Glasswrights' Apprentice Read online

  The guard was surprised by the attack, and his terrible oaths rang out in the night. Other guildsmen stared stupidly, already too dulled by their labor to find liberation - or even encouragement - in Cook’s brave rebellion. The captain of the guard hollered from his post by the kilns, and the ground trembled under metal-clad feet as soldiers gathered from all over the compound.

  Rani sprang away from the commotion at the well, leaping for the orchard and lunging from gnarled trunk to gnarled trunk in a frantic effort to melt into shadow. She wriggled up one particularly knobby tree near the edge of the copse, ignoring the scrape of bark against her palms. Reaching the last branch broad enough to support her weight, she took a single steadying breath and launched herself at the wall.

  There was one horrifying instant when she discovered she had miscalculated her leap, and the breath was crushed from her narrow chest as she came up sharp against the wall. She gasped for air and stifled a sob, certain she would feel a soldier’s gauntleted hands on her legs at any instant. Driven by blind terror, she caught her bottom lip in her teeth and forced first one leg to the top of the barrier, then the other.

  She lay across the top of the wall for a long second, gathering her breath and bracing herself for the hue and cry the soldiers were certain to raise. Ignoring the sting of scraped palms and knees, she clutched the stone like an orphan and offered up a prayer, calling on Lan, whose help Cook had already enlisted.

  Even though she knew she was looking back at certain death, she could not refrain from one last glance at her adoptive home. Already, the guildhall’s familiar outline was destroyed, the jagged teeth of its rotted towers lurid in the torchlight. A crew of soldiers swarmed in the kilnyard like maggots on a corpse, and Rani could scarcely believe that her sheltering oven was already reduced to rubble.

  That destruction was nothing, though, compared to the tumult closest at hand. Cook was surrounded by half a dozen soldiers. The woman’s cries floated across the orchard. “You drunken sots! The guild had nothing to do with the prince’s murder! By First God Ait, I’ve never seen men as foolish as you!”

  The woman’s taunts were met by gauntleted fists, and Rani heard the crunch of breaking bones, even across the orchard. “You blooming idiots!” Cook’s voice shrilled against the pain. “In the name of Lan, find the true murderer - find Instructor Morada and leave us to mourn the Prince!”

  Rani knew Cook directed those last words at her, even as the soldiers surged forward, pummeling the woman into silence. Rani forced herself to look away, ordered herself to exploit the distraction as all the soldiers focused their attention on one rebellious old woman.

  Dropping over the stone enclosure, Rani barely remembered to roll when she hit the ground. The breath was knocked out of her, and it took a long minute to recall how to climb to her feet, how to gather her arms and legs and run - run as fast as if wolves pursued her under the cloak of night.

  Soon, though, Rani was forced to stop her headlong flight, brought up short as she gasped for exhausted breath, sobbing like a baby. Gulping from a fountain at the heart of the Guildsmen’s Quarter, she remonstrated with herself. Her behavior was ridiculous. She had not cried when she arrived at the Guildhall, when she was all alone in the world. She certainly wasn’t going to disgrace herself and her guild now, bawling like an infant in the night. Cook would expect more of her. The old woman would never forgive Rani if she dishonored the glasswrights with tears that only proved she was too weak to belong in her current caste.

  In fact, Rani should be husbanding the new strength that she had found, the new power that sharpened her wits and lent strength to her body. It was as if Cook’s cries to Lan had been answered, as if the kitchen god had truly adopted Rani as his own. How else could one lonely apprentice escape an entire platoon of soldiers bent on her capture?

  Rani vowed to light a candle to Lan when she next had the chance. The kitchen god … he was an odd patron for a merchant girl turned glasswright. But if Lan had seen fit to respond to Cook’s prayers, who was Rani to protest? Who was Rani to gainsay her elders and her betters?

  Rani’s silent tongue-lashing worked its magic, and she retreated to a deep doorway, gathering her thoughts close with her ragged tunic. Search out Morada, that’s what Cook had said. How was she supposed to do that - one disenfranchised apprentice wandering the City’s streets without even a penny to her name?

  Rani’s head began to ache, and she remembered the soothing herb tea her mother made whenever she was ill. The thought brought fresh tears to her eyes. She imagined her mother’s cool hand laid across her brow, smoothing back her hair, forcing away fear and exhaustion and childish nightmares.

