thought, putting his hands on his hips now in his best “stern adult” expression. Trouble didn’t back down, which was another thing the streets must have taught him.

Don’t give in to authority. No matter what.

He remembered when Trouble was still four, five, hiding behind his mother’s skirts; when Tris was still his laundress, washing bedsheets and pillows in the clinic to keep things hygienic. If only she’d told him at the time that she had a bad heart—or perhaps Tris didn’t even know it herself. She’d died suddenly, leaving Trouble alone, and by the time Elden heard the news, weeks later… the boy was already gone. Taken in by a street gang made up of other urchins and orphans. They taught him how to steal, brawl, and lie before he even learned how to read.

Elden tried to reverse the flow, tried to be a good influence in Trouble’s life, but it was like trying to dam a river with a single rock. They kept running into each other over the years, but every time Elden tried to persuade him to leave the streets, to take up a small apprenticeship in the clinic, Trouble refused. It seemed that each time he saw him, the boy was more and more entrenched into the ranks of the Razors. They depend on me, he’d said the last time they met, ten months ago. He remembered thinking Trouble was far too young to be saying anything like that.

Elden realized it then. “You’re a panton-karas now, aren’t you?”

Trouble scowled again. “Been that way for a while now.”

Elden sighed, kneading the point between his eyes. A panton was street slang for a “prince of the streets”—a street-fighter adept at scrapping and a kind of streamlined version of boxing and martial arts. Pantons were often deployed by their gangs as enforcers, intimidators to other rival groups… and sometimes they even joined tournaments, fights held in gambling alleys where they could earn coin for brutal, teeth-knocking matches with other urchins.

Trouble seemed to read his thoughts. “The other guy’s worse off,” he said, pulling something out of his pocket. He lit the stick of charch and put it in his mouth, cupping his palm around the flame to protect it from the clinic’s draft. “I haven’t lost a fight yet. Not one.”

Elden groaned. “And now you’re smoking?”

Trouble stared at him pointedly from over his cigarette. “Helps with the hunger.”

“Hunger? How could you be hungry if you’re a panton? With your winnings you should be able to buy your own house!”

“All the winnings go to the Razors,” Trouble answered flatly. “We need money to feed the younger kids. Vice Guard’s cracked down on begging in Whitestone and the Market Quarter, so—older ones have got to step up. Look after the others. Whatever that takes.” He wiped blood off his lip, then on the leg of his pants.

Elden sighed again and leaned forward, allowing his magic to flow back down Trouble’s arm and into the rest of his body. For a moment they were silent, waiting as Elden knitted together Trouble’s bones, strengthened joints worn down by repetitive use. Normally it took a fortune to be healed this way, all at once—but if he tried to do it piece-by-piece, Trouble would never agree to come in again, and he couldn’t very well go chasing after the boy along the city’s canals. And he couldn’t take his money, either. However foul-mouthed and hot-tempered Trouble was, he was still Tris’ child. And Elden had failed him. This was the least he could do.

Trouble kept smoking; at least he had the courtesy to lean out of the open window intermittently and blow the fragrant, citrus-smelling smoke into the alleyway outside. After a few minutes Elden said: “So you kids need money?”

Trouble grunted and waved a hand. “Not your money, no.”

“Besides fighting, how do you earn enough to keep everyone fed?”

The boy looked away and shrugged, stubbing out his cigarette on the bottom of his boot. “Sometimes I go up to Whitestone and wait for some fancy carriages to go by.”

“Don’t tell me you rob them.”

“Sometimes, when the mark is easy, yeah.”

“Trouble…”

“But most of the time they got guards. So’s other times I wait for them to get out. Lots of times they have ladies or gents, you know, horams they’re not supposed to get caught with. So they don’t have any personal bodyguards to come with ‘em and see ‘em kissing and whatnot—just guards for the carriage, where no one can see inside. And I dress up all nice, so it doesn’t seem like a grift, and then I walk past them and splash mud on their shoes or slap ‘em with a glove, spit in their face. You know, get them really mad. And then when they can’t take it anymore they say they’ll duel me, and I act scared, like I don’t want to do it, like I’m just a wretch who got fancy clothes somehow but don’t know how to act in them, which puffs them up more, because of course they’re going to outshoot some uneducated idiot teenager. And then we duel, and I make sure we got witnesses, so everyone knows it’s all legitimate—and then I shoot ‘em dead.”

