The Gathering Dark (The Kingkiller Duology #1)

Chapter Three

756 B.V.

The gods were greedy. The gods were lonely. The gods were thieves, reaping men from Beggar's Hole by the tens every fortnight.

But the Hole was a home too small to fit all the beggars who roamed its slums. So mayhap Waif Girl shouldn't have been questioning the gods instead of begging that they leave her be.

Only Waif Girl was tired of begging. And the gods were tired of giving.

The boy who sold fish at Drowned Man's Wharf gave a lot more than the gods. Fish Boy, he was known as in her mind, the boy at the quay who sold fish. Just as she was known as Waif Girl, a name or a curse given by him, the girl who was a waif. Just as so. One and one is two, a girl begs for food so she is a waif, a girl has no coin so she gets no fish. The Fish boy eats fish, the Waif Girl eats whatever she can get her grimy hands on.

But Fish Boy was different from the gods, he may have not given fish, but he gave something more. His boots, for instance. Though one could argue there wasn't much giving to it.

"Turn out your pockets," she had demanded the first they met. Fish Boy had jabbed his stick at her; he'd had his share of thieves before, to be like.

"Git awa'," he had beat her with his stick, "b'gone ye waif girl!" He spoke like the folk of Beggar's Hole, Waif Girl had noticed, just as she had noticed that she did not. People gave her strange looks that were something akin to hunger when she spoke too much, some even chased after her. She was faster, but she spoke not much again.

The stick had come down again, smacking the hand she'd raised in defense. Waif Girl had wrenched the thing out of his fishy hands and snapped it in two. He wasn't an awfully quick boy, which was why he was Fish Boy and not Quick Boy, and so she had managed to swipe a crayfish from his cart before he could find another stick.

"Boots," she prompted, but Fish Boy was flapping his tongue far too much and far too loudly, and she didn't want anyone to overhear and meddle. The city watch didn't bother with Beggar's Hole much, but she'd learned before what happened when someone paid close attention to her. Living in the Hole could inspire some desperate characters, Waif Girl knew this well enough herself. So she took a piece of the broken stick and slapped him real good with it, and it shut up real good, it did.

For, one could suppose, roughly fifteen seconds, before he started fighting back.

"Git off a' me— ach!— ruttin' thief!" He spoke too much, Waif Girl had decided, so she had hit him harder and knocked him down. Then they were all in the dirt and she was trying to cover his mouth, but he was a biter, he was. She had stopped asking, pulling the boots right off his feet. And of course he was wailing and fussing and stumbling after her, but the last she had glanced behind, he had given up.

Waif Girl had been hungry— still was— hungry and weary and cold at night. But what she also was was fast. Real fast, fast as a minotaur. Faster now with Fish Boy's boots. Days later, her blisters were healing and the days were rainier. Esrulas was hot and rainy almost yearlong, and this time of year the rain was more curse than blessing. The wharves were flooded and Fish Boy wasn't there so often.

Not that Waif Girl came back every day to see, not that she saved what little coin she got from the Butcher's Quarter for capturing rodents in hopes of getting her hands on Fish Boy's catches. Not at all.

But the crayfish she had stolen was fairly good, she had to admit, though it wasn't much of a meal.

The sun was low in the sky and the clouds warned of rain as she washed her feet in the canal, bringing relief to her blisters. The water was dirty but Waif Girl was dirtier. Fish Boy was wheeling his barrow of clams and oysters and crayfish down the docks, she could see. Not very much, though. She had bad eyes, sometimes they'd fog up, turning the world yellow and blurry. It never lasted long, and at the moment it wasn't much of a bother.