“Drajan, there’s a young man here to see you.” A young man did indeed step out from behind Drajan’s mother as Drajan turned towards her from the stone he was carrying to mend the wall along the road.
“It looks as if I caught him at a most convenient time. Ma’am, it was truly a pleasure.”
“Oh, it was all mine.”
Drajan thought that his mother must have been taken in by the young man’s looks, as she had never spoken so cheerily to an unexpected guest.
“And it looks as if my timing was perfect given my purpose,” the thin young man said. Then seeing the mother had no intention of returning to the house, he added, “Drajan, do you mind if we have a stroll while we talk? I’ll have him back to his wall very shortly, ma’am.”
Drajan had a very strange sense from the young man, and then it struck him. This was the thin, sand-haired boy he had seen at Chrystamos’s shop. The boy who was lurking around behind the money lender. He looked different now, somehow older. The young man’s entire demeanor was striking. He could not but agree to the stroll even though he knew the work to do on the wall would already take him well past dusk. He could hardly blame his mother’s rapt attention.
“I… uh… I’m Drajan,” he said after they had walked for a minute.
The man grinned. “I know that of course.”
“Yes, I… uh…”
“You knew that, but you were looking to get the conversation started, as you are a busy boy with plenty of work to be done. Sir, I appreciate and admire that, and I, sir, apologize. I needed a moment to size you up, so to speak.”
“And you’re… I think I saw you…”
“Let me get right to it, Drajan. I need to ask a favor of you. A friend of mine had a very valuable piece of jewelry stolen from her. The thieves in this town, sir! Scoundrels! Well, Drajan Pantelic, I intend to get it back from her.”
“And how do I fit in Mr…”
“How rude of me!” The young man stopped walking and offered his hand to Drajan. “Julian Fanica. Please just call me Jules. All my friends do.” The two shook hands and resumed their stroll down the road.
“Well, Drajan, I believe this necklace, which is so very dear to my friend, is stashed away in the house of a man of very ill repute. Do you know a Mr. Turnmore?”
“I suppose everyone does. He’s a landlord of several buildings in town. But I’ve never heard anyone say he wasn’t a fair man.”
“Of course not! Who wants to be on the wrong side of a man like that? But, if you frequent the places I do, those places where congregate the poor and hungry, those who will never have the money that they might do business with such a man, well, you’d not hear a favorable word about the man.
“Mr. Turnmore keeps a bodyguard in his employ. I just need a bit of muscle, shall we say, in case something does not go to plan.”
“What wouldn’t…”
“Shall we turn around here? I don’t want to keep you from your chores. My friend has offered a reward of five pieces of gold for the necklace’s return. Yes, five. As I’ve said, it is quite dear to her. I would do this for nothing, of course, so if you help me, the reward is yours.”
“Well, five [kronar] is a lot of…”
“Of course it is! But I know that right now you are asking yourself how you can trust a complete stranger such as myself.”
“Well, I did see you in…”
“I understand! And maybe you will take a turn in sizing me up as we make our way back to your domicile. Let’s not have another word on the subject until then. In the meantime feel free to ask your questions of me so that we may not remain strangers.”
“Ok, well I saw you at Chrystamos’s. At least I think I did.”
“I have a very plain face. It could have been anyone.”
“But you don’t and I’m sure now it was you. Well, pretty sure. Is Chrystamos your father?”
“A relation.”
Drajan asked him more questions. Where was he born and why they had not already been acquainted in such a small town? Julian told Drajan that he had been born in Specularum, the capital of the duchy, that his parents were Thyatian immigrants, that his mother had died and he had had a falling-out with his father.
“So I left home at a very young age, living on the streets of Specularum before… A ho! What is this?” Julian bent to pick up a silver ring. Drajan immediately recognized it as the ring he had found in the rat’s lair [Mr.?]. Drajan’s left hand immediately went to his right where he would have sworn his ring had just been. Seeing the gesture, Julian said, “You recognize it then? Well, if it belongs to you, here you are,” and held out the ring for Drajan. “Lucky that I noticed that glint of metal in the road. My mother always said that I had an eye for shiny objects.”
Drajan slipped the ring back onto his finger still puzzled as to how it might have slipped off.
