Thief's War: A Knight and Rogue Novel by Hilari Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

alone. You’d get killed in a heartbeat, without someone sensible to restrain you.”
    “Then we go together, as always. My squire.”
    Michael clapped me on the shoulder, and his smile was like the rising sun. He knew perfectly well that I couldn’t let him go into danger alone… and he’d used that knowledge against me.
    On the other hand, if he was going to lay down ultimatums, then he could hardly blame me for getting…creative.

To my surprise, Fisk made no further argument about going on to the city. I know that in his heart he wanted to bring down Jack Bannister’s wicked employer as much as I did. ’Twas only this Jack he wished to…avoid, I think. At times Fisk seemed to hate the man, and I’ve gathered some great betrayal lay between them. But for betrayal to leave the scars that this one had, there must once have been great trust, and even love.
    To me, Jack hadn’t seemed at all loveable. But I wasn’t a teenage boy, learning the skills to survive as a thief and con artist.
    If Master Bannister was innocent, of murder at least, I might be willing to spare him. But if the blood his master shed had splashed onto his hands…
    * * *
    Tallowsport was larger than I’d been able to imagine, and not nearly as…I think “grand” was what I had expected. A shining, bustling richness that nothing else in the Realm could rival.
    Traveling at the food train’s slow pace, we reached Tallowsport’s outskirts early in the morning. All towns have craft yards on their outskirts, so at first I assumed that the grandeur I expected would eventually appear. The craft yards were indeed bigger than any I’d seen, noisy and bustling—and even I wasn’t naive enough to expect shine and richness from such places. They ran for mile after mile. Most towns have just one central market, some larger towns have two or three, in different neighborhoods. We passed through five markets, on this road alone during the full day it took us to ride through the town. And the prices…
    “A bushel of potatoes sells here for less than we paid the farmers for it,” Fisk told me. “And that doesn’t take transport, warehousing, and the merchant’s profit into account.”
    “I know nothing of how food is handled in a place this size,” I said. “Mayhap they stockpile food that doesn’t spoil, to keep the price the same year-round.”
    Fisk knows no more of a great city’s food markets than I, but his scowl deepened, and I was reminded that he hadn’t wanted to come to Tallowsport at all.
    “Mayhap we’ll be here long enough for you to get a letter from Kathy,” I said, hoping to cheer him. My sister was forbidden to write to me, so she wrote to Fisk instead. And since she’d been sent to court, her letters had become even more amusing. “She never did tell you her scheme to get out of the Heir hunt.”
    “Maybe,” said Fisk. But his expression brightened a bit as we rode on.
    The laborers that supported all this industry were housed in tall, unadorned rooming houses, some of them four or five stories high! The folk we saw in streets and yards appeared well-fed, busy, and as happy as folk anywhere. Looking down the lanes I saw laundry lines, strung like bunting between the rooming houses. And if the clothing on those lines wasn’t brightly dyed, ’twas plentiful and not too often patched.
    Dusk was falling when the carts finally rolled into a great warehouse, which they said was somewhere near the Old Market. The laborers were taken off to temporary quarters, having been told that some of them could start repaying their travel debt tomorrow by unloading the freight wagons they’d traveled with. I went to fetch True from the cooks, and Fisk went to get our pay.
    I’d taken the train boss’s measure well enough that I wasn’t surprised when Fisk returned with two reasonably fat purses. I was surprised by the difficulty of finding a rooming house that had stabling for two horses and would admit a dog. And in a port