The casual way that this was delivered appalled Elden almost more than the news itself. Fighting was one thing, but killing… He was a Healer through and through, and the loss of human life—especially delivered by a fifteen-year-old—was too much. He felt as if his throat had filled with sawdust.

“You don’t,” he said, hearing his voice shrivel under the weight of it.

“Do so,” Trouble said, unblinking. “Fair’s fair. They were willing to shoot me, so if I just happen to shoot faster…”

“But you’re baiting them! You know you shoot faster—and anyway, where did you even learn to shoot?” Elden shook his head. “No, never mind that. Where’s your gun?” Dueling pistols were expensive; the boy couldn’t have more than one.

Trouble was staring up at something on the ceiling. “Back at home. Don’t carry it around with me all the time.”

“Why not? Wouldn’t that get people to leave you alone?”

“Maybe, yeah. Or maybe they’d tried to rob it off me. Anyway, I’ve got to save the bullets, I don’t have that many.”

“I want you to bring it to me,” Elden began, because he had a foolish idea that he could somehow take it away from Trouble, as if this wouldn’t make the boy fly into a rage, as if this would change anything about the harsh reality of life on the streets, life with the Razors. But before Trouble could open his mouth and start an argument, the front door of the clinic opened—and Seskel floated in.

Elden’s heart leapt in his chest, and before he knew what he was doing, he was scrambling up out of his chair and bobbing a bow, as if Seskel were a foreign dignitary or a visiting queen. “Miss Cross! I wasn’t, er, expecting you today—”

“Yes, I see you’re with another patient,” Seskel answered with one of her mysterious smiles. She turned to Trouble and tucked her wavy black hair behind an ear. “Hello. Who are you?”

Trouble eyed her suspiciously. “None of your business, thanks.” Then he tested his arm experimentally before nodding curtly at Elden. “Guess we’re done here? Thanks. I’ll make sure some money comes your way, maybe in a sennight or two. Not much, but—” He glanced around the empty clinic pointedly. “Something to help.”

“You know that’s not necessary,” Elden began, feeling the thread of his healing snap as the young fighter moved away, but Trouble only flicked him a salute of acknowledgement and walked out the door, shrugging on his tattered jacket. Elden and Seskel both watched him go before he turned to her and said, “I’m sorry, he never talks to adults politely…”

“It’s quite all right,” Seskel answered easily, moving past him and taking Trouble’s spot on the examination table. The air smelled of jasmine and sage, where she walked. “Who was he, anyway?”

“Trouble Alder. Trouble’s not his real given name, but damned if I can’t remember what it was…”

“Who are his parents?”

Elden sighed and went to the sink in the corner of the room to wash his hands. He suddenly felt acutely aware of the emptiness of the clinic; he felt a flush of embarrassment at the thought. Trouble was wrong, he didn’t need financial help—Healing paid well, when you could get the Autarchy to license you, and Elden was frugal besides—but Seskel had often commented on his slow trickle of patients. Was she judging him for the apparent lack of business, as Trouble was, or—was she insinuating something else?

He flushed, then cleared his throat over the burst of water from the faucet. “He doesn’t have any,” he mumbled. “Parents, I mean. His mother, Tris, died about ten years ago. Sudden heart attack was my guess, but I never saw any official reports. Trouble was only four or five at the time—terrible business, they just turned him out onto the streets without caring where he went or getting him into an orphanage…”

“How sad,” Seskel said, as if she were reciting the lines of a nursery poem. “And his father?”

Elden shrugged. “No idea who he was. I doubt Trouble does, either. He was never around, as far as I could tell, and Tris never mentioned him.”

Seskel nodded, taking this in. Elden noticed that her hair was now curled fetchingly around her shoulders—a different style from a few days ago. Had she gotten a haircut? Just to see him? Ought he mention it, or—

“Who takes care of him now?” Seskel asked.

Elden shook his head as he crossed back over to the cot. “It’s a… complicated situation. I won’t bore you with the details.”

Seskel laid a hand on his forearm, sending a blaze up all along his nerves. “It’s not boring at all,” she said sweetly, her hand very light and cool, even through his sleeve. He noticed that she had painted her lips.

