Venture was too absorbed in contemplating his grim future to notice another boy approaching, until he stumbled right into him. Venture caught his arm to steady him and was about to advise him to watch where he was going, when he felt a hand slide into the inside pocket of his open jacket. Venture grabbed him at the wrist, just above the offending hand, and held him out far enough to punch him in the face.
The street kid yelped, wrenched away, and took off with his fist full of a very important piece of paper. Venture sprinted after him, caught him by the arm, and shoved him into the stone wall.
“Give it back,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s no use to you.”
“Oh, I think I can find a use for a nice bank note.”
Venture was on him, trying to hold him down with one hand and take swings with the other—he’d get the paper back after he punished him—when a hand, wiry and tough from decades of servants’ labor, gripped him around the neck. Able.
“Venture Delving!”
“He took my papers.”
The alley rat scowled his disappointment at the revelation that he hadn’t gotten hold of anything valuable after all, then quickly turned the expression into a sneer. He flapped the pages open and pretended to read. “Venture—” He paused to recall the rest of the name Able had just pronounced. “Delving—is hereby declared a bonded boot-licker.”
Able snatched the letter giving Venture permission to be in town without his master from the kid’s grimy hand, at the same time anticipating Venture’s reaction and tightening his grip on his neck.
“Vent! He ain’t worth it. He’s mad ’cause he don’t belong to no one. Don’t have no one.”
Venture didn’t care why even a kid who’d either been born in the gutter or escaped the orphan’s home in order to live on rot and rubbish and thievery thought he was better than him, just because he was a bonded servant. Venture didn’t care that he was bonded. But nobody called Venture Delving a boot-licker and got away with it. Venture tried to twist free and pull his arm back to take another swing at the rat, but in the struggle, as he drew his arm back, his elbow struck something, hard.
Able’s face. Able gave a startled cry, then shoved Venture roughly against the wall of the smithy. The rat laughed. Venture sagged against the wall, staring at Able’s lip. It was busted wide open.
“Get!” Able shouted, spattering the boys with blood. “Before I call the lawmen on you!”
The kid scuttled away, hocking up a blob of phlegm and spitting at Able over his shoulder.
Able sidestepped the wad of spit. He wiped at his lip with his sleeve, but it was really gushing. Venture fumbled in his coat pocket for a handkerchief and offered it to Able, who snatched it and pressed it to his swelling mouth.
“Let’s go,” he said, quaking with anger. “People are watching.”
Venture glanced at a well-dressed woman, who clutched her little daughter closer to her side and veered away.
“I’m sorry. I—”
“Shut up! You just shut up and listen to me, Vent.”
Venture stopped talking. Able had never spoken to him like that, but then he’d never split his lip wide open either.
Able shoved the papers back at him. “Master would’ve wrote you another one and you know it. You got no idea how good you got it, belonging to Grant Fieldstone.”
He certainly did know, but Venture knew better than to say it. There was no one he admired more than Grant Fieldstone, who’d risked what was left of his family’s dwindling fortune years ago in order to build it back up; Grant had shocked his peers and gone against his mother’s wishes and sold off much of the family land. Now they had just enough fields and livestock to feed the household, just enough woodland to enjoy a good hunt. And Grant Fieldstone had three successful luxury resorts, in key locations around the Western Quarter, businesses he’d conceived and built up himself.
But that wasn’t what Able meant. Able was a free servant who’d come to the household about four years ago. While Grant Fieldstone managed his household and his business with an uncommon combination of shrewdness and compassion, Able’s previous master had been pretty bad, and the one before that, when he was a bonded boy like Venture, waiting to turn nineteen so he could be free to go elsewhere, had such an effect on Able that to this day he couldn’t bear even to utter the man’s name.
“You go around acting like a ruffian, and people find out who you are—you’re tarnishing a good man’s name.”
Venture rubbed his chafed knuckles. “What about
my
name?”
Able shook his head at him, then turned his back. Venture followed, steaming mad at Able, at the street kid, but mostly at himself.
“He’s going to see my face,” Able said, still without looking at him. “I got to tell him. And then what’s he going to do with you?”
