Chapter 45: 54. The Shadows

Rorri

 

A human child sat on the floor just beside Rorri’s feet, gazing up at him with bright, round eyes. Rorri had hoped the human children wouldn’t be able to speak Elvish, but it seemed that, at least among the nobility, they were well-educated enough to be fairly fluent – a shock, given they’d only lived a small handful of years.

“Do you live in a tree?” the child asked, her voice eager and bubbling.

“No,” Rorri said as he chewed on his thumb nail, teeth gritted, praying the show would start soon.

“Do you wipe your butt with leaves?”

A round of giggles rippled through the room. Even Adar chuckled.

“No,” Rorri grumbled, shutting his eyes.

The crowd outside the door was finally thinning, and wriggling little people filled up most of the chairs. With every sudden bout of shrieking, laughing or crying, a sharp, psychic pain pierced through Rorri’s ears, like he’d been shot by a tiny, screaming arrow.

“Can you talk to a-aminals?” another child chimed in, scooting closer to Rorri’s heels.

“No, I can’t t-talk to animals—”

“Can you change colors?”

“Of course not—”

“Can you teach me how to read minds?” an older child asked. Rorri bit his knuckles and stared at a point on the wall. Soon, another one approached, followed by another, until a small gathering had formed at his feet.

“Do you have any kids?”

“Why do you talk funny?”

“Why don’t you live in the forest anymore?”

“Alright, that’s enough,” Adar said, stepping between Rorri and the sea of children. The kids scrambled away and Rorri breathed a deep sigh of relief, though he would’ve liked for his friend to have intervened sooner.

Finally, the last parent left, and the half-door clicked shut.

“Ahoy, mates!”

Bilge’s voice cut through the cacophony, bringing silence to the room.

“I said, Ahoy, mates!” he repeated with a grin, striking a pirate captain’s pose. The kids echoed his greeting, and at long last, the show began.

The intricacies of Bilge’s performance were lost to Rorri’s limited grasp of the language. He waved when introduced as the group’s ‘wizard’, but a strange, wistful feeling weighed down his eyes. He knew he’d never forge the same sort of connection with the kids that Bilge demonstrated with ease, and though he had no desire to do so, it still struck him as another of his many inadequacies.

“Without further t’do…”

On cue, Rorri collected his magic at the front of his eyes and visualized the lit sconces dimming, then changing to blue, then extinguishing. The children gasped and oohed as the lights went out, and only one of them started to cry.

Under the cover of darkness, Bilge and Adar ducked to their places behind the puppet stand, and Rorri sat with his back to theirs, facing the wall that would be his canvas. The room glowed with pastel orange and blue, cut with sharp strokes of bright pink, like a clear, late-afternoon sky. Silhouetted seagulls flapped lazily in an imagined breeze, weaving in and out of the clouds, as stars trickled down from the ceiling in time with the setting sun. The little ones giggled and gawked, fully immersed in Bilge’s narration. Practicing magic like this might have even been relaxing Rorri, if the circumstances were different – it really was its own art form, its own type of meditation – but relaxing was impossible. He had too much on his mind.

Every time he glanced towards the door he chastised himself. She wasn’t going to abandon whoever she was with to sneak away for him, obviously. Maybe during intermission, but certainly not during the show. Probably not during intermission, though, either. He saw the way she’d fled the children’s room, as if she’d been caught in a terrible crime just by existing nearby him. And who were those children she came with? Had she been hiding a whole family from him? He peeked towards them when he could, searching their faces for a resemblance, or hopefully a lack thereof.

“Waterin’ hole!”

Bilge tensed through the brief delay that followed the cue, but Rorri caught it in time. He dimmed the lights and projected a bluish glow around the stand, brightening the stars’ twinkle. Bilge released a slow, silent sigh, and the show went on.

The next few signals came in rapid succession. Ronny the Rabbit crept into the narrow alley to find the ‘stolen candy’ – Rorri whispered the ssshhhhhkkk of brick scraping against brick. The ‘candy smugglers’ saw Ronny, and he dove from the pier – Rorri splashed the audience with an even sprinkle of water from a cup hidden behind the stand, drawing a fresh round of giggles. At the punchline of some joke he didn’t understand, he conjured a salty aroma from a simple command word – fish – until the room smelled just like the docks, lingering until he dispelled the illusion. All went exactly as rehearsed, though Rorri’s eyes were growing tired from maintaining the sky.

A shadow darted past the half-door. Rorri whipped around, but it was gone before he could finish turning his head. His chest fluttered. What could that have been…?

Perhaps it was a staff member with a particularly quick gait, or side effect of the magic’s strain on his eyes, or… maybe it was Shacia? But why would she move so quickly? Maybe it was like the shadows from before…

“Ow!”

An elbow jabbed Rorri’s ribs.

“Tossed his shirt…” Bilge repeated through gritted teeth. Ronny the Rabbit had smothered the smuggler with his sopping wet shirt, buying himself time to escape – Rorri submerged the room into chilly, damp darkness, and the audience shrieked and laughed. As he let the illusion lapse back to blue light, he gently tapped Bilge’s shoulder, securing the human’s attention for long enough to flash his middle finger, which Bilge readily returned with his un-puppetted hand.