Elden would have said anything to keep her there, touching him like that and looking so attentively into his eyes. He cleared his throat. “Ah—he’s a part of a gang around these parts. The Razors. I don’t know too much about it all—it’s a complicated fabric, life around here—but from my understanding, it’s one of three large street gangs that have a stake in the area. Most of the gangs are formed by orphans, street urchins who band together in order to survive. The younger children make money by begging or selling flowers, while the older ones tend to either steal, pickpocket, or offer services to people around the district. Messengers and couriers, spies… sometimes they even become brawlers and make money from gamblers. From my understanding, everyone in the gang is responsible for earning money, which goes into a communal pot. This pot provides for shelter, food, and clothes, and is run by the cleverer older children, typically teenagers until they’re old enough to get their own apprenticeships or jobs. If you don’t earn enough money on your own, sometimes the gang is forced to cast you off. But in general, it seems they do well enough to provide for those children who are left to wander the streets.” He felt a tinge of bitterness suddenly. “Better than the orphanages do, at least, which is ironic given that the whole ecosystem is run entirely by kids not old enough to grow facial hair.”

Seskel took all this in without batting an eye. “So this Trouble—he has no relations, only the other… how do you say it? Manti? Alley rats?”

“We don’t say it like that,” Elden put in hastily. “The word for them is urchin, sometimes street kid—we don’t call them rats. I don’t, anyway.” He cleared his throat as she pulled her hand away, watching him with knowing eyes. “Anyway, yes, you have it about right—he’s a Razor, and he doesn’t have many other connections besides that. Other than me, of course. I knew his mother… she was our clinic’s laundress before she passed. Sometimes he comes by after a bad fight, or I see him wandering around with a bloody face, and I do what I can to fix him up.”

“So kind of you,” Seskel breathed, leaning closer so that he could smell the mint on her breath. “It must be a dangerous life for him, full of peril. He could starve at any time…”

“Well, I suppose,” Elden said uneasily. “I think the greater danger is that he could get killed in a fight or a gang war. They brought in another child, a few years ago, who had been stabbed and left to die in one of the canals…”

Seskel made a humming sound. “How sad. I should like to meet him, sometime. The next time he’s here, perhaps you could tell me…”

A thought came to him through the sudden fog her presence had brought on. “Trouble? What would you want with him?”

Seskel caught up his hand, chapped and dry from antiseptics, and she kissed the knuckles, smiling at him slowly. “I’d like to help him, that’s all. I think I can.”

Elden forgot all about the conversation after that.

#

Trouble was tired. Bone-tired, the kind of fatigue that stuffed up his head with cotton and made him feel achy and feverish. He had been running himself ragged, trying to come up with the funds that would get the gang through the coming winter, holed up as they were in a drafty abandoned warehouse that they could be evicted from at any point. It was this exhaustion that he would later attribute his poor decisions to; if only he had been more clear-headed, more alert, he could have avoided the terrible things that were waiting to befall him.

But now he sat, stony with weariness as he listened to Dink and Fly outlining the state of their rations.

“It ain’t enough,” Fly said, setting the scraps of brass carefully down on the milk crate. “Sorry, Trouble. This’ll get us through the next month, along with what Rabbit and Han got, but—we need more. Us older ones are rationing enough as it is, and Lou fainted earlier this morning. We won’t last just on this.”

“What do you want me to do, then?” Trouble nearly snapped. He rubbed at his jaw, feeling the phantom pain of a bruise now healed. “I can’t make them hold more fights, and all the nobles’ve left the city for the winter. Got no one to earn coin from, nor anyone to steal coin from.”

“The problem,” Dink broke in, speaking in that all-knowing voice that tended to get on everyone’s nerves, “is that none of the merchants like to trade with us. Even when we have enough coin, they don’t like to do business with a bunch of scrawny kids.”

“All right,” Trouble said; he was well aware of the way shopkeepers wrinkled their noses when he came into the store, wary of some trick being pulled. “So what do we do about that? Bribe some adult to buy things for us?”

“No,” Dink said, jabbing his finger at the milkcrate triumphantly. “We cut out the middleman, not add more in! Instead of stealing coin so we can have enough to buy food—why don’t we just steal food?”

There was a long silence as Fly and Trouble stared at him, taking this in. Dink smiled shakily, looking around as he waited for their resounding approval. He had always been a little jittery, and Trouble didn’t know if it was the cold or nervous excitement that had his fingers trembling now. He had somewhat of a wild look in his eye.

