We Leave Together, стр. 32
He could barely walk the next day. They spent all day wandering the streets slowly, looking for a hiring caravan. Men looked at the man who could barely walk, and did not hire him. Rachel and Djoss knocked on the doors of warehouses and asked whoever opened the door if they had a caravan leaving the city. Djoss was in no condition to walk, much less work.
A sea of faces, all of them hard and bedraggled and tired, with one rough dog voice barked the two away back into the street.
***
Jona was across the street looking out a window with a scrivener from the guard. Jona sipped a beer slowly and waited for Rachel and Djoss to step out from the barred doorway where they slept out of the rain.
He waited a long time. He sipped only the one beer.
Next to him, the scrivener won round after round of drinks in a card game with a couple lowlife smugglers that had gone birdie for a drink. Jona had bribed the gangers to keep the scrivener drunk and happy. A week of Jona’s wages slowly traveled from Jona’s pocket to a street thug to the scrivener.
Jona’s mind did not hold that scrivener’s name, or his face, or anything about him at all except for this: when he was drunk his cheeks reddened and his smile was very wide and the more he drank the redder his cheeks became and the wider the smile and the Pluckies found the kid’s joy infectious and they cheered the boy on letting him win every round, and the scrivener was king for a day of all the Pens and all the fates. Jona drank so slow. What more was there to know about the truth. He had always known. The pieces he had put together were there for anyone to find that cared to look. The Night King’s power was so great, that she did not even have to hide for people were too afraid to look. What was the point of writing any of it up?
He had gone to the man that ruled his night, a carpenter to the street. He had left a single note, with a single line. Now that I’ve seen it, I know who I’m working for, and that’s fine.He watched the woman he loved leave an alley where she had been sleeping with her brother, and he felt dead inside. He felt like even suicide was pointless.
***
Djoss rested his elbows on his knees and stared at his fists against the cloudy night sky. His sister watched him from the other side of the alley. Read his lips if you can, Jona. She doesn’t even see you to get closer.
“I took care of you,” he said, into his hands, “I took care of that monster that made you. I took care of you after our mother got taken. I always took the best care of you. You were never evil. You were supposed to be evil, but you’re not. I don’t think you even feel the bad stuff in you because of me. I raised you, Rachel. I raised you good.”
She said nothing.
“I hid you when they burned ma,” he said, “I’ve escaped with you in every city. I can get us some money. I’ll go get us some money. Untie me, and let me get us some money. I always find a way to take care of us.”
“Please, Djoss…” she said. That’s all she said. It rained on and off all night. The mud was all over their cloaks and clothes. No one could tell Rachel was a Senta from her clothes because the red X she had sewn on Lady Joni’s cheap dress, getting leather over the cloth that would wear through, was smothered in thick, black mud. She was just another body sleeping in the street.
Before the sunlight returned, they both fell asleep in the mud. When they woke they felt the wet stink of it pressing into their skin through their clothes.
Rachel left Djoss there in the morning. When he woke up, bound and alone, he assumed that was going to be it for them, and he’d never see her again.
And, he was glad for her, even if he wanted to die because of it.
CHAPTER 10
As wolves we ran, and as wolves we slipped underground.
We are hunters.
We hunt.
We slid up from the sewers, and we stood upon the brink of our destination, where the sewers opened to the empty building of the street, at the edge of our destination.
Aggie knew the way in and out, and so did Jona following Salvatore and Aggie, and so, therefore, did we.
We slipped inside in the dark. We climb in silence past the rectory kitchen, up the stairs and into the darkness.
Wolves slipped into the rooms, sniffing through them all for the woman who is old enough to be in charge.
We peeled back the wolfskin. We looked at her sleeping. She snored gently. She was a thin woman with blue veins like rivers in her wet parchment map of skin. She looked up at us, and pulled the ragged sheets around her body, pulling back.
She reminded me of another woman.
“We are the Walkers of Erin,” I said. “We have been hunting the demon stain.”
“What are you doing here? This is not the proper channels!”
“The proper channels are too corrupted,” I said. “Do you remember Aggie?”
“Of course I do! It was one of the worst things that’s ever happened in my life, signing off on her! Where were you? Where was your huntress in the night?”
I placed the papers at the foot of her bed.
“We need your help,” I said. I bowed gracefully. “The children of Erin beseech