With the effort and accent of a foreigner, he said, “Sir, you have bags? I carry. I help you.”
“No, thanks. We’re all settled in.” Venture searched the people making their way up and down the street for an adult this little beggar might belong to, someone who might have put him up to it.
“Please, sir, there is thing I do for you, for hot roll?”
Venture stopped, really looked at the boy for the first time. He was scrawny, with hungry brown eyes. Deeper in those eyes was more than hunger, there was—a hauntedness. There was a grief Venture found painfully familiar, but there was a strange pain that went beyond that, too. Dasher’s hand went to the pocket that held his bag of coins, but Venture gave him a little head-shake
no
.
“What’s your name?”
“Chance Morninglight, sir,” he pronounced carefully.
Venture had initially thought that the boy had approached them knowing that Dasher was the Champion, and that they were therefore a gold mine for a little beggar; now he realized Chance hadn’t addressed any of them by name.
“Do you know who I am? Do you know who he is?”
“No, sir, you not tell me.”
“You’re right. My mother would be horrified at my manners. I’m Venture Delving. Do you know who this year’s All-Richland Champion is?”
“I not know what champion is. I not know much.”
The kid’s ignorance seemed just as genuine as his desperation. “Do you know how to take care of horses, and how to drive them?”
“Yes, sir!”
“How old are you, Chance?”
The boy opened his mouth to speak. His eyes darted to the side, then he looked down at the hole in his boot-toe and mumbled, “Eleven.”
“What’s that?” Venture tipped his ear down, closer to the boy.
He lifted his head and spoke up. “Eleven, sir.”
“You don’t need to call me
sir
.”
“Yes, sir.”
Venture sighed, then folded his arms. He narrowed his eyes and made his face grave. “Eleven? Is that how old you really are?”
“Yes, sir. I was to say thirteen, but . . .”
“But you decided to tell the truth?”
“Thirteen sound more . . . useful.”
“Well, it just happens that I’m looking to hire an honest eleven-year-old boy.” Venture brushed the hair back from the grimy little face with his hand.
Beside him, Earnest raised his eyebrows. Venture didn’t care. What better use for the winnings he’d been saving? It wasn’t enough to do anything else of importance with, but it was enough to feed a scrap of a kid. How much could a kid that small eat, anyway?
“Let’s go get something to eat, and you can get to know me a little better, figure out if you want to work for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
They took the boy to lunch at a restaurant down the street. When the men’s stomachs were full, the boy still ate, earnestly, unceasingly. Venture encouraged Dasher and Earnest to go ahead and run their errands without him, while he lingered at the table with Chance.
“Where are you from?” Venture said, handing their bread basket, empty yet again, to the maid as she passed by.
Chance finished chewing a piece of crust, swallowed, then said miserably, “Atran.”
Atran? The kid had come a long way, nearly halfway around the world. Venture had heard the reports over the last several years, that the country that had so influenced Richland’s founding had failed to fight off its invading neighbors, that it had fallen apart and been decimated to the point of utter destruction. He’d heard nothing, though, of refugees finding their way all the way to Richland.
“What’s your name, in Atranian?”
The boy’s eyes lowered. He stiffened. “I learn you language. Learn name mean Chance Morninglight. That good enough.”
“I’d like to know it, though.”
“I not want hear other language, not ever again.”
“Okay. Let me tell you something about myself, then. I’m a bonded servant. Since I was six years old.” He leaned across the table and said softly, “Are you bonded, Chance? You can tell me.”
Chance wiped up a remaining smudge of butter on the dish with the last scrap of bread on his tin plate. “No, sir, not bonded.”
Venture hoped he was telling the truth. The last thing he needed was to deal with harboring a runaway bondsman. “Well, is there anyone else missing you, then? What about your family?”
Chance dropped his bread into his bowl. “They put me on boat. Say hide, go Richland. Be safe.”
“So you do have a family?”
Chance sank back into the corner formed by the high-backed bench and the wall, as though if he tried hard enough, he might just disappear into it. “They dead by now. Father say forget what see there, forget that country. I not talk about it anymore!”