Finally, Trouble sighed and leaned back, feeling his bones crack with the movement. “I don’t know, Dink. Stealing gold from nobles who could afford it is one thing, but from shopkeeps—”

“We know some of them,” Fly pointed out, gnawing at his thumb.

“So we choose the ones we don’t know,” Dink said impatiently, standing up to pace around their “meeting room”—little better than a cleaned-out supply closet. “Come on, don’t tell me it wouldn’t solve all our problems. We steal a big ice-chest, full of meat—six ice-chests, no, twelve—just enough to get us through the winter—”

“You don’t think people will notice a bunch of teenagers running through the streets with big meat chests? Are you stupid?”

“We plan it good, when no one’s around,” Dink continued, undeterred. “And we strike all at once, so no one’s got any time to warn anyone else or get their guard up. You, me, Rabbit, Han, Zeck, Suri, Carnaby, some of the older lads—we hit five shops across the city, all at the same time, and we’re made for the whole season.”

“I guess it sort of makes sense,” Fly muttered—he was always the most easily influenced of the older ones—but Trouble reiterated: “Don’t feel right. Weget food, sure, but the butchers? Their families? You going to let some other little kids starve because we cleaned out their dad’s stock?”

Dink scowled now, sitting down and sending Trouble a hard look. “What are you, soft?”

Trouble bristled, and Fly went very still. It was a great insult in their world, to imply one was soft, too mushy to do what needed to be done, too spongy to defend oneself—like a snail without a hard shell to protect it, ready to be picked off by the birds. That Dink thought of hurling such an offense at all was troubling; boys who spoke this way in their gang usually earned a black eye for their troubles, and Trouble was known as the most ferocious scrapper of them all. It usually kept the others off his back, earned their respect when they might have looked down on him—they looked at him differently, after all, since he’d known his mother and had a home, at least once. Everyone knew he had a real surname, a kind of target on his back: a tiny privilege in a world where no others existed. He was not Trouble Ward, like Dink Ward or Fly Ward, the name automatically given to orphans whose parents couldn’t be tracked down. It marked him as different, and his fighting skills and temper had had to make up for it.

But now Dink was saying that none of that mattered. When the group was on the brink of starvation, everyone fell back into singling each other out, backbiting and pointing fingers. This was when things really fell apart—when the enemy crept in through the door they’d forgotten to lock because they were all too busy nursing petty grudges. Throwing plates and mouthing off. He couldn’t let that happen. They’d all worked too hard to turn on each other now.

Still, he could not stop himself from rising from his seat on the upturned bucket. It was instinct, ground into his very bones: defend his honor, or he’d be walked all over. Fly put up a placating hand, an invisible barrier that stood between himself and Dink.

“I ain’t soft,” Trouble said, very quietly.

Dink looked away, smiling still in that nervous way. Trouble glared at him; Dink was usually a coward, shrinking away from the prospect of violence. Someone had emboldened him; whispered encouragements into his ear. “Prove it, then,” Dink said, avoiding his eye. “Help us do this, and we’ll know you’re loyal.”

His gut felt as if it had burst into flame. “Loyal? Where in the fuck are you coming from? Dare you talk about loyal? I’m out here, busting my arse, getting my ribs kicked in all so I can earn money for us. What are you doing, Dink? Nicking watches when you’re not too busy pissing down your own leg—”

“At least I give up all my coin, even when I’m just nicking watches,” Dink burst out then. “Someone said you’re not giving up all your winnings—that you’re keeping some, saving up so you can leave—”

Trouble smashed his fist into the stone wall, cowing Dink into instant silence. Fly looked like he was about to throw up. Heedless of the pain blazing up his arm—damn it, old Elden had just fixed it—Trouble pointed a shaking finger at Dink.

“Who told you that?” he asked him in a deadly soft voice. “Because it ain’t true, and I’ll gut anyone who’s been spreading lies about me and feed them their innards. You got me? I’m not going to have my teeth knocked out just for someone like you to question my loyalty. I was raised a Razor, I’ll die a Razor. I’m not going nowhere!”

Silence. The boys all regarded each other for a moment, and the walls themselves seemed to tense, as if they were holding their breath.