  Her family may have bought her way into the guild, and they might fear the wrath of Shanoranvilli’s soldiers, but they would certainly take her in. That’s what family meant.

  Rani picked her way through the streets. Except for the Pilgrims’ Bell, tolling steadily in the foggy night, the City was quiet now. The constant clang was comforting; Rani had heard it every night of her life. She carefully schooled her thoughts away from the memory of Prince Tuvashanoran and his daring feat of manning the abandoned Pilgrims’ Bell. Those stories were past, as dead as the man who inspired them.

  Rani picked up speed as she made her way to the Merchants Quarter. Now, she knew the streets. She had played in them as a young child, roamed them to bring customers to her family’s stall. She knew the way the cobblestones buckled in this patch, and she automatically ducked through a stone gateway to cut through the potter’s tiny yard on the corner near her family’s home.

  Despite her shivering exhaustion, Rani let a smile cross her lips. She would come home, and her mother would gather her up in fat arms, pressing Rani’s head against her breasts in the way that usually drove Rani to squirm away with a wrinkled nose of disgust. Rani’s father would listen to her gravely, shaking his head in disappointment that his daughter had gotten herself meshed in such misdeeds. Bardo, her brother, would be the one to help her. He would let their mother shed a tear or two, and he would let their father rant and rave, but it would be Bardo who would lead Rani through the streets in the dawn. He would walk her to the Palace, her hand neatly folded in his, and they would explain what a terrible mistake had been made.

  Bardo would make everything right.

  Rani rounded the last corner, reassuring herself that her brother had the power to set the world straight. She was so intent on thinking about Bardo that she forgot to look where she was going. She came up short on a sooty flagstone, her hand raised to knock on a non-existent door.

  Her home was reduced to smoky rubble.

  Rani stared at the charred ruins in disbelief, staggering back to the stone curb across the narrow street. She could smell the remnants of the fire, and she could see lazy smoke spiraling up from the collapsed beams of her parents’ house. She could taste the soot on the back of her tongue as clearly as if she had kissed the blackened lintel of her home.

  “Get away from here!”

  Rani jumped at the hissed anger, stifling a cry as she whirled to face a midnight shadow. “Varna!” Rani was so relieved to see her childhood playmate that she almost chanted the name. She took a step toward the tinker’s daughter, coating her words with gratitude that she had finally found an ally in her struggle. “You won’t believe -”

  “I won’t believe any words from your lying mouth!”

  Rani stepped back as if she’d been slapped. “Varna, it’s not true, whatever they’ve said.”

  Varna spat at her feet. “Aye, Rani. Just as it wasn’t true when you told me we’d work the stalls together this summer. Just as it wasn’t true when you told me you’d never go to some guildhall, to be a snotty apprentice.”

  “Varna, you know I didn’t want to leave you. But my parents were willing, were able to pay for me to join the hall, to make the glass -”

  “Glass! They say the arrow you shot had a glass tip, and that’s why the prince died so quickly.”


  “Varna, I didn’t shoot the arrow. I couldn’t have - I was inside the cathedral. I saw the whole thing.”

  Varna did not let facts cut short her tirade. “Aye, you were inside the cathedral, where no merchant child had a right to be. They say you cried out and Tuvashanoran rose to his death. You killed the prince, whether you shot the arrow or merely cleared the way for one of your sisters to do it.”

  “Morada was not my sister! Morada was a nasty Instructor who could care less whether I lived or died. Varna, Morada was worse than any of the customers we ever served. She was mean, and rude -”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to say anything else. How foolish do you think I am, Rani? I believed you when you said you’d never leave the Merchant’s Quarter. You lied then - why shouldn’t you lie now, telling me how terrible the guildsmen are? What did you say to them about the people you left behind? What did you tell them about me?”

  Rani gaped at Varna, amazed at the transparent jealousy in her friend’s voice. “Varna, I never mentioned you to them.”

  “So, even your closest friend was not worthy of mention in the guildhall! Rani, you forgot everyone when you left behind your family. Merchants have no business in a guildhall.”

  “Varna, that’s not fair! You were just as happy as I was when the guild agreed to take me in. You know how I can draw, how I can design the glass -”

  “I know how you promised to be my friend.”

