Anders stared at her. Was she talking to herself? How long was she going to take? And how was he going to get out of here? If she caught him, she’d report him to the Wolf Guard for sure.
Just as he was trying to remind himself to breathe slowly, there came a knock at the front door.
Seriously?
The woman and her hat bustled away to answer, and a moment later he heard Rayna’s cheerful voice, though he couldn’t make out her words. One thing you could say about Rayna was that she always jumped in headfirst, whether or not she had a plan.
Suddenly, the woman’s voice grew nearer again. “I told you, I really don’t want—”
Rayna didn’t let her get another word in edgewise, and suddenly Anders realized she’d forced her way into the house. “As I said, we’re offering a free sausage to every house, today only, as a sample of our wares. I think you’ll find we sell the finest sausages in the city of Holbard, Dama! Perhaps in all of Vallen!”
He watched as Rayna strode past the pantry door, followed by the woman, who was clearly trying to get her out of the house. They looked in that moment as though they could be related—if Rayna wasn’t in a shabby dress, and the woman wasn’t in fancy clothes, they could be mother and daughter. This could be his and Rayna’s home.
Suddenly he realized that his moment of daydreaming had distracted him from the fact that the woman wasn’t between him and the front door anymore. He dumped the lid he was balancing on his head and climbed out from behind the jar.
He took a deep breath, then hurried out of the pantry, sneaking toward the front door.
“Hey!” The woman’s voice sounded sharply behind him! He ran for the door.
“Enjoy your sausage,” Rayna shouted as she followed close on his heels. She threw him his coat as they ran through the square, squeezing past the crowd and pushing their way into an alley on the other side. They were out of sight before the woman made it out her front door.
“Whew,” said Rayna. “That was close. What did you get?”
“Get?” he echoed, pulling on his coat. “What do you mean?”
“Get,” she repeated. “It was the pantry, wasn’t it? What food did you take? I had to give her the sausage to get you out. It was a good sausage too.”
“I . . . I didn’t get anything. I was too busy trying to figure out how to hide, once the window closed,” he admitted.
Rayna was quiet for a moment, but then, as she always did when he messed up, she grinned and slung an arm around his shoulders. “Doesn’t matter,” she said cheerfully. “We saw a puppet show today, that was pretty good.”
Dusk was falling, and they both knew it was time to hole up for the night. It wasn’t a good idea for twelve-year-olds to be out after nightfall. So they made their way over the rooftops of Holbard until they reached a tavern near the center of town.
The Wily Wolf, the sign outside said. They had to move all over the city to scrounge up enough to stay fed, so they couldn’t always make it back to the Wolf at night. But whenever they could, they did. The Wily Wolf was special.
On the ground floor it was bustling with business, golden lights coming on one by one, noise spilling out into the street. But it had two more stories above that, fairly tall for a building in Holbard, and it was on a small hill as well.
Together they climbed up to the roof and lifted a hatch they’d found years ago, all overgrown with grass. Inside was a tiny attic, really just a space between the grassy rooftop above and the flat ceiling beneath. There was no way to get to it from below, and it wasn’t large enough for an adult to even sit up inside. But it was just big enough for the twins to curl up and stay warm.
Anders always thought that curling up inside the roof of the Wily Wolf was as close as he could get to coming home. It was their special place—their secret.
Rayna wriggled down first, and Anders paused halfway in to look around and take in the view, which was quickly vanishing in the dusk. Thick city walls circled Holbard, the plains and mountains beyond lost in the dark. The rooftop meadows stretched away in every direction, and to the east of him was the glint of the sea, the masts of the ships in the harbor.
Just as he was about to pull the hatch down, he heard a soft mew from nearby. He waited another few moments, and a small black shadow with bright yellow eyes slipped out of nowhere, darting down to join Rayna. It was Kess, a cat that sometimes slept with them at night to keep warm.
Anders pulled down the hatch on top of the three of them, and Rayna spread the blanket over the two humans, Kess curling up by their feet. Anders’s stomach was growling with hunger, and he was sure his sister’s was too, but neither of them mentioned the lost sausage. Or the fact that even surrounded by food, he hadn’t thought to shove any in his pockets. Safe together in their secret spot, the evening didn’t seem so bad.
Still, he had to say something. “Thanks for coming to get me,” he whispered.
“Don’t be silly,” Rayna whispered back. “What else was I going to do? We’re a team.” She wriggled one arm out from under the blanket to wrap it around him. “We’ll always be together, Anders. We’ll always take care of each other, I promise. Right?”
“I promise too,” he said, because of course it was true.
But as they settled down to sleep, and he lay there in the dark, waiting to drift away, he knew the truth. Rayna would never need him like he needed her.
CHAPTER TWO
THE NEXT MORNING, ANDERS AND RAYNA were on their way to the docks early. The monthly Ulfar testing—the Trial of the Staff—was one of their best pickpocketing days, so neither of them wanted to miss a moment of it. And it turned out to be a good thing they’d started out early—the Wolf Guard were still on street corners, far more of them than usual. The twins were forced up onto the rooftop meadows again, which was safer but took longer. Finding ways to cross the streets often meant going out of their way by several blocks.
Their goal, the dockside square, was bordered by tall, thin, colorful houses on three sides—yellow, green, and blue, with square white window frames and polished wooden doors. The houses were squeezed together, two and three stories tall, often with more than one family living in them.
On the fourth side of the square was the harbor. From far away the docks looked like a forest, masts sticking up from a flotilla of ships from all over the world. Vallen wasn’t a big island, but everyone always said that you didn’t need to leave the capital city of Holbard to see the world—the world would come right to you instead. And that was because of the wind guards.
High above the entrance to the port were the huge, metal arches of the wind guards, the biggest artifacts in all of Vallen. They had protected the harbor for generations.
The arches were marked with runes forged all along their length—the runes were the sign of an artifact—and were big enough for even the largest ship to pass under. But though Anders could see straight through them to the ocean on the other side, the guards magically kept out the wind. Even when a storm raged beyond them, the harbor was always peaceful.
The docks were where newcomers arrived in the city of Holbard from all over the world. The safety of the harbor meant that people from every place Anders could imagine—and some he couldn’t—came not only to trade, but to live as well. From what Anders knew, most cities were a mix of people from all over, but perhaps none were quite as varied as Holbard.