Boys left the gang all the time, it was true. They found better employment for themselves elsewhere, a job where they could feed themselves and themselves alone; or they aged out, wanted their own lives, fell in love or moved away, seeking their own fortune.

Trouble had been taken in by one such boy. Hayward, he’d been called; all Trouble could remember of him was dingy brown hair, a crooked-toothed smile. A warm hand on his shoulder as a scratchy voice told him never to let anyone see him cry. He’d looked after Trouble, made sure he got his fair share of food while the larger boys brawled over it. He’d been like a brother.

But then he’d left. And that was the most terrible betrayal of all, in Trouble’s mind. His mother had abandoned him to his own fate, but she couldn’t help it—she’d died. Hayward had had a choice, and he chose to turn his back on his friends.

The thought made Trouble feel as if he’d swallowed a knife. His body trembled with rage. That anyone could accuse him of hoarding his own funds—that anyone could say that he planned to leave—

He cursed softly and sat down. If he didn’t master himself, he might kill Dink.

Finally the other boy broke the silence by muttering, “I believe you. Sorry.”

“Who told you that, Dink?” Fly asked, looking nervously at Trouble, who was still as coiled as a snake about to strike—even while sitting. “Who said Trouble’s been hiding things from the gang? That’s a fucked up thing to say about someone. Was it Carn?”

Dink shook his head slowly, avoiding their eyes. “No, it wasn’t Carn. Wasn’t anyone in the gang. I’m sorry, Trouble.”

“Who was it?” Trouble growled.

Dink looked away again. “Lazu Reen,” he muttered. “I saw him… after he came from one of your fights in the Ribbon. He said he saw you separating out some of your gold and pocketing it.”

Trouble could have shaken him; as it was, he threw himself back against the bucket again and exhaled a long and angry breath. “Serves you right for listening to a son of a bitch like Lazu Reen. He’s a Serpent, Dink. You can’t trust him as far as you can throw him.”

“I know,” Dink said in a small voice. “I’m sorry, all right? It’s the hunger getting to me—I can’t think straight. I heard that and I… I got angry. Like I… I wanted to believe it. I wanted to take it out on you.” He looked away, ashamed. “I know you wouldn’t leave us, Trouble. You’re not that sort.”

“You’re damn right I’m not,” Trouble muttered. As quickly as it had come on, the heat of his rage had drained out of him again, leaving him cold and more exhausted than before. His heart felt like the ashes of a banked fireplace. I’m not, he told himself again. Not like Hayward. Not like his father, who'd upped and left his family like it meant nothing. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.

There was a silence again before Fly stirred and said, “Then, Dink? This plan of yours, to hit a bunch of stores at once—this Lazu Reen, too?”

Dink shook his head. “Naw. I ain’t that dumb. This one’s me, and I still think we should do it.”

Fly turned to Trouble. “It could work,” he said. “And it’s not like all shopkeeps are saints—we know people who’d deserve it.”

Trouble grunted, skeptical. “What you mean?”

“Take Yevi the butcher, on Bomba Street. Remember how he beat the Hael out of his wife and kids before she packed up and left?”

“Well, now he’s a raging drunk with nothing to lose,” Trouble answered. “I heard a kid tried nicking one of his sausages and he took their hand with one of his cleavers. No shit, without even calling the Vice Guard. You want to steal from him?”

“He won’t even be there,” Dink said. “He lives in a house six streets away the shop. We’ll go before dawn, break the lock, nick some meat, and then leave. He’ll never know what hit him.”

“We should do it,” Fly said then, decisive. “And we need you, Trouble. We can’t do any of this without you.”

Later, in his adulthood, Trouble would be told that he could have said no. He could have refused to do this, with all of his misgivings; he could have stayed behind, looked after the younger kids, and averted his terrible fate. The course of his life could have gone much differently. He might have stayed a Razor forever.

But the people telling him that just didn’t understand. Trouble could never have said no. His loyalty had been called into question, and there were only three things in his life he defined himself by. Loyalty, strength, and willingness to fight. He couldn’t have said no any more than he could have turned the moons and stars by hand.

