Taking Flight

“Oh,” Azraya said again. She tossed another pebble, and the dove flapped wildly for a moment, then wheeled into the air and flew away. “I guess I’ll be going back to Ethshar, then.”

“Why were you traveling in the first place?” Kelder asked.

“None of your-oh, damn it, it doesn’t matter.” She slumped forward, chin on her hands, elbows on her knees.

At first, Kelder took this to mean that she was going to answer his question, but after a moment it became clear that she wasn’t going to say anything without further urging.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” he said, “but I’m curious.”

She turned her head to glare at him around an errant ringlet of hair. “Why?” she demanded.

“Oh, I just like to know things,” Kelder said rather feebly.

She turned back to staring at the cobbles.

“When I was eight,” she said, “my parents died of a fever.”

Kelder, realizing he was about to get the whole story, nodded encouragingly.

“We couldn’t afford a theurgist to pray over them,” Azraya continued, “or a witch to hex them, or a wizard to cast spells on them, so they died. Two of my brothers died, too, and my older sister-the neighbors were all so afraid of catching it that they wouldn’t come near us, they shut up our house with us inside. That left me, and my younger sister Amari, and our baby brother Regran. I was the oldest, so I tried to take care of them, and I would sneak out of the house and steal food and things for them. And when the fever was gone, I took the boards off the doors, and then the tax collectors came and took the house away because we couldn’t pay, we didn’t know where our parents had hidden their money-if they had any.”

Kelder made a sympathetic noise.

“So we all went to the Hundred-Foot Field and lived there, with the beggars and thieves,” Azraya went on, “in the block between Panderer Street and Superstition Street, in the Camptown district. Our house was in Eastwark, but our old neighbors … well, we thought we’d do better in Camptown, and the Hundred-Foot Field goes all the way around the city.”

Kelder had no idea what this meant-he had never heard of the Hundred-Foot Field or anything else she mentioned. Interrupting to ask for an explanation did not seem like a very good idea, however, so he let her go on.

“I didn’t steal,” she said, “not after we lost the house. I think Amari did, but I didn’t. I begged when I had to, and ran errands for people when I could-one good thing about Camptown, the soldiers usually had errands we could run, taking messages to their women, or fetching things from the Wizards’ Quarter for them, or even just standing lookout when they were supposed to be on duty and wanted a nap, or a little time in bed with someone, or a game of dice.” She took a deep breath. “Regran died when he was two, just before my tenth birthday,” she said. “I’m not sure what he died of, he just got sick and died. Somebody had kicked him, maybe that did something, I don’t know. We’d done everything we could for him, even found a wetnurse and paid her half what we earned for a few months, but sometimes babies just die. After that, Amari and I didn’t stay together much any more, and I lost track of her after awhile. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years now. She might be dead, too.” She paused, remembering.

Kelder wanted to say something comforting, but before he could think of anything and phrase it in Ethsharitic, Azraya resumed her story.

“I told you we lived near Panderer Street,” she said. “Well, the panderers noticed me, after awhile, and I started avoiding them. And by the time I was thirteen I didn’t run any more errands on Pimp Street or Whore Street, either.”

Kelder did not recognize the Ethsharitic words for panderer, pimp, or whore, but he could make a guess what she was saying.

“And after awhile, I decided that I was tired of it. I was tired of the Hundred-Foot Field, the mud and the flies and the lunatics talking to themselves and the thieves going through your bedding every time you were out of sight, and I was tired of being harassed by the pimps, and I was tired of the soldiers and their errands-they were propositioning me, too, by this time. So I went to the markets to find work, but I didn’t find anything at first, just more pimps, and slavers, and farmers who wouldn’t take me as a field-hand because I’m not big enough. I was too old to apprentice-I should have found something when I was twelve, but I didn’t, I missed my chance.”

Kelder nodded in sympathy. Maybe he should have found an apprenticeship on his own, regardless of what he parents wanted-but he hadn’t.

“Anyway, eventually I got to Shiphaven Market, and I thought I would sign up to be a sailor, but there was someone there looking for volunteers to join a dragon hunt in the Small Kingdoms, and I thought that would be wonderful. It was a way out of the city, and I may be small, but I’m not stupid, and I’m stronger than I look-I thought I might help in a dragon hunt. So I signed up.”