The patron thief of brea.., p.4
The Patron Thief of Bread, page 4
Maybe other orphans would have given themselves over to the church, or else found farms and manors to work for — a lifetime of dedication to a friar or a lord in exchange for room and board.
But the Crowns preferred the streets. The streets meant freedom. Meals were never guaranteed, yes, and sometimes they went hungry for far longer than any of them could stand, but they were their own masters. Beholden to no one.
And that was far better than a full gut.
Yes, Duck could sleep anywhere — but she found a peculiar feeling come over her as she stepped under the clean, unfinished ribbing of the vaults.
A sense of pride. Of belonging.
Of security.
Was that simply the feeling of unspent coins in her pocket?
Or could this cathedral possibly be home? At least for a little while?
Three Cheers for Duck
“She’s back!” The Crowns were gathered in the nave. A great hole in the unfinished northern wall, where a rose window should have been installed, meant the chamber was open, swimming in daylight, making the cool blue shadows in the cathedral even more pronounced.
Duck kept one still-piping loaf under her arm and set down the rest of them on a long pew that needed to be sanded before any worshippers could put their well-upholstered rears on it.
Everyone was sitting or sprawling around a toppled pillar except for Gnat, who leaned against the far wall, his expression unreadable. He had all sorts of ways of leaning like this, to mask his shriveled right arm, which clung to his body like a gnarled vine. He pivoted his right side toward the stones; his left hand was busy working on a new knot. Gnat carried a length of rope with him everywhere and could tie complex knots and bows with five functioning fingers quicker than anyone else could with ten. “The right knot at the right time could save your life,” he loved to preach. But for now, he spotted Duck and said coldly, “Did anyone see you?”
Duck shook her head.
“Did you circle the block before you came in?” he asked, pushing away from the wall as he put away his rope. He took the loaf from her hands.
Duck nodded. She had gone around the block twice, just to be careful.
“So quiet. Did you forget how to quack, little duckling?” Gnat tore away a chunk of bread and sniffed it before eating.
She held her breath.
It wasn’t that Duck couldn’t talk.
It was just — words didn’t come as easily to her as they did to the other Crowns.
Spinner and Fingers, the other two girls in the gang, were not as talkative as Drippy or Ash, but they could still string sentences together with no trouble. Even Le Chou, who didn’t say much, said enough.
No one said as much as Frog Eyes, who talked enough for all of them, and no one said things the way Gnat did — Gnat didn’t flap his gums constantly, but when he spoke, he said the right things. When he spoke, people listened. Duck knew she would never be able to say anything like that.
But still.
Duck always managed to say enough. She very nearly opened her mouth to say just such a thing to Gnat now — but then she realized what he’d called her.
He’d called her “little duckling.”
Not “Garbage.”
Still not her name, but an improvement.
Gnat swallowed the bread.
The Crowns surrounded him, all of them watching, waiting for the worst. Gnat always tested whatever they brought in first, just in case.
Always ready to save them, Gnat.
“All right,” he said after a minute. “Seems fine. Dig in.”
The bread was parceled out as evenly as possible — four of the six loaves were split in half to make eight chunks, one for each of them.
“Oh, yum!” Frog Eyes tore off a chunk with his teeth like a starved puppy. “Fank you, Lord, for dis food,” he said, his mouth stuffed.
Spinner chortled, reaching past him to grab her own share of bread. “You want to thank someone, thank Duck.”
Duck quickly looked at her feet.
She wanted them all to think she’d done a good job. But she didn’t want them to . . . to thank her like that. To make such a fuss. She’d just done what was needed for them to survive. She’d just done what a Crown had to do.
“These loaves are monstrous!”
“Honestly, this’ll keep us full for days!”
The clamors were highly approving, with bonus praises to Gnat for finding this bakery in the first place — it was amazing how empty tummies made all these ruffians so grateful.
Two loaves were left over. One of them was wrapped up in muslin to save for emergencies; if it got too hard, they could always soak it in stolen ale to soften it again.