CHAPTER TWO
Venture crouched outside the door to Master’s office. He’d taken off his noisy boots and now he dug his bare toes into the fine woolen rug and braced his palm against the plastered stone wall in order to lean his ear closer to the door without casting a shadow they’d see through the crack underneath it. Jade crept over to him and put her hand on his, but he jerked it away.
“Vent,” she whispered. “You have to stop.” She rubbed her dainty, freckled nose and sniffed back a growing sob.
“Let them send me away if that’s what they want.” He was nothing but trouble now. Nothing but shame to his mother’s memory. When he was little, he used to cause the sort of trouble that made Master laugh, but now he was half grown and squandering his opportunity for an education—the very thing his father had died trying to provide for him. Somewhere in the heavens the God of Atran was surely frowning down on him.
“They can’t,” Jade said, but she knew very well that they could. That anyone else would have, long ago.
From the other side of the door, Master said, “I’m not going to work him all day. He’s just a boy! You know I only contracted him for his mother’s sake.”
The grandson of bondsmen, but the son of free parents, at six years old, Venture had become what they’d all worked so hard for him not to be—bonded. His mother had signed a contract pledging her service to Grant Fieldstone for the rest of her life, and Venture’s until he was nineteen, in exchange for the provision of all their physical needs. Prone to chest pains she tried to hide from her boys, she had chosen this for herself and Venture. Grant had interviewed her at the resort he owned in their hometown of Calm Harbor, and brought them back home to Twin Rivers with him—a nurse and a playmate for his daughter.
“Yes,” said Mistress Rose, “and he’s the only child in this house, besides Jade. You must consider the effect he has on her.”
Venture’s face burned, and he buried it in his sleeve. It was stained with ink and blood and street grime.
“Grant, I’ve tried. I’ve done all I can do.”
“You know,” he said gently, “how much his mother would appreciate what you’re doing. Tutoring him right alongside Jade.”
“I know you hoped it would occupy him, tame him somehow. But what good is that break with custom really doing him? He’s impulsive. Reckless. And now, brawling like a street boy! This is the second fight in as many months.”
“It would only be worse otherwise.”
“Worse! Stop making excuses for him—for both of them—and start being his master.”
There was an unintelligible mumble from Master. Then Mistress replied softly, “You’ve let yourself get too attached to him. The widow Ratchet could give you a fine son. When are you going to let Jewel go?”
The last sentence was barely above a whisper, but Jade startled at the sound of her mother’s name, and her pale green eyes filled with new tears. Venture reached for her hand, and she rubbed her fingers between his the way she always did when she was anxious.
Mistress’s voice had risen again, in response to some remark Venture had missed. “Teaching them all to read a bit is one thing, but educating Venture as though he were a man of Society is going too far. And it hasn’t taught him how to behave like a proper young man, let alone a proper servant!”
“It’s only right to teach a boy that bright, no matter what the Cresteds think. Who are they to judge anyone’s potential? Every privilege they hold comes from ancestors dead and turned to dust hundreds of years ago.”
“They’ll judge whether you like it or not. Venture is getting older. More noticeable. If it gets out, what I’ve been doing—and him a troublemaker, too—the Fieldstone name will be ruined.”
Jade squeezed his hand through the long silence that followed. She smelled like warm bread and honey, not like sweat and street filth.
“Vent,” she whispered at last, “You can’t leave.”
He pulled her head onto his shoulder and kissed her hair. He was a selfish idiot. Why couldn’t he have stayed out of trouble, at least for her? It might be too late for him to do anything about that now, but— “I’ll come back,” he said, “even if I can’t ’til I’m grown.”
“I’ll be too old then. Married and long gone.”
“I guess I’ll have to make sure I’m in time to marry you first, then.”
She laughed softly and looked up at him. “Promise?”
As he opened his mouth to answer, Mrs. Bright appeared in the corridor, and Jade jolted upright.
“Aren’t you in enough trouble, Vent, without getting caught eavesdropping, too?” Mrs. Bright whispered fiercely. “Mistress Jade, you get that boy out of here this instant if you care for him at all!”
Jade scrambled to her feet, tugging Venture along with her. He barely had time to grab his boots as she pulled him away.
