“Whatever this is about,” Rey said to Unicorn, “I don’t think I should be swept up in it. Off we go, darling girl.”
It took Unicorn some coaxing to get into the road, and by the time she did, a fire was burning merrily through the wreckageof the Blanchet house. Smoke obscured the stars and ash fell over the statues and delicate flowers in the garden, and Rey was just thinking the southern border was much quieter this time of year when he felt a thump reverberate from the cart behind him. He twisted round and looked through the opening behind the bench.
A figure was scrambling about in the dark.
He narrowed his eyes, making them more foxlike. The darkness became more defined, and he could see a young teenager huddled in the back of his cart. He was a boy with choppy red hair and clothes too big for his small frame, and he had rags tied in a makeshift bandage around his neck. He was shaking and covered in dust, and his hands were dark with blood.
“You know,” Rey said, and the boy jumped, reaching for a blade. Rey made his tone easy and light. “If I were hitching a ride in a stranger’s cart in the middle of the night, I might be inclined to at least give them my name.”
Silence. The boy was shaking, his eyes wide and dark with the terror of a rabbit in the brush.
“Or you don’t have to,” Rey said. “But again, if I were someone in the back of a stranger’s cart and a house just started burning down behind me, well, I’d want to wipe my hands on the rag in the other corner, maybe. I’d even use the water-skin on it first, just in case.”
The boy stared at him for a minute, breathing hard, then slowly started to fumble around for the rag and water-skin.
“Want to give me a fake name?” Whatever had happened, the boy clearly didn’t have the ability to tear down a house. Rey had an eye for people—it came to him easier after a few centuries of fooling nobles out of their coins and setting up love matches for fun—and this one didn’t seem like a killer. He just seemed scared and young, and Rey had a weakness for small, frightenedcreatures. He, too, was a small being in a world of giants. If the little creatures didn’t look out for one another, then Staria really was going to the dogs.
“Arthur,” the boy said.
“Hey, Arthur. You can call me… do I seem like a Louis to you?”
The boy was silent.
“I might be a Louis for a while,” Rey said. “I like trying on new names. Kind of like hats. There’s power in a name. What you let people call you and what you call yourself, it’s old magic. It helps you control how they see you.”
“Yes,” the boy said, at last. “I picked a new name for myself a few years ago. It felt like that—powerful.”
“There you go. How old are you?”
“Sixteen.” The boy looked down. His hands were scrubbed clean of blood, but there were dark stains on the front of his shirt and smears of it on his trousers. “It was my birthday today.”
“Really?” Rey wanted to reach out for the kid, but he suspected he’d jump and run like a startled hare. “Well, happy birthday, Arthur.”
The boy started to cry. It was the silent kind of weeping where you tried your best to keep the sobs in and ended up hiccuping and running out of breath, and Reynard tilted his hat down and hunched his shoulders as the boy curled into a ball in the corner of his cart.
“I don’t know where you’re heading,” he said, looking out over the open road out of Duciel. “But Southern Staria’s nice this time of year. Warm even in winter, with vineyards and horse racing, a few schools the Gerakians built some years back. There’s a village with a statue of a crow—actually, funny story about that, don’t know if you heard it…”
He kept talking as he rode, rambling a little, running through the various stories he knew of the Starian country. Some ofthem involved him—embellished a little to make his role less embarrassing, at times, or more heroic—but most were just tiny stories, none of the grand or terrible adventures that happened on nights like this.
The stars faded. The sky bloomed with the gold and red of a sunrise, and Rey heard more thumping in the back of the cart.
“You don’t have to go,” he said, not looking behind him this time. “If you don’t want. But if you have to, there’s a box of coins under the brown bag beside you. I probably wouldn’t notice if a few went missing.”
The boy said nothing. The carriage rocked slightly, and after a minute, Rey urged Unicorn to a halt. He climbed down and went to the open back of the cart, where his things were left roughly where they were meant to be. He opened the box of coins and let out a little huff of surprise.
Every coin was still there, untouched. He twisted round. The boy had taken nothing as he disappeared from the cart, leaving behind only a bloody cloth and a stained spot where he’d gripped the back of the cart with his bare hands. Rey could only just see him even now—a small, red-haired figure disappearing around a group of trees near a field.
“Well,” Rey said, jostling the box of coins in his hands. “Whatever this was, kid, I sure hope it gets better from here.”
Chapter
Three
Five Years Later
“Now, I know you may be upset...”
Reynard, who was currently going by the nameGerald de Plume,son of the Archduke of Staria,climbed onto a water bucket to avoid the furious, five-foot Maria Barone, who was brandishing a basket full of bread as though it were a mace on an ancient battlefield.