“Now where was I? Right, so I was on the streets of Specularum and, being tired of eating refuse tossed from windows, I decided to head up here to Threshold where my aforementioned relation is a money lender. Now I’m waiting for the harvest to make some bones once again.”
“Well, you shouldn’t need to wait long. We’re getting ready to take in the wheat and then the rye. [Is this timing right?]”
“Right, so look,” Julian waved his hand. “Here we are back at the lane to your wall, your home, and your lovely mother. If I can have your answer, I shan’t keep you any longer from them.”
“Just how dangerous is this plan? The guards will have us leave any weapons we have with them at the gate.”
“And you will not need one. Make a bit of conversation with Turnmore’s guard so he does not hear anything inside. I grab the necklace and we are in and out in two minutes.”
“What if he does hear something?”
“You just run a bit of interference for me. Two minutes. He will not notice a thing, and you will not need the axe I hear you are so good with.”
“Where did you hear…”
“Word travels in this little town. Gossip, you might say. Loose lips sinking ships and so forth. We will meet an hour after nightfall, then, just in town beyond the southern gate.” With that, Drajan’s new acquaintance took his leave.
As night fell and his parents were cleaning up and settling in for the night, Drajan pretended he had work to finish in the barn. After a quarter hour tinkering in the barn, Drajan threw on an old dark woolen cloak, put a hand axe in his belt, and skulked out through the shadows towards town.
He had gotten to the lane when he realized that Bolt, sensing adventure, had followed behind. “Go home, Bolt! Go home. Go home!” The dog finally slunk back to the house, clearly not happy with being left behind.
It took Drajan another three-quarters of an hour after he began to walk the three miles into town. As expected, the two soldiers standing guard at the southern gate confiscated the axe telling him there was no need for a receipt as no one else had come through with any weapon. “And you wouldn’t be one to forget, mate,” said the one as he looked at how the boy towered over even himself. Jules was waiting for him in the street just beyond the inner wall.
“I appreciate the punctuality, sir.”
“Drilled into me by my father, I suppose,” answered Drajan. “I only hope he goes promptly to bed and doesn’t decide to check up on what I am supposedly working on in the barn.”
Jules reassured him again that the task would only take a few minutes and that his parents would not have time to miss him.
The home of Mr. Turnmore occupied a corner near the center of the village near the center town square. It was a three-story stone building, one of the tallest outside of Town Hall and the Temple. Before the pair arrived at the town square, Jules pulled Drajan into the darkness between two wooden homes.
“The entrance is on the south side of the building. The bodyguard will be there. I need you to act a bit inebriated, a bit too into your cups, as they say, and engage him in some loud banter.”
“And what should I say?”
“You will figure that out. Improvisation, boy. Keep the guard occupied for two minutes. Three, if you can. I should surely be in by that point. Then head for the river. Remember, inebriated and loud. You know the building, right?”
Drajan assured Jules he did.
“Take this dagger. If something goes wrong, stick him with it.”
“You said there would be no need for…”
Jules was gone into the gap between the houses, leaving Drajan no time for further protest and wondering how Jules had gotten the dagger past the guards. He sighed and stuck the dagger into his belt. Drajan, who had never tasted anything other than the weak beer that was a staple of life in Traldaria or the glass of wine at the holidays, still had seen enough drunks in town to be able to put on a fairly good act. He staggered up the last block of houses to where the Turnmore place was across from the town square.
A burly man stood watch in front of the building’s entrance just as Jules said. Drajan wove his way to him.
“Excuse me!” he shouted while still some fifty feet away. “Excuse me! Can you point me in the direction of The Goblin’s Tankard?” Drajan knew the public house, The Goblin’s Tankard, was back toward the southern gate from which he had just come. He had been sent by his mother on more than one occasion to find his father.
“Hold your voice down, boy!”
“I’ve just come in from ou’ of town, an’ I’m meeting a frien’ there!” Drajan continued in a loud voice though now he was a mere 15 feet from the door to the house.”
“Keep your voice down. There are respectable folks asleep here. You sots need to keep your place. The Goblin is back down the way you came. Say, is that your dog?”
Drajan turned to see Bolt come bounding up. “Damnation,” he thought. “Nope. Never seen it. As he turned back to the guard afraid of what Bolt might do to give him away, a cry came up from the eastern side of the building.
“Argh! You bastards!” It was Jules’s voice.