He didn’t know if he believed in God, or fate, or any of the things that preoccupied scholars and people who weren’t narrowly avoiding starvation every day. He only knew one thing: he would live and die for his friends. Whatever price there was to be exacted, he would pay it. If they demanded his blood, he would bleed. That knowledge gave him solidity, grounding strength and buoyancy in turns. It was the only thing he knew in the dark, cruel ocean he had been cast into, the day his mother died. He had to hold onto that part of himself with all his strength, or else he was afraid he’d be lost to the waves: swept into some place he didn’t recognize or drowned altogether.  It was the only truth he knew, and he clung to it like a life raft.

So he said yes. To say otherwise was to defy the very tides themselves.

#

Dink was so small that he was almost swallowed by the shadows of the night. It was something he always used to his advantage, except in fights with the other boys: when he was begging, patrons could mistake him for a baby-faced boy of ten or twelve. And he could often slip unnoticed into places, skimming under most people’s line of sight.

Not so with Trouble. He looked his age, a tall, hulking adolescent with a surly face and challenging eyes. The kind of youth you knew to avoid. “An undesirable element,” Elden sometimes said, gently, as if to take the sting out of the wound.

So he waited in the alleyway, striving to not look suspicious as he smoked another precious stick of charch and waited for Dink to slip into the alcove that marked Yevi the butcher’s back door.

There was a rustling, clanking movement as a trash can fell over, followed by Dink’s soft curses. Trouble ignored him and looked up at the dark blue fabric of the sky. The others would be approaching their own shops by now, Fly and Carnaby creeping into another butcher’s shop, Zeck and Rabbit slipping into a grocery…

Dink returned, as silent as a shadow. “We’re in luck,” he whispered, looking excited. “The old drunk didn’t lock the back door when he left—he must have been so addled that he forgot! We can just slip in and take what we want!”

“Really?” Trouble glanced at the windows of the shop, but all were dark and empty. Perhaps this was divine providence, after all: a sign that they were doing things right. “Fine, then. Let’s go in and out, quick as a fish, yeah?”

Dink nodded, and they hurried back to the alcove and eased the heavy door open, slipping into the kitchen where Yevi prepared the meats he sold out front. The first thing that Trouble noticed was the reek of salted meat and booze—dark, alien shapes hung around the room, pigs being drained of blood, great haunches of beef that looked like dragon legs. He moved farther into the kitchen and froze as his foot kicked against something, sending it skittering—a glass bottle. Yevi had dropped a bottle that smelled of whiskey and just left it here in a puddle on the floor. Trouble wrinkled his nose. How much of a drunkard was the man?

Dink was moving around the room, stuffing smaller items into a burlap sack he’d tied across his shoulder. “We can take that meat locker,” he said softly, pointing, “and stuff it to the brim—you can carry that big haunch, too, over your shoulder if you can manage it.” Then he bent and cursed softly. “Shit, there’s a lock on this chest. Want to check the front and see if there’s a key before I break it?”

Trouble nodded and began to move towards the door that led to the front of the shop. Dink said from behind him, “You can clear out the register, too,” and Trouble thought that that was going a bit too far, even for him; Yevi couldn’t make that much, and he doubted he would leave money in the till overnight anyway, he couldn’t be that great of a fool, even though there was another bottle rolling away just as he opened the door—

He sensed the danger before he actually saw it, diving behind the counter just as a shelf exploded above his head. Trouble rolled, popped up, and surged forward, light on his feet the way a panton-karas was supposed to be, fists raised to defend himself as Yevi the butcher roared in fury.

He saw that he was outmatched in an instant: he was unarmed, save for a knife in his boot, and Yevi had an enormous cleaver in his hands, a blade big enough to chop Trouble’s head off in one swing if he got close enough. His thoughts whirred and put the scene together in a moment, almost too fast for him to process: Yevi must have gotten drunk and fallen asleep here in his shop, he never went home at all, and now they had to get out of here before—

The door to the kitchen opened then, and Dink stood there, pale, wide-eyed, as Yevi roared again and charged him. Trouble yelled out a warning just as the huge man bore down on his friend, and Dink managed to scramble out of the way just as the cleaver embedded itself in the wall above his head. The two of them crashed back into the kitchen and Trouble gave chase, slipping first on the damn bottle by the door, then on the puddle of alcohol it had left behind. By the time he kicked open the door, Dink was lying in a dazed heap on top of a pile of fallen racks, and—Yevi was poised over him, his cleaver swung high above his head like an executioner’s axe.

