The Silver Crown

2.

The smell in the Lower City is always abysmal—and is particularly bad on muggy afternoons—but growing up here, I barely detect a stench anymore.

The busiest section of the Lower City is the Market District and the surrounding blocks. The Saban River runs right along the street. Now, in the dead of summer, the river is dirty and low. The placid waters are twelve feet below the edge of the street. Three-foot tall stonewalls pieced roughly together line the side of the dirt street along the river. The walls are older than the city, built by the farmers that first settled here to stop the river from jumping its banks and washing away their fertile soil. It was onto the wall that I jumped. I walked along the uneven top as the noise of the city ruled my ears.

Beggars, street kids, and thieves were at work. Panhandlers, looking pitiful, stood or sat by the street corners staring intently at the poor residents of the slums. I had tried begging early on but found that I had no patience for it. I preferred to get up and work or steal for what I needed even if it meant that I was often on the run.

Children ran along playing while their mothers washed laundry in the fountain in the main square. Stall keepers called out, hawking their wares and rough looking lads guarded stalls from thieves for a copper crescent or two.

Everywhere I looked I could see pickpockets deftly snatching purses and coins and food out of baskets and off belts of those only a little more fortunate than themselves. Less skilled thieves were the ones to get caught with their hands fishing around in pockets by the few guards of the Day Watch. That meant they were really bad pickpockets as there were hardly any of the Guard assigned to the Lower City.

Little children, some homeless, some stealing for the fun of it or just for the rush that came with risk, and still others just to contribute food to the table, were underfoot and less noticeable but just as crafty and sly.

I knew how it felt to have a pickpockets fingers groping for my coins so I wasn't worried. And I didn't even carry a belt purse.

I noted kids from several different gangs wandering around doing their own share of stealing and also just watching, plotting, and chatting. The blue sash a girl was wearing as she snatched a coin purse from a tall man gave me a brief flashback to that the blonde boy lying in the alley where I had left him, crimson soaking into his blue sash and turning it a deep purple, almost black.

A boy and girl on the other side of the fountain sported woven leather necklaces dyed a light red, the sign of the Desert Dogs. And the dyed red headscarf on a girl coming around the corner of Bakers Row and Brewer Street singled her out, for those who knew such things, as a member of the Cobras.

Seeing me, the Cobra girl grinned and hurried over. I stopped walking and plopped down on the stone wall I had been on. The girl wove her way through the crowd unnoticed; her naturally waved brown hair out of the way in a days-old side braid.

"Kade!" She said as she hugged me, oblivious to the blood beginning to dry on my shirt and the outline of knuckles beginning to turn purple and blue on my jaw. Miri, the Cobra girl, was the only person besides Tobin that I really allowed to touch me, let alone hug me.

"I just saw you yesterday," I commented.

"I know." She perched herself on the wall next to me. "And in only one day you manage to make yourself look even more like a criminal. What happened?" She asked, finally acknowledging my disheveled state.

"I tangled with some Market Kings. The blood's not mine," I said roughly. Miri didn't know about my new death wish. She didn't know about Tobin. She didn't know about what I had to do to get him back and how impossible it would be.