Part I

Chapter I

The deepest part of the night in the most savage winter of the coldest year anyone could remember.

So he thought, hearing the middle-of-night bells that meant he needed to get up—to go outside, right now. Into the city. Into the ice, in the blackness.

He didn’t want to. Why would anyone in their right mind want to? Were there enough coins to steal to make it worth going out into the streets now?

Evidently, yes. Because they were going to try. Not so many coins but…enough?

He was lying alone in Silvy’s bed. Silvy had gone upstairs to Anni and Eudes’s room, carrying the candle. He had no light here. She had let him stay in her room, however. She knew why he’d wanted to sleep away from his mother’s house tonight. She didn’t ask questions, didn’t force him not to answer, or lie. Silvy was his most trusted friend, possibly his only trusted friend (he didn’t want to think too much about that, just now). They’d agreed some time ago not to bed each other. Probably wise. Most of the time he thought so. It protected the friendship.

He’d already been awake when the night’s third bells sounded from the sanctuaries. He’d counted them. He tended to awaken too early when he had a thing to do, a place to go in the dark, or at dawn. A lifelong fear of being late, oversleeping. He didn’t sleep well, in any case. Often lay in bed (at home, in a tavern bed with a girl) working up a poem. Lines in the dark. He was a man who shaped lines in the dark. He’d rise and light a candle at the embers of a fire to scribble by. That defined him, he thought. It would do as well as anything else to define him.

He was still young, of course. He might grow into something different, someone different. You weren’t the same through the whole of your life, were you? Not marked by one thing. If you lived long enough to change, of course.

Thierry Villar didn’t expect to live a long life. In this city, in this time, it was a reasonable way to feel. So he thought, anyway. Perhaps he might be modestly famous before he died? Not just known in a few taverns here in Orane. Known, and sometimes hated. His verses could be harsh, and he named names. Sometimes names of people who were, well, famous. And not happy with what he wrote about them. He took chances that way. Didn’t you do that for your art? For some reason the thought amused him, even though nothing was really amusing in this cold.