There was no time to think. Trouble dove at Yevi, ignoring the fact that the man was a solid three-hundred pounds of muscle and fat; it felt like he had thrown himself headfirst at a brick wall. He and Yevi went flying into the racks—he saw Dink diving out of the way, diving towards the back alley door, escaping, no, leaving him as he ran—

And then Yevi was looming over him, his mouth a jagged gash of darkness against his face, and Trouble scrabbled for the knife in his boot and realized he would get to it too late, and he thought, Ah, shit.

He twisted to the side, but too late—Yevi’s cleaver flashed down and tore through his arm like paper and tinsel. Trouble felt the flash of cold pain and rolled, struck a counter. The knife in his hand had somehow gone flying. Yevi raised his hand again, beads of dark blood clinging to the edge of the cleaver, and sour alarm flickered through Trouble: he was cornered. He was dead.

Yevi brought his arm down, and darkness snapped down on him in one cold flash. He did not even feel the pain: the smallest blessing the powers above could afford a wretch like him. There was no fanfare. He disappeared beneath the waves without a sound.

#

Elden was still half-asleep when the boy pounded on the clinic door, bloodied and screaming. Seeing him in the pale pre-dawn light was like seeing a ghost: the boy’s hair was stiff and white-blonde, almost colorless, while his pale face was streaked with vivid blood. He was barely able to stand with the weight of a much taller boy sagging against him, the tall boy’s arm looped around the small boy’s shoulders as his head lolled, clearly unconscious. Then Elden did a double-take and blanched. Trouble. It was Trouble, and someone had taken a knife to him.

He threw open the clinic door, not even bothering to fetch his dressing robe as he took Trouble’s weight from the screaming boy and heaved him onto one of the beds in the treatment room. “What happened? Tell me what happened!” he shouted at the hysterical boy, who was convinced that his friend was beyond saving. The boy gabbled something about a butcher, a thievery gone wrong when they’d broken into his shop—

“He was there,” the boy gibbered. “We didn’t know—he was there, drunk off his arse—he was going to kill us, Trouble saved me, I ran but then I came back through the front and broke a bottle over his head before he could kill him—”

“The butcher? Is he alive?” Elden felt for Trouble’s pulse; he had lost a lot of blood, but it was there, weak and sluggish. He sent his magic surging into the youth’s system, and then reeled it back—if he let unregulated power shoot into the boy, he could wreak even more damage, burn his nerves or sear his organs. He tamed his magic, turning it into a wiry probe rather than a wave of raw energy, and said, “He cut Trouble with a cleaver?”

“Yes,” the other boy sobbed. “And bloody Hael if I know if that bastard is alive, I didn’t stop to check!”

Elden cursed under his breath. He would have to send the Vice Guard to check on Yevi, but first he had to tend to Trouble. He had a head wound, better than it actually looked at a glance; something sharp had glanced off his scalp, probably Yevi’s blade just as the other boy had hit him. But his arm—his arm was the real problem, mangled and cut to the bone as it was. Elden didn’t really like looking at it, and he was a gods-damn Healer, someone who had devoted his life to staring at gruesome injuries. He got to work immediately, his magic replenishing Trouble’s blood, fusing the flesh together. Steam came out of Trouble’s pores. The boy groaned, but Elden felt the cool detached feeling settle over him, the sensation that allowed him to look at his patients as—as specimens, of a like, anatomical problems and not people he knew and could permanently doom if he made the wrong choice. It was hard, grueling work, sewing Trouble’s flesh back again, repairing the savage cracks in the bone, coaxing tissue to peel away from tissue and veins to shift back to their correct positions.

He lost track of time, laboring over Trouble like that. By the time he looked up again, it was well past noon, and the other boy had long since disappeared somewhere. Elden let out a shaky breath and mopped his brow with a fresh cloth from the drawer by the sink. His hands were fissured and dry; his face felt as taut as if the skin had been welded to the bone. He felt his eyes staring like a dead man’s.

But he let out another painful breath, closing his eyes. It would all be worth it, if Trouble was going to live.

The door opened, and Elden looked up, expecting Trouble’s young friend again—but he saw Seskel instead, pausing in the doorway and outlined with noontime gold. She took the situation in at a glance, then crossed the room swiftly, laying her hand on Elden’s weary shoulder. “How can I help?”