Venture felt himself shrinking back right along with him, back to a place he never wanted to go again. He blinked hard and reached out to put a hand on the kid’s arm instead.
“I’m sorry, Chance. You don’t have to talk about it.”
Another basket of bread plunked onto their table. Venture handed the astonished maid the empty butter dish.
He pushed the basket closer to Chance, and he perked up and tore off a hunk.
Venture didn’t care how strange it was, to think of a bonded servant hiring help. There was no leaving this big-eyed boy here, in the largest city in Richland, all alone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Autumn’s Third Month, 658 After the Founding
It was early in Autumn’s Third Month, and still mild in and around Twin Rivers. A light frost crunched under Venture’s boots, though from the look of the sky, the sun would have the earth moist and soft and smelling of warm, moldy leaves by afternoon.
Chance’s breathing grew heavier as he struggled to keep up with Venture’s much longer strides. Venture slowed down and glanced over his shoulder at him. Justice had looked at Venture incredulously when he found out he’d hired a young “assistant.” But Grace had immediately fallen in love with Chance’s heart-rending combination of knowingness and innocence, the big, sad eyes above the winsome smile, the good manners alongside the foreign awkwardness, and she’d felt compelled to mother him at once, and so her husband had had nothing to say against their unexpected guest.
A wall of warm air hit Venture when he pulled the smithy door open. A young boy pulled the bellows chain, and the flames of the forge roared hotter. Venture unbuttoned his coat, shrugged it off his shoulders, and tucked it under his arm. Chance just stood back in the shadows, watching, taking it all in. Earnest, home resting at the tail end of a bad cold, had asked him to stop by the bladesmith to pick up a set of knives. A gift for his mother, he wanted Venture to fetch them in time for her birthday.
The lamps flickered in the heavy iron chandelier above the anvil, over which the patriarch of the bladesmithing family was hunched. His bulky back was to Venture, blocking his view of the smaller figure he was talking to. A pair of tongs hissed as one of his sturdy daughters quenched them in a bucket of water.
“Hello there.” The smith smiled as he turned toward the sound of Venture’s footsteps.
“Hello, Mr. Newman. Flora.” Newman stepped toward him, and as he moved, Venture saw, just behind his bulky frame, the last person he’d expected to see here. “Miss Fieldstone.”
“Venture,” Jade said cooly, then, acting well enough to convince the Newmans she meant it, though not well enough to fool him, “just the man I wanted to see. There’s some business I must talk to you about. Let’s get out of this heat for a minute. Excuse us, please.”
“Will you be coming back in to talk about your hilt?” said Flora.
“Yes, of course. I’ll be right back.”
Venture gestured for Chance to stay put and followed her outside and around the side of the stone building, into the narrow alleyway. He eyed Jade warily. In the three days since his arrival in Twin Rivers, he’d put a great deal of effort into not thinking about her at all.
Now he was alone with her, in a darkened alley, his heart pounding no matter how he told it to stop. “I shouldn’t be here, Miss.”
“Don’t worry, Vent. I’m not trying to seduce you.”
“Why would you want to do that, Miss? You’re a lady, after all, and as you said once, I’m just a simple servant boy.”
“I never said that!” Jade’s arms flew to her sides, hands clenched into fists.
“Of course you did, to your cousin Tempest.” He watched with satisfaction as the realization washed over her.
“Vent, you know I didn’t mean that. I couldn’t let her think—” She stopped. Then, “Vent?” she asked simply, though the look said,
You believe me, don’t you?
“Never mind.” He started back toward the front of the smithy and the street. “I came to check on some knives for Earnest, but I’ll tell him he’ll have to do it himself.”
“Vent.”
“
Never mind
, Miss. You can call me whatever you like. It’s your right.”
“But I can’t call you my friend, can I?”
Venture spun around. He had no interest in friendship anymore. Foolish though he knew it was, his feelings for her had gone too far beyond that.
“No, Miss, you can’t. Not anymore. Now I really should go.”