  “Varna!” Goody Tinker’s voice sliced through Rani’s strangled response. “I told you to wake me if those god-forsaken fools came back.” Before Rani could duck away into the night, Varna’s mother stepped into the doorway of her soot-stained house, cradling a sleeping infant in one brawny arm.

  “Goody Tinker!” Rani exclaimed. “What happened? Where is my family?”

  “Get away, witchling!” The woman’s fingers flew in a sign of warding. “You’ve worked your evil on the prince, now don’t think you can come back to destroy the homes of good people.”

  “Destroy the homes? Goody Tinker, I had nothing to do with this! Where are my mother and father? Where is Bardo?”

  “Gone! As you should be! Whatever fate they meet, it’s too good for them!”

  “Goody Tinker, I don’t understand! I don’t know what you’re saying-”

  “Aye, and we didn’t know what the soldiers were saying when they dragged us from our beds. They barely gave me time to waken Varna and pull my Dona from her cradle - they would have harmed my babes just like that.” The woman snapped her fingers in front of Rani’s nose. “If they hadn’t stopped to confiscate your father’s trinkets, we all might have smothered in our beds, with the smoke billowing about.”

  Rani stared at the scorched flagstones, at the heat that had twisted her neighbors’ stalls. Certainly, the tinker’s home was left standing, but the fog had lifted enough to show that the fancy-painted sign - the board Goody Tinker had taken such pride in only a few months before - was black with soot as it swung in the night breeze.

  “You’ve brought shame on us, girl! You plucked the flower of Shanoranvilli, and the City will never be the same. Get away from here - you don’t belong with civilized folk.”

  “Please, Goody Tinker, let me explain -”

  “Guard!”

  Rani scrambled into the night, frantic to leave behind her home, desperate to escape the safety she had sought only a few minutes before. As she rounded the corner, she realized that the voice that had summoned the guards was Varna’s. Rani’s own friend had turned against her.

  This time, Rani fled without any conscious plan. She was exhausted; her sleep in the kiln had completely failed to refresh her. Nevertheless, she was able to avoid the guards easily, familiar as she was with this quarter. The fog assisted her escape, and she drifted in and out of the clammy banks, with only the tolling Pilgrims’ Bell and her pounding heart to break the silence of the sleeping City.

  The entire time she ran, Rani wondered about Goody Tinker’s words. Her mother, her father, all her brothers and sisters… They couldn’t be dead; Goody would not have spoken about them in the present tense. Rather, they must be taken into Shanoranvilli’s dungeons, reluctant companions to the glasswrights’ apprentices.

  That conclusion was easier to dwell on than the other lesson she had learned on the tinkers’ doorstep. Varna hated her. Varna, who had been her best friend, whom she had pledged to love as a sister for her entire life.… Varna had called the guards.

  When a stitch daggered her side, Rani slowed her headlong pace and set aside her bitter thoughts. She staggered down deserted streets, stumbling over her own feet in utter exhaustion. Pulling her tunic closer and cinching in the waist, she wished that she had managed to keep her cloak. When her fingers snagged in the ragged hole where her guild badge used to be, she could only stare stupidly at the trailing threads.

  That evil crow had done her a service. Tuvashanoran’s edict against the Guild would have forced her to sacrifice the shiny emblem herself; better that some living creature profit from the loss. That thought was so drenched in self-pity that Rani could not keep a solitary tear from leaking onto her cheeks. The tear turned to a sob, and the sob to a torrent. Huddling in a shadowed doorway, a thirteen-year-old disgraced apprentice cried herself to sleep, accompanied only by the tolling of the Pilgrims’ Bell, summoning wanderers from the fog-shrouded hillsides around the City.

  Chapter 4

  Rani woke before dawn. At first, she was not sure what had summoned her from her uneasy dreams. Then, she realized that it was her turn to light the kitchen fires, and she’d best hurry or Cook would be furious. That thought, of course, reminded her that Cook was furious, if she wasn’t dead. And that reminded her that she had promised to light a candle to Lan. Rani rolled over and forced her eyes to open.

  And closed them again when she saw the ring of eyes staring back at her.

  “Cor!” came a harsh exclamation. “Ye’ve gone ’n’ woke ’er, Rabe!”