He shook his head, drained. All of the magic had leaked out of him; he had expended it, putting Trouble’s body back together. Now the boy slept, the uneasy slumber of recovery rather than the unconsciousness of a terrible head wound.

“There’s nothing else that needs doing,” he said after a moment. Then he cleared his throat, unglued his tongue from his mouth, and tried again. “I’ve done all I could for him. Now we just… wait for him to wake up.”

Seskel’s hand squeezed his shoulder, almost painfully tight. “Will he be all right? Will he…”

“I don’t know,” Elden said, unspeakably weary now. “As I said, I’ve done all I could. It’s up to him now. There shouldn’t be any lasting injuries or ill effects, but—with damage of this extent, you never know.”

They were silent for a moment, watching Trouble’s chest rise and fall slowly as he breathed. Finally Elden said, “He’s a strong kid. I think he’ll be fine.”

“Yes,” Seskel said slowly, shifting so she could lean against Elden’s hip. An intimate gesture. Carefully, as if she might break, he put his hands around her small waist. “He is strong. He has the energy of—of a fighter, of a soul that could live through anything. Someone the world can’t crush, no matter how hard it tries.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed Elden’s cheek. “It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

He frowned just as he noticed a sweet scent in her hair—something different from her usual jasmine and sage, something more sickly. Like rotting flowers. What was that? And why was his magic, now dormant and dull, shifting so uneasily?

Seskel Cross smiled, then leaned close. “My love, did you really think I was hanging around here for no reason?” she whispered. “Haunting a clinic in the slums? I’ve been looking for—well, someone like him.” She tilted her head towards Trouble’s still form on the cot. “Someone resilient, someone who could endure what’s to come. Someone who no one would miss, or go looking for.”

Elden tried to pull away, but he found that he was frozen in place, as if her touch had turned him into a statue. Something in him flailed and thrashed, like a fly caught in the web of a spider. Glamour! it screamed. Bewitchment, enthrallment, a spell—she’s an Enchanter, you fucking idiot, you have to get out—

But he couldn’t. If he was at his full strength, he might have been able to untangle himself, to shake free of the veil of the enchantment the way he could lance poison from a wound. But it was the perfect trap: he had given up all his power for Trouble, had sent it all into the boy, and now he had none left for himself to resist Seskel’s magic. Why had he never thought to ask her what sort of Mage she was? Why hadn’t he suspected? He’d been too blinded, besotted, and now he was looking into Seskel’s eyes, falling into those pools of gold, unending bottomless maddening gold, and he couldn’t get out, he was sinking, drowning.

She smiled and kissed him. “I thought it would be harder than this,” she teased. “I thought I would have to fool you into thinking one of your patients had died, some cast-off that you wouldn’t think twice about. But then I saw the way you looked at me and—oh, you know how magic is. It’s much easier to invade someone who’s open to it.”

She laughed, and the sound was like the clanging of a funeral bell. “I think I’ll be taking him now,” Seskel whispered, tracing Elden’s jaw. He trembled, but he could not move.

“Taking him where?” he managed to grind out. “What are you going to do to him?”

Seskel laughed again, and he felt her magic closing around his mind like the jaws of a trap—and he was just a defenseless animal, limping, wounded. Crying out in helpless fury. He wanted to run to Trouble’s table, to shake the boy awake and tell him to run—but he was too asleep, as trapped in the coma of the half-dead as Elden was in Seskel’s grasp.

“Please,” he said, almost half-weeping.

Seskel only smiled. “My friends will be ever so pleased I found him,” she said. “If we can help him, make him powerful, give him the ability his kind should have had… We’ll change the world. And he’ll live to thank you. You would be thankful too, if you remembered him. But you won’t. Not.

                                                              After.

This.”

#

…

…

…

Dink came back that afternoon and found an empty clinic and a Healer who had no idea what he was talking about. Who was Trouble, and where had he gone? No one knew, and by the time anyone was really able to look, Trouble Alder was far beyond their reach. It was as if the city had swallowed him whole. As if he had melted into stone and mortar. There was not even a body left to mourn. They gave him a paltry funeral, the grievers full of doubt and confusion, as if they could not decide whether he had really died or simply run away. He was their soldier, and he had fought for them until the end—but they mourned him like he was someone who had simply fallen overboard and been taken by the sea.