The other loaf was called the king loaf, which always went to that day’s lifter as a payment for risking their skin.
And today, for the first time in her life, that was Duck. Half a loaf just for being a Crown, and a whole other loaf to her name. But Gnat held the king loaf over her head, out of her reach.
“Go on, Gnat, let her eat,” Ash prodded.
“Hang on a minute.” Gnat lifted his chin and eyed her. “Where’s the penny?”
Duck’s heart clamored. The other Crowns stopped cheering, sensing blood as she reached into her pocket.
She had been practicing this very move in her mind the whole walk back from the bakery.
She held the tarnished silver coin between her thumb and forefinger and gave it to Gnat — the same penny he’d sent her with this morning.
When he looked down, a whole pool of coins spilled out from under the single penny.
Ash’s reaction didn’t disappoint. “Holy bones! What’d you do, Duck, pick pockets?”
“No!” Duck rushed to say, seeing the gleam of venom in Gnat’s eye. Fingers was the only one allowed to dip into purses and pockets with abandon. Fingers and Gnat. Fingers was fast enough; Gnat was clever enough. Everyone else had to get permission before they even tried it.
“I shortchanged the baker.” Duck let this confession roll out of her mouth unabashedly.
“Brilliant!” burst Le Chou.
“Well done!” Ash clapped her on the back. “Now we have enough to feast for weeks!”
“Feast! Feast! Feast!” chanted the other Crowns, giddy with victory, until Gnat shot them a look.
“Brilliant? Or reckless?” Duck imagined Gnat asking, and her insides lurched. What if her stunt with the coins had made her too memorable for the baker? They’d have to find a different mark for their next scam. Or what if someone had noticed her swap and followed her back to the cathedral, and any minute, the place would be swarming with constables? Gnat was never going to give her another job again. No — even worse, he was going to kick her out of the Crowns.
Duck had no one, nowhere to go — how would she survive without them? Her breath grew spiky—
But instead of a tongue-lashing, Gnat handed her the king loaf. “Nice job, Garbage,” he said. “Looks like you managed to pull it off — this time, anyway.”
“Wait a minute!” Frog Eyes reached for one of the pennies. “Just wait a minute — yes! I knew it! We’ve swiped this coin before! Look at it — this divot, right here. It kind of looks like a butt. See?” He held it up, and everyone leaned in — yes, the way the silver was dented, it did look like a butt. Duck couldn’t verify that it was a familiar butt, but Frog Eyes was convinced.
He placed it back in Gnat’s hand, smug. “That coin followed us all the way from Perpinnet. We used it on sausages, remember? And now it’s here. That’s a good omen, that is.”
Yesterday’s dinner had been a single bowl of beef stew, swiped from a merchant’s windowsill and shared between the eight of them.
The day before that, their dinner had been the dream of dinner.
Now they all sat or lay along the pews, nibbling with contentment. Duck pictured the bread filling up all their hollow parts — bellies, yes, but also their heads, their legs, their big toes.
Ash was the first to finish his portion. He brushed the crumbs from his tunic, licked his fingers, and sighed. “I haven’t been this full in weeks.”
“These are the biggest loaves I’ve ever seen.” Drippy, a pipsqueak of a boy with a perpetually runny nose, sniffled and held up the bread to examine his last bite with his weak eyes. “As big as a constable’s left boot.”
Duck was reluctant to claim the king loaf in front of everyone, but Ash nodded encouragingly at her, and so she tore out the softest, fluffiest section from the heart of the loaf and took a bite. It tasted like yeasted clouds.
“I’m saving half of mine for tomorrow.” Spinner shoved her leftovers into her pockets.
“And this place is a paradise!” Le Chou leaped onto the stacks of stones as if he were claiming it for the queen of Avilogne.
Gnat tilted his head back to survey the rough beams of the ceiling, the glassless windows, the dried mud and construction dust that formed a carpet on the floor. “It is kind of charming, isn’t it?”
“It’s waterfront property.” Frog Eyes pointed to the steely-blue Sarluire, visible through a great big hole in the wall.