  “I dinna touch ’er! She woke ’erself!”

  “Ye breathed so loud she could ’ardly ’elp ’erself, could she?”

  The Touched! Ever since she’d been a baby, Rani had been threatened with banishment to the casteless Touched when she’d been lazy or had done wrong. “Sweep the hearth, or I’ll turn you out among the Touched,” Rani’s mother had grumbled. “If you don’t polish that silver buckle, you might as well go run with the Touched.” The Touched were dirty and cruel and more than a little jealous of any proper merchant girl, or a guild-sworn apprentice. Rani watched through slitted eyes as a boy - Rabe? - reached out one grimy finger to poke her side. He managed to find the bruises she had gathered against the guild wall, and the pain throbbed beneath her skin. “Go ahead. Tell ’er I dinna wake ye, or we’ll ’ear nothin’ else fer a week.”

  Rani opened her eyes again, swallowing hard before turning to the children’s apparent leader, the girl who had spoken first. Rani had to clear her throat before she could make herself understood. “I woke myself. Because I remembered I have to work in the guildhall.”

  “Ohhhh,” the girl breathed. “The guild ’all. Beggin’ yer pardon, milady.” The Touched child faked a curtsey, a look of disgust twisting her filthy features, and the boy snorted. “And what guild would that be?”

  “The gl-” Rani started to answer, then remembered the soldiers’ horrible charge. Who knew what stories had already spread to the streets? What would these children do to her, if they knew the king desired her death? Shaking away the last cobwebs of sleep, Rani forced herself back against the alley wall. One hand crept inside her tunic pocket, closing comfortingly around her Zarithian knife. “What difference does it make to you?”

  “What difference?” the girl crowed. “What difference! We wouldna want t’ ’ave a’ ‘undesirable element’ roamin’ th’ streets at night, now would we? After all, King Shanoranvilli ’as ’is reputation t’ think of. Wouldna want pilgrims t’ fear for their lives i’ th’ city streets, eh?”

  T
he boy jabbed a sharp finger into Rani’s breastbone. “’N’ I don’t think ye’re from any guild, if ye’re sleepin’ ’ere i’ th’ street.”

  “I can sleep where I choose!” Rani protested, raising her chin defiantly.

  “Aye, ’n’ what’s yer name, that we may be th’ judge o’ yer choices?” The boy took a step closer with his challenging words, and his breath stank as he forced Rani to lean away.

  “My name is Ra-” Rani caught herself before she voiced the second syllable. What was her name? If she gave her birth name, Rani, then the Touched would know that she belonged to a merchant family. They could surmise that her presence in the streets, alone in the cold night, meant that she had been driven from her family home for some unfathomable shame. If she gave her guild name, Ranita, that would only give rise to more unwelcome questions, inquiries that could not stand against Rani’s torn tunic. She swallowed hard and restated her assumed name with pretended authority. “Rai.”

  The girl shook her head scornfully, spitting out the single syllable. “Rai. Ye’re stakin’ claim to a Touched name, then, are ye?”

  “Touched or a God,” Rani muttered, wondering if she would actually have to use the metal knife that warmed beneath her fingers. Her blasphemy drew an unexpected laugh from the girl.

  “Ach, ye’re no Touched girl, but ye’ve figured our way o’ thinkin’. Touched, Gods, we draw no lines ’ere i’ th’ streets. What’ve ye got t’ share wi’ us, Rai?”

  “To share? I don’t have -” Rani remembered the carrots she had dug reflexively from Cook’s plot. “I’ve brought carrots from the garden.”

  “Garden! We Touched don’t ’ave gardens, girl. Don’t make me call ye a liar.”

  “Not my garden. The garden of the gl-” Rani’s assumed scorn melted as she realized she could not even speak the name of her former home. These Touched brats might just be waiting for the opportunity to summon the guard. Everyone knew you couldn’t trust the Touched, especially not the bands of ragtag children who roamed the City unsupervised while their parents worked as servants for the nobles and the priests. Rani swallowed a tight knot of fear and reformulated her retort. “The garden at the stone heap Shanoranvilli’s soldiers are destroying. I ducked through the wall they’re tearing down and helped myself. Those miserable guildsmen won’t have any need of carrots when the king is through with them.”