Authors: Rachel Aaron
“You’re wrong,” he said softly.
Benehime froze, her white body perfectly still.
About what?
“I wasn’t lying to you,” Eli answered. “I do want to become the world’s greatest thief, and I can earn a million gold bounty. You told me I could have whatever I wished for. That’s it. I want the chance to prove you wrong.”
Benehime sighed.
Now you’re just getting desperate, love. The only way you could possibly earn a million gold bounty is if I helped you.
“You’re wrong!” Eli said, speaking his mind for the first time
since the night she’d killed the Spiritualist. “I don’t need your help. I’m not your pet. I’m a wizard and the best thief around. I can earn a million gold on my own.”
Don’t be stupid
, Benehime said.
You think you’re some kind of savant thief because you’ve snatched a few trinkets? The only way you got any of it was because I let you open the portals and steal through the veil. Part of growing up is learning to face the truth, Eliton, and the truth is that you’re nothing without my favor. Just a charming boy with quick hands. How could something so small possibly be enough to earn a million gold?
Eli swallowed against his pounding heart. “Want to bet?”
Benehime scowled.
What?
“I’ll make you a deal,” Eli said, speaking quickly before he lost his nerve. “Give me the chance to prove I wasn’t lying before. Let me go learn to be a thief and try to earn that million gold bounty on my own skills. If it really is impossible, if at any point I have to ask for your help, then you win. I’ll come back to you and be everything you want me to be. But if I’m right, if I get a million gold without your help, then you have to let me go free.”
Benehime leaned in until she was so close Eli could feel her cold breath on his skin.
Why
, she whispered,
would I ever take a bet like that? I hold all the cards. Why should I take a risk?
“Because if you don’t, then there’s no point in letting me grow up,” Eli said, his voice trembling. “You said you wanted me to learn to appreciate you, right? How can I do that if I never experience life away from you? If you keep me here, then you’ll never know if I’m lying when I say I love you, because I’ve never had the chance to experience life without your love.” He lurched forward, closing the tiny gap between them so that their foreheads pressed together. “Let me go,” he whispered, staring into her cold, white eyes. “Let me try it on my own. If I fail, then I’ll have learned how much I need you and I’ll never, ever try to run
again. And if I do somehow succeed, then I’ve proven that I love thieving more than I love you, and that sort of man isn’t worthy of being your favorite anyway.”
I decide who is worthy of my favor
, Benehime said, but Eli could hear the consideration in her voice. Behind the blank wall of her white irises, he could almost see her thinking it over, testing the angles, looking for her edge.
She must have found it, for the Shepherdess leaned in and kissed him. It was a hard kiss, crushing his lips against her burning skin, but when she leaned back, the distance between them felt final. Real.
I always did like you best at your most defiant
, she said, smiling.
Very well, you’ve got your chance. But I’m warning you, Eliton, I will hold you to every letter of our deal. You have to do it all yourself, no using my power, no showing your mark. And the moment you get in over your head, the second you have to ask me for help, you belong to me. Forever.
“Fair deal,” Eli said, a smile spreading over his face. “But you should know better than anyone how stubborn I can be.”
Benehime almost laughed at that, but caught herself at the last moment. She reached up, resting her white hands on his shoulders. For a moment, Eli thought she was going to pull him into a hug, but then, without warning, she pushed him.
He toppled off the tree, falling fifteen feet before landing on his back in the wet cushion of leaf litter at the tree’s base. The impact knocked the wind out of him, and for several moments all he could do was gasp for air. When his lungs finally started working again, he sat up with a groan, looking around at the endless forest. Overhead, the tree branch was empty. Benehime was gone.
He froze a moment, waiting for her to say something. But the forest was silent. Then, like someone opened a door, the sounds
came roaring back as the spirits recovered from the Shepherdess’s presence. Eli sat in the muck, trying to get himself to believe what his senses were telling him. Benehime was gone. His gambit had worked. He was free.
He stood up with a whoop that echoed through the forest, and for ten minutes he danced like an idiot, bouncing off the trees in celebration of his glorious, glorious freedom. The white world was gone; everywhere he looked he saw color. Spirits buzzed all around him, their noises calm and without fear, and Eli fell to the ground, greeting them with pure joy. The spirits, alarmed at this wizard who was suddenly shouting at them, clammed up immediately, but Eli was too happy to care.
After almost half an hour of this, he realized he’d better get going. He had a bounty to earn, and he couldn’t do that in the middle of nowhere. Brushing the leaves off his white clothes, Eli reached out to tap the veil and make a door to somewhere useful.
He caught himself a second before the cut opened. Oh no, it wasn’t going to be that easy. No using the Shepherdess’s gifts, that was the deal, and Eli would stick to it if it killed him. They were enemies in the game now, and if she got even an ounce of leverage on him, she would push on it with everything she had, just as Eli would. Now that he was still, he could almost feel her waiting on the other side of the veil, watching him, urging him to make a mistake, to give her something she could use.
With a sly smile, Eli drew his hand back and slid it into his pocket. He picked a direction almost at random and began to walk through the forest, whistling as the evening rain began to fall.
Giuseppe Monpress, the greatest thief in the world, had retired to his northern retreat for a little well-earned rest and to plan his next heist. He was just sitting down to his first dinner in solitude,
a splendid roast duck with shallots and an excellent bottle of wine he’d lifted from the Whitefall family’s private cellar, when he heard a knock on his door.
Monpress froze. This was one of his most secure hideouts. He was high in the Sleeping Mountains, deep in bandit country. But he had an understanding with the local gang, and anyways, bandits didn’t knock. He swirled the wine in his glass, considering his options as the knock came again, louder this time.
With a long sigh and a sip from his glass, Monpress decided he’d better answer it.