“And look — the place is clean.” Ash wasn’t referring to the actual cleanliness of the cathedral, which was far from godliness — he was talking about the fact that there were no other markings, no signs that other gangs had claimed this as their territory.
Gnat grinned and handed him a sharp rock. “Do us the honors, then.”
Ash chose a spot that was easily visible from the porch but would also require effort to erase, a real demonstration of malice — he climbed to where the altar would have been, had this been a functioning, finished cathedral, and he drew their symbol on the stones with the rock. A five-point crown, messily rendered — what it meant was more important than how it looked.
“There.” Ash leaped down from his perch, flushed and beaming. “A little decoration.”
“It’s been a long time since we had a wall to draw on.” Gnat spread his left arm wide. “Welcome home, Crowns.”
Warmth flourished in Duck’s chest.
Home.
“Our fingers be nimble!” someone started.
“To our graves, be swift!” another added.
“And on every head a crown!” the rest of them chorused.
Though the bread she’d swiped was delicious, Duck had been craving this moment, right here, for much longer.
She had almost forgotten how it felt to be able to exhale, to rest, to stop longer than was necessary to rub the grit off the bottoms of her feet. For a month, they’d slept in shifts, roamed, crouched in tunnels, divided their scraped-together meals into tiny sections that only echoed in their tummies like pebbles dropped into dried-up wells.
Some gangs were little more than feral dogs, guided by their noses, disorganized, undisciplined — but not the Crowns. Gnat ran a tight ship. There were rules and procedures and oaths.
Not a day went by that Duck didn’t feel lucky. She’d been adopted into the Crowns as a wee baby. She’d had Ash to vouch for her.
Ash had wanted her.
Even if Gnat hadn’t.
The harsh reality was that if Duck found the Crowns now, as a recently orphaned child on the streets, Gnat probably wouldn’t let her in. He’d tell her to eat snails.
Sometimes he looked at her like he was going to say it now.
It wasn’t his fault, not entirely — Gnat had been stressed lately. They all had. It killed him to drag his constituents around like this, from alleyway to bridge to lodge, scanning for potential places to live, only to find a stallion or a pair of crossed axes or a chalice chalked onto the walls, a sign that another gang had already claimed the area as theirs.
The Crowns had been pushed all the way to Chatoyant County, all the way out to the sheep lands. Odierne was their last chance at city life before they would have been forced to break apart, find jobs on farms.
Life as a Crown was a life on the move. Duck always woke up with the possibility that she might be falling asleep somewhere else that night.
But maybe now things could be different.
Duck found a dry corner of the cavernous nave and settled on her knees, chewing on her bread. It was so hearty, one of the best they’d ever stolen.
She allowed herself to feel the teeniest bit of triumph — she’d pulled off her first real job, and she’d done it with a flourish.
Extra coins and bread to fill everyone to the gills.
Everything was going to be all right.
“A moment of your attention, Crowns, and then the day is yours.” Gnat hopped onto an old barrel, waiting for his underlings to settle. “We seem to find ourselves, for the first time in recent memory, with a surplus of goods and money—”
“All thanks to our very own Duck!” Ash clapped, and the rest of the gang hooted and cheered. Duck blushed with pride but was sickened when Gnat narrowed his eyes at her as though she were the enemy.
“Let’s not name names,” Gnat said. “We all played a role. Anyway, the point is that now we have eleven extra pennies, and I’ve got a proposal for what to do with them.” He paused and glanced at each of them. “The hot fair.”
All the Crowns looked at him with wide eyes.
The fairs of Chatoyant were famous far and wide — the cloth-producing merchants of the Lower Countries brought their wares up along the ancient roads to sell in open-air markets. The first hot fair started in mere hours and would last for a fortnight, ending with a bonfire feast on the Eve of the Splendid.
They were the very heartbeat of rural Avilognian commerce, these fairs — a boasting of colorful wares, endless food stalls selling shiny produce and spiced meats, an absolute holy grail for the seedy, hardworking thieves of this kingdom. But sadly, these bustling spectacles had never set up anywhere the Crowns called home . . . until tonight. Tonight, the Crowns would finally get to see one — but not as thieves. As customers.