Jade rushed in front of him, her expression changed. “Venture, wait. Please, you can’t tell my father what I’m doing here.”
“Why? What
are
you doing here?”
“I’m having a sword made, and a dagger—for me.”
“I figured that out already. But why? And why would this reputable family do such a thing without your father’s knowledge?”
“Flora makes and repairs the practice swords for our swordplay class now. She’s willing to make real blades for me.”
“Swordplay? You’re back at Beamer’s?”
After they’d been attacked on the road near the Fieldstone property, Grant had taken the unusual step of bringing Jade to Beamer’s for self-defense lessons. It was how Beamer had heard about Venture. Why he’d urged Grant to bring him to his center once his injuries had healed, and see what Venture could do on the mat, and what Beamer could do for an out-of-control boy with an uncommon fighting spirit. But Jade’s training alongside lower class girls at Beamer’s had ended on her fourteenth birthday, when her grandmother insisted she become a lady.
Jade laughed. “Funny no one told you. It’s the whole serving staff’s favorite thing to joke about.”
“Maybe they have other things to talk about.”
“I have ears. I hear them.”
“And your father allows this because . . ?”
“I agreed to continue being a pleasant young lady and make nice with with his friends in Society if he let me do something other than help Grandmother manage the house and sit around looking pretty—let me keep learning self-defense, including swordplay.”
“What does your grandmother think about that?”
“She thinks Father is crazy, of course, and knows nothing about raising a young lady, and should leave me to her, considering the job he’s doing.”
Venture smiled in spite of himself at the mental picture of Jade wielding a sword, and Rose watching in dismay. He wondered if this swordplay business had something to do with the ending of her courtship with Mr. Rippley.
“What? You think she’s right?”
It was one thing for the Crested ladies Jade envied to carry on with the traditions of their warrior class by practicing the fighting arts with their relatives in their private home training rooms, and quite another for her to frequent a fighting center full of rough boys, especially at seventeen years old. Right or not, it would be viewed as unseemly.
“I wouldn’t think of criticizing my master.”
“Yet you’d think of criticizing me, I’m sure.”
He leaned back nonchalantly against the gritty stone wall and pretended not to notice how beautiful she was with her cheeks flushed and her eyes flashing with irritation. She crossed her arms and tipped toward him on the balls of her feet, chin lifted high in challenge.
“A good servant wouldn’t think of criticizing a lady of his master’s household,” he said with a smirk.
“You’re sure about that?”
She was still leaning toward him, still stretching up to look him in the face, and he couldn’t help thinking that with one little tug on her wrist, he could send her tumbling forward into his arms.
But the memory of her words jumped at him again, so he threw them back at her once more. “Simple boy that I am, I’m positive of that.”
“How can you think I believe you’re a simpleton? I studied right alongside you, and didn’t you best me every time?”
He averted his eyes. He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to remember how things had once been, didn’t want to like her again.
“Did you hear what Tempest said to me before I told her that? Do you know what she said?”
“I might’ve missed some of it. So what?”
Jade shrank back a bit, looking even smaller than before. She folded her arms across her body as though to protect herself from what she was about to say.
“She said she’d bet you’d know what to do with her if she let you think you were lucky enough to take advantage of a young lady. The thought of her trying to get you alone—”
She stopped herself and took a deep breath, and heat washed over Venture’s face.
Jade straightened herself up, regaining her volume. “Vent, it was a stupid thing for me to say. Please forgive me. Anyone who calls you simple is an idiot. What can you not do well? Tell me one thing.”
“We both know none of the things I’m any good at are of much value to a young lady, except that some of them are useful in a servant.”
“Well, I guess I’m not much of a young lady then.”
Her eyes filled with emotion for him, and Venture had to steady his breathing. The practical part of him, the part that told him he needed no distractions from his training, and he needed even less the heartache he would surely endure if he pursued Jade, stomped on the part of him that still hoped, that had refused all this time to be completely extinguished.
“You can’t change who you’re meant to be.” His words cut into his own heart. He turned and strode back to the smithy door, pushed it open, and said, “Time to go,” to Chance.