“The devil’s was that?” exclaimed the guard and began to run off to see who was there. A light in the third-story window flared to life. With little time to act, Drajan pulled Jules’s dagger, raised it up, and brought the pommel down onto the guard’s head with a crack. The guard went down in a heap. Bolt ran up and bit the fallen guard’s calf, but the unconscious guard neither flinched nor made a sound.
Now, however, a commotion came from the second story of the building. Drajan tore away the key that had been hanging on the guard’s belt and used it to open the heavy front door. He stepped into a dark entryway. Light glinted from daggers on wooden stands, swords in cases, and poleaxes along the wall. Drajan walked through the gallery in amazement at the collection and was almost run over by Jules leaping down the nearby staircase.
“We gotta run, chap!”
Drajan turned an knocked over a pedestal holding a dagger. As he tried to replace the dagger, Jules gave him a shove back towards the entryway.
“No time for that!”
The two of them stumbled out to the street.
“Stupid that I missed that trap on the window.”
“But you got the necklace?”
“Oho! And did I!... Ay, what’s this?” Jules jabbed the bodyguard with a bit of a kick. “Gave the ol’ boy a bit of a thump.”
“Well, when you…”
Jules pulled a dagger from his boot.
“What are you doing? Wait!”
“Opening this poor man’s throat.” Jules said it without a hint of remorse.
“Well…. Don’t!”
“And have him point us out to the magistrate? I am sorry, sir. Needs to be done.” Jules did not sound sorry for it at all.
“No! No, it doesn’t. He never saw you, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t really get a look at me!”
Jules looked up from where he knelt next to the guard. “Are you sure about that? Bet your life on it?” Jules waved the point of his dagger at Drajan.
“I’m sure.”
“Then we best get along.”
At the river, Jules led Drajan to a rowboat tied amongst the larger boats moored there. As Drajan rowed the boat out across the river, he asked Jules how he knew the boat would be there. Jules explained how he had brought it over earlier in the day. He also confirmed Drajan’s supposition that the daggers had been hidden there too.
“So what happened back there? What trap?”
“Careless, really. Had a trap loaded with a bolt. Though the dunces had set it as if a thief would be standing directly in front of the window and not dangling from the rope like an orange utang.”
Drajan could just make out a dark spot on the shoulder of Jules’s cloak. “You’re hurt.”
“A scratch. It did make a racket though, did it not? It woke the elder gentleman; I had to give him a thump.”
“Just a thump?”
“Admittedly a rather forceful thump. Old chap still has a bit of fight in him. Watch the logs there.” Jules pointed ahead into the blue-black of night.
“But you didn’t…”
“Kill him? Like I said it was a pretty good thump. He had not time to don his spectacles. Plus – “ Jules pulled a black kerchief from his neck up over his face to hide everything but his eyes.
“You got the necklace, though?” Drajan asked as he landed the boat on the river bank opposite of the city.
Jules pulled a leather pouch from his cloak and extracted a jeweled pendant on a gold chain. “She’s a beauty, is she not?” The pendant glittered with red and green in the pale moonlight.
“Very. Your friend will be so glad to have it back. What else is in the bag?”
“Just a little walking around coin.”
“That’s a pretty hefty pouch to be walking around with just to break into an old man’s house.”
“A finder’s fee taken from the aforementioned old man. Punitive damages, if you will. A message needs to be sent, sir, that theft of such a sort will not be shirked by the good, law-abiding citizens of Threshold.” The necklace and bag disappeared back into Jules’s cloak.
With their escape from town taking them to the far side of the river and Jules’s admonition to avoid going back into town that night, Drajan had to walk about a mile north to the crossing at the logging camp and fisherman’s village on Lake Windrush. From there it was at least another three miles back to the farm. Even Bolt looked tired when they walked back up the lane.
As Drajan fell into his bed, he thought of Jules’s “walking around coin”, the twinkle in Jules’s eyes when Drajan had asked about it, and some other things that made no sense to him. What especially troubled him was Jules’s willingness to cut the throat of Turnmore’s guard. Jules hadn’t, and there was no particular deceit he could fault Jules for. Something in his mind, in his stomach really, did not sit right. Drajan’s uneasiness had mostly been forgotten by him until three days later when Sheriff Babunski came to the farm.
great writing! Now I need the rest of the story!