“We’re coming to the close of some difficult times, Crowns,” Gnat’s speech went on. “I say we go out tonight and celebrate in style. Who’s with me?”
The Crowns erupted in cheers — all except Duck, whose thoughts were a jumble. She’d been a Crown all her life — raised on their stolen food, clothed in the outfits they’d yanked off the dangling lines between buildings. Today, for the first time ever, there was a surplus — and Gnat wanted to spend it?
Gnat, their fearless leader, who catalogued every crumb they swiped, now had a gleam in his eye that was completely unrecognizable to Duck. He rolled one of the pennies along the knuckles of his left hand.
“Then it’s settled,” he told his gang. “We meet back here just before sundown for the fair. Feel free to wander, Crowns — sightsee, run around, squabble over which corner of the cathedral will be yours. But keep your noses clean, do you understand? Absolutely no lifting, no scams, no picking pockets. No trouble.”
The Crowns needed no further instruction. They were a ruthless scraping street gang, yes, but they were also children, and now that their guts were full, their egos boosted, and their heads brimming with the dreamy possibilities the night held — eleven extra pennies! A whole coronet! The hot fair! — they scattered. They climbed the broken pews like mountain goats, jumping and swinging and playing.
They crawled up the walls like spiders, leaping onto one another’s backs. They wrestled, they hopped down the stairs two at a time, they found sticks to use as swords and split into fighting pairs, joyfully making whacks that could be heard all the way down the road.
Happy, feral children.
Most of them were still children, technically. Gnat and Ash stretched the definition of “child” at around sixteen. Spinner and Frog Eyes were fourteen, Le Chou and Fingers thirteen. Drippy was only eleven, but that was still older than Duck, who, at eight years old, was still a baby compared to the others — and they made sure she never forgot it.
Duck watched her fellow Crowns leave in pairs to explore the surrounding neighborhood.
Across the cathedral, Gnat found a new spot on the wall to lean against, his left hand tying a knot in his rope as he chewed the last of his crust.
Another oddity — Gnat never horked down his daily bread; he usually nibbled at it, an inch a day, keeping it in his pockets until it was nearly too stale to suffer.
Surviving on the streets required caution. Gnat pounded this into the Crowns with rules and systems, especially because most of them were like unleashed beagles. But caution grew inside Gnat like an organ.
So then why was he so freely gobbling up his entire share of bread today instead of hoarding it in case it would be his last meal for a week? Why was he taking them to the hot fair to spend their coins, as if money could easily be fished from the Sarluire with nets?
Gnat looked up at Duck just then, his features pinching with suspicion, and Duck gathered the rest of her king loaf and marched up the spiral masons’ stairs, up to the roof.
A good omen, Frog Eyes had said of the butt-imprinted penny, and at this moment, Duck hoped he was right.
Ash and Dust
Duck had been on roofs before. She had seen the views from atop western facades in Perpinnet. She’d seen the stars glitter while perched on barns in Tortues. She’d seen the sunrise, seen the morning birds pepper the sky in sheer black clouds while crouching in trees that belonged, like the Crowns, to nowhere in particular.
She’d seen the best and most beautiful views in Avilogne, ones typically reserved for aristocrats’ balconies or sacred spires.
This was not one of them.
The view of the river winding east behind the unfinished cathedral was ordinary. The opposite end of the roof showed all of Odierne, but was obscured by the blunt plainness of the city’s other rooftops — the thatched straw of the burghers’ homes, the slate tiles of the wealthy nobles’ manors, the steeples of the churches.
To the south of the cathedral, there was a laundry, a square brick shop with a large yard that was open to the Sarluire. Inside the yard were wooden troughs full of tablecloths and bed linens soaking in wood ashes and soda, cauldrons of water boiling over fires, buckets of soft soaps made from glistening animal fat. Sheets were stretched out on tables, drying in the sun.