He pushed his chair back and walked to the door, grabbing his dagger from the mantel, just in case. The knock was sounding a third time when Monpress opened the door and glared down at his most unwelcome visitor.
It was a boy. Monpress pegged him at a young fifteen. He was scrawny and short for his age with untrimmed black hair and a face that was too likable to mean any good. He was dressed in rags, his feet shoved into ill-fitting shoes that were far too thin for the half foot of snow on the ground, and he looked as if he hadn’t had a good meal in weeks. But, hungry as he must have been, the boy didn’t even glance at the succulent duck sitting on the table. Instead, he looked Monpress straight in the eye and flashed him what the boy probably considered a deeply charming smile.
“Are you Giuseppe Monpress?”
Monpress leaned on the door, framing the duck behind him with his crooked arm, just to be cruel. “That depends on you,” he said slowly. “Unless you can give me a very compelling reason why you know that name, you can think of me as your death.”
To his credit, the boy’s smile didn’t falter. “I heard from a reliable source that Giuseppe Monpress was the greatest thief in the world, so I set off to find him. Took me the better part of a month to pin him down to this part of the mountains, but I
couldn’t get an exact location, so I’ve been checking each likely valley.”
“Impressive,” Monpress said. “And what were you going to do when you found him?”
The boy straightened up. “I’m going to ask him to take me as an apprentice.”
“I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time, then,” Monpress said. “Giuseppe Monpress doesn’t take apprentices.”
“Since only Giuseppe Monpress would know that, I think you’ve answered my question,” the boy said. “And I can assure you, Mr. Monpress, that you’ll take me.”
Despite himself, Monpress began to chuckle. “And why is that?”
“Because I’m going to be the greatest thief in the world,” the boy said proudly. “And because, if you don’t take me, I’m going to sit on your doorstep until you change your mind.”
Monpress smiled. “Assuming, for the moment, that you’re right, you can hardly expect the greatest thief in the world to be trapped by a boy at his door. What will you do when I give you the slip?”
“Find you again,” the boy said with a shrug. “As many times as I need to.”
“I see,” Monpress said. “Why are you so determined, if I may ask?”
The boy looked insulted. “I told you,” he said. “I’m going to be the greatest thief in the world. You don’t get to the top by apprenticing yourself to amateurs.”
“So you’re serious about just sitting there?” Monpress said.
“Absolutely,” the boy said, and then, to prove his point, he sat down on the icy step, propping his legs up in Monpress’s door. The position only helped to highlight how pathetically thin he was, and Monpress felt a tiny twinge of pity. Fortunately, it was easily quashed.
“Well,” he said, stepping back. “Then I hope you have a lovely night.”
He held just long enough to see the boy’s smile begin to crumble before he shut the door in his face.
Nodding at a job well done, Monpress slipped his dagger into his belt and returned to the table. As he sat down in his chair, he braced himself for a racket as the boy began to demand to be let in, but none came. Except for the howl of the wind outside, the cabin was silent. If Monpress hadn’t just shut a door in his face, he’d have never known the boy was outside.
He glanced sideways at the shutters, rattling in their grooves as the storm blew back up, and then back down at his rapidly cooling dinner. He’d just raised his knife and fork to carve the duck when the wind gave a low, mournful howl. Giuseppe rolled his eyes and set his silverware down with a sigh. He stood up and marched over to the door. Sure enough, the boy was sitting on the doorstep just as Monpress had left him, only his black hair was now full of snow.
“Change your mind?” the boy said, looking up.
“Not as such,” Monpress said. “Happy as I would be to let you sit out there until you starved, it seems that my conscience is heavy enough without a boy’s life weighing on it. I’m not agreeing to anything, mind you, but since it’s clear you’re the suicidally stubborn type, you might as well come in and eat.”
The boy grinned from ear to ear and rushed inside so fast Monpress was nearly knocked off his feet. The boy sat down in Monpress’s chair and began devouring the duck like he’d never tasted food in his life. The thief sighed and walked over to rescue his wine before it too disappeared into the boy’s maw.
“What’s your name?” he said as he spirited his drink to safety.
“Eli,” the boy gasped between bites.
Giuseppe frowned. “Eli what?”
The boy shrugged and kept eating. Monpress sat down with a sigh, sipping his wine as he watched the boy reduce his fine roast duck to bones. The child was cracking them to suck the marrow when he caught Giuseppe looking.
“What?” he said, shoving a leg bone into his mouth.
“Nothing,” Monpress said. “Just trying to shake the feeling that I’ve let my doom in by the front door.”
“I wouldn’t fret about it too much,” Eli said. “I was planning to come down the chimney once you’d banked the fire anyway.” He flashed Monpress a smile before spitting out the bone in his mouth and reaching for another. “When do we start training?”
Monpress drained his glass and poured himself another. He briefly thought about continuing his denials, but he was rapidly running out of energy to fight the boy’s seemingly endless optimism. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, taking a long drink.
Eli’s eyes widened, and his face broke into an enormous grin. “What am I doing?”
“Fetching a cask of whiskey from my stash up the mountain.”
Eli’s face fell dramatically. “
Whiskey?
Why?”
“Because, if you’re going to be staying here, I’m going to need it,” Monpress said. “Finish your supper. I think a speck of duck still exists.”
Eli gave him a skeptical look before turning back to the far more important task of making sure no bit of duck flesh escaped his attack.
Outside the little cabin, far from the cheery light of the little fire, the white shape of a woman vanished into the deep drifting snow.
The Legend of Eli Monpress
The Spirit Thief
The Spirit Rebellion
The Spirit Eater
The Sprit War
Spirit’s End
The Legend of Eli Monpress:
Volumes 1, 2 & 3
(omnibus edition)
Contents