Venture lunged past the boulder he and Jade had made their finish line and slowed to a stop. “I win!”
She knew he needed to burn off some of what was raging inside him, so she’d challenged him to a race.
“One more time,” Jade insisted.
“Sure.”
He kicked a loose stone from the cobbled driveway to the Big House, as everyone called the Fieldstone mansion. A three-story sandstone with arched windows and doorways, it sprawled over the hill in such a way as not to loom over, but to nestle in its natural beauty. Inside, Rose and Grant Fieldstone were still arguing. Venture felt the throbbing start again, that thing inside him that kept swelling up, threatening to eat him up, and he broke into a run.
“Don’t wear yourself out! I’m going to dust you this time!” Jade called.
Venture forced out a laugh. He stopped at the front walk and waited for her to get back to the starting line. She was taking her sweet time, picking little blue bits off the grape hyacinths along the way. Pretending she wasn’t tired.
She frowned and rubbed at her nose. “I might not be as fast as you, but I know I can outlast you. What we need is a longer distance.”
“Like what?”
“Down the road, all the way to the bend and back.”
“That’s halfway to town!”
“I know.” Jade tossed her blond hair back with a smirk. “You’ll never make it. Too bad.”
“All right, let’s do it then. Just don’t expect me to carry you back up the hill when your legs give out.”
She gave him a shove and gathered the long waves of her hair together at the nape of her neck, then took a bit of cord she kept around her wrist and tightened it around it. “Let’s go.”
“Aren’t you going to get some shoes first?”
Her plain blue linen dress belied her status, as did its dusty calf-length hem and her dustier bare feet, their soles so thickened by long, shoeless days that they didn’t mind hard, stony earth. She looked more common than he did.
“You know perfectly well my shoes are useless, and I don’t have time for riding boots. You might lose your nerve if I take too long.”
Venture rolled his eyes. He pulled off his sweater and tossed it onto the boulder, next to her cloak.
It had been dry, but not particularly sunny this first week of the new year, and the dirt road was hard and cool. He kept a steady pace right beside Jade. It was a long way, and he was breathless and sweaty by the time the bend came into view. He caught Jade eyeing him, measuring him up, and he gave her a confident smile. Her cheeks were bright red and her smile looked more like a grimace. She stuck her tongue out at him and he let her sprint ahead. She was only ten and it took two of her strides to match one of his.
He could see the valley below, where the Swift and the Sweet Rivers met. Twin Rivers Town had grown from a village into an important center of trade and transport, filling that valley. In Twin Rivers goods were brought in and sent out by keelboat, and the vessels of the locals, from little two-man rowboats to elaborate pleasure boats, lingered on the riverbanks. From downtown a cobblestone street narrowed into a dirt road and threaded its way up a green hillside to the Fieldstone family property.
The blue-gray of the sky was deepening and Venture’s stomach was aching for supper. Going back uphill was going to wear him out, but it was going to kill her. He’d be lucky to drag her back home before dark, and then he’d be in even more trouble. Unless Master already had Able packing his things for him.
Venture pushed out a burst of speed and reached out to grab the back of Jade’s dress and pull her back a step.
“Ha! Now who’s ahead?”
“Let go!”
He did, and she fell right on her rear. Venture collapsed next to her, laughing. When he looked up, they weren’t alone. Three older boys, about thirteen or fourteen, skulked around the bend. They glanced from Jade and him to each other and smiled the sort of smiles that weren’t really smiles at all.
Venture stood up quick and, without taking his eyes off them, held out a hand to help Jade up. He didn’t like the looks of them, but Jade didn’t seem to notice. She was still laughing as she brushed off her skirt, still calling him a dirty cheater. Once she was on her feet, she moved to pull her hand away, but he squeezed it hard.
He gave the boys a polite nod and whispered to Jade, “Let’s walk back.”
She glanced from him to the boys and nodded. They looked like the drifters that stowed away on barges and popped up around the river. What would bring them up the hillside, unless they were looking for trouble? Livestock and tools to steal. He’d warn Master about them, make sure the outbuildings were locked tonight.