“Theft?” asked Djaren, with interest.

            Jon and Tam spoke over one another telling all about the theft in the station and the pickpocket on the train.  Djaren and Ellea listened with great interest.  “But what was in Uncle Eabrey’s satchel?”  Ellea spoke again in her careful quiet voice.  “Thieves don’t steal papers.  They don’t sparkle.”

            “That’s a good point,” Djaren agreed with his mouth full.  “What were they after?  It isn’t as if Uncle Eabrey looks the least bit wealthy.”

            “He’s your uncle?” Jon asked, surprised.

            “More or less. Good as,” Djaren explained.  “Father and he grew up together like brothers, from the time they were boys.  Father always sort of looks out for Uncle Eabrey, and Eabrey’s always looking for clues to help with Father’s cause.  They’ve worked together for ages.”

            Ellea smiled oddly over the shrinking pile of sandwiches, and delicately sipped her mint water.

            “He didn’t seem much upset by the theft,” Tam said.  “He said nothing valuable was lost.”

            “And that’s odd too,” Djaren said, “because the only thing he ever gets really worked up about is his research, and what he’s uncovered.”

            Jon was still keeping an eye on the grown-ups, and so he noticed when the Professor pulled the ebony feather from his breast pocket, and handed it across the table to Djaren’s mother, who took it with a secret smile, and tucked it carefully into her hat.

            “Well, everything seems in order,” Hellin said, returning to them with the Professor at her side.  “Your packages should be ready to collect and then we can be on our way.  Djaren dear, do collect up the copper pieces will you?  Leave a half silver.”

            Of course,” Djaren said amiably, resorting small coins on the tabletop.  “We collect coppers,” he explained to the Gardners.  “You never know when you’ll need a penny.”

            “Aren’t silver more handy?” Tam asked.

            “Only if you plan to spend them like money,” Ellea said.

            Djaren handed the last two sandwiches to Tam and Jon to pocket.  “At last! Come on!”  He gestured them along with him out the door and into the hot street again.  “I order the papers, three of them, but they only come in once a month.  Along with any books we order in.  We didn’t come into town last month so now I’m two months behind, and I’ve had nothing new to read.  It’s intolerable.”

            “We’ve got papers,” Tam offered, keeping step beside the shorter Djaren.  “The Professor got a lot of them.”

            “Really?  Good!  Then Anna and I can have at them at once.  She’s following some story or other in the Times, and I was worried we’d have a fight for the first paper.”

            “That story?” Tam looked a little befuddled.  “Well, it doesn’t end. Not as yet anyhow.  The lady just faints a few more times.”

            “I think,” Ellea said, “that she is being poisoned.”

            “And I told you,” Djaren sighed, regarding his sister, “that Arienish women are always fainting.”

            “No one faints that much.  She’s dying, and just doesn’t know it yet.  All her silly troubles will be for nothing because she is going to her grave in a year.  It’s inevitable.”

            “Well, don’t you go telling Anna that,” Djaren said.  He looked at the Gardner boys.  “My sister is very cheerful, as you’ll notice.”

            Ellea stuck out her tongue at her brother, somehow primly.

            Jon exchanged a look with Tam and grinned.  He was beginning to quite like the Blackfeather children.  He exchanged a glance with Tam, a little smile to see if he felt the same way. Tam smiled back and nodded.  “It’s a terrible heat, but the folk are good,” he told Jon.  “Mind you wear your hat.”

            Kara watched, hot, hungry and annoyed, from under a wagon as the strange little entourage passed.  The bug-eyed boy was walking beside a little princess in hair ribbons with a frock that looked like ruffles and frosting.  The lout was there too, and the skinny man with all the scars, whose watch was now in her pocket.  A very fancy lady was talking with him and showing them all to a dusty carriage.  Mostly Kara glared at the new boy.  He was particularly annoying.  He could pass as easily for a girl as Kara did for a boy.  Kara at once disliked the arrogant turn of his head, his long hair, fine features, and pretentious spectacles.  He obviously had far too high a regard for himself.  You could tell by how he smiled all the time and never seemed to shut up.

            Kara was so busy watching them that she nearly missed her chance to roll unnoticed from under the wagon before it began to lurch away.  She blamed this on the heat and her now raging hunger.  She swore and followed silently behind some workmen carrying trunks, hefting a heavy canvas bag of things she had collected in the baggage car.  She entered the crowd at the next corner, safely anonymous, and began searching for the sign for the next meeting place.  Her sharp ears caught three dialects here, but trade common seemed most prominent, which was lucky.  She didn’t understand the other two.  She discouraged a smaller and far more amateur would-be pickpocket with a hard kick that made him curse and run off.  She was just sizing up some of the local merchants as possible fences or marks, when she found what she was supposed to be looking for.  Under a faded wooden sign depicting a red pitcher she found an old man leaning by the door in the shade.  She planted herself in front of him with her hands on her hips and waited for him to take notice.  After a frustrating moment he finally did.

            “Ah, little one.  I have no coins for you.  Be gone!”

            “That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”  Kara gave the white-haired man a dark look.  “Alehd mentioned you were a fool and half blind, but I don’t find that enough of an excuse.”

            “What a temper the small one has,” the old man muttered to himself.  He squinted down at Kara, and spoke in a hushed tone.  “I have seen the least and the greatest of thieves, in all kinds and all manners, but you are the smallest they have ever sent me.  Don’t you have some home to go to?  This is no life for a little one like you.  You will make your mother cry.”

            Kara sighed and bit back curses.  She would not stab him. The daft old fool looked honestly concerned about her.  Getting old, getting soft, Kara thought.  “My last home was a packing crate,” she growled.  “I am tired, and I am hungry, and my mother is as dead as you are about to be if you go tell Negal that you have turned away the best lock pick in all Charesh and the five provinces of Corestemar.”

            The man lifted both hands, palm up.  “Easy now.  I do not send you away.  You are welcome here, little--” he caught Kara’s dangerous look, “--master lock pick.”  He smiled as he said it, exposing gaps of missing teeth and a hundred new wrinkles.  “But where is Alehd, is he not with you?”

            “He missed the train,” Kara said shortly.  “And he didn’t pay me for my work.”

            “But there is work here in plenty.”   The old man gestured to the doorway.  “Here the finest of tomb thieves have gathered in my father’s time, and my father’s fathers.  The tombs of Alarna have been my family’s living.  Things have changed now with the new visitors.  We have now not to steal from the dead, but from other thieves.”

            Kara nodded slowly.  “Archeologists.”

            “And what are they but thieves themselves?  It is all the same under the sky.”

            “Don’t flatter them,” Kara said.

© 2007 Ruth Lampi