Rorri’s focus waned through the sword fight between Adam the Armadillo and the ‘evil Guard’. He neglected the sound effects, and even the simple light tricks flickered in and out, the atmosphere vacillating between magical and mundane. The children still laughed and clapped at all the intended beats, but Bilge quietly fumed, his sharp glares going unnoticed by his increasingly distant housemate.

There!

You are reading story The Thief’s Folly (Book One of the Bloodlines Duet) at novel35.com

The shadow zipped past the door. Rorri jumped, but it was gone before his eyes could find the empty frame.

“There’s s-something out there,” Rorri whispered, his heart racing. Adar, still holding his puppet high, glanced at his nervous friend.

“…What?”

With no further warning, Rorri crept to the edge of the room and stepped over the half-door, dropping the illusion behind him. He paced up and down the dimly-lit hall, checking every corner for the mysterious figure, but all he found was carpet and walls, potted plants and paintings. Still, he felt the shadowy presence hiding from him, just out of sight. Maybe Bilge was right, and the Widow really was there, or maybe it was an assassin, someone who wanted to harm one of the house’s noble patrons. Or… What if it was the Guard, coming to look for him?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head. He fished around his pockets for a cigarette, but just as his fingers grazed the tobacco-end of a half-smoked stub, a pained groan gushed from inside a nearby washroom, louder than the opera music seeping through the walls. Rorri rushed over and pressed his ear to the door. The distressed gurgling persisted, though it was quieter, as if someone’s life was slipping away. He looked to his left and right, but there was nobody around to help. Possessed by adrenaline, he braced for whatever he might find and threw open the door.

The moaning ceased as soon as he burst through the frame. Light flooded in from the hall, outlining the contours of the washroom’s fine furnishings, but it was otherwise pitch dark. Rorri scanned the room slowly, his eyes gradually adjusting, until they froze on an indistinct, undulating mass in the corner. From it, an eye opened, reflecting the light back to him, then another – then they closed, fluttering, as the creature released a low, throaty hum.

“You… joining?”

Rorri recognized his employer’s honeyed voice and broken Elvish. A stranger dressed in a staff member’s tuxedo pressed her petite form into the wall; the stranger did not flinch, nor even look up at the intruder, continuing, instead, to fondle and smother, as the dark-haired human woman regarded Rorri with a coquettish smile. He gaped in disbelief, groping for something to say. Realizing he had no words, he turned around and shut the door.

Just as he took his first harried steps down the hall, his chest overwhelmingly tight and begging for smoke, another sound caught Rorri’s ear.

“Oi.”

Rorri looked to find Bilge tramping towards him.

“Let’s have a chat, ay?”

He gripped Rorri’s shoulder and spun him as he passed. Rorri stumbled, hesitant to follow, but he still did, ducking his head like a dog caught with his master’s half-chewed shoe. Bilge led him to an easy-to-miss pocket of space beneath the hall’s wooden stairs, and Rorri settled into the wall, fidgeting with the cigarette in his pocket, his eyes locked onto a tiny red stain in the carpeting.

“The hell was ‘at, ay?” Bilge said in a hushed, seething voice.

“The hell was what?” Rorri said, glancing up from beneath his furrowed brow.

“Don’t gimme that shite, mate, y’know damn well wot—”

“I know you r-roped me into this shit without asking me first, if that’s wot,” Rorri snapped. “And, I know we’re getting p-paid either way, so I don’t see what’s got your balls on the b-burner—”

“It ain’t about the coin,” Bilge hissed, looming over the forest elf. “Ain’t like you to bungle a job—”

“Since w-when is it not about the coin?” Rorri said with an irate grin. “You can’t bungle a job if you still get paid!”

Rorri felt a jolt in his chest—

 

Y O U N E V E R S A W M E

 

—as the memory of that day intruded upon his mind. He saw it as clearly as ever…

 

…the bright, bright whites of the young guard’s eyes…

 

…but he stuffed the memory away, and his resentment snatched him back to the space beneath the stairs.

Bilge grimaced. “Wipe that goddamned smile off yer face, kid—”

“I’m not your kid, Bilge!” Rorri barked. Bilge stiffened. “If you w-want one of those, go talk to our employer – I’m sure she thinks you’ve got a n-nice arse, too – and while you’re doing that, I’ll be on the balcony, having a smoke and pondering w-whether or not I should just jump already, because that’s the kind of w-week I’ve been having, not that you’ve ever given a shit, you useless, b-bumbling ass!”

Rorri started to storm off, but Bilge caught his shoulder, freezing him in place.

Idle chatter from the opera’s main audience spilled into the hall from the foyer, signaling the beginning of intermission. The unlit sconces magically flickered to life, and servants in fine black clothes appeared from their hiding places to attend to the wealthy guests, carrying silver platters of drinks and tiny sandwiches. They passed by, heedless of the heated quarrel happening beneath the stairs.

Rorri spun around to square off again, but he faltered. Bilge’s eyes shined. It wasn’t the shine of pure anger, though the flare in his nostrils still betrayed its waning presence. His lips quivered, struggling with whatever words hid behind them, struggling to maintain the thin line that kept his emotions at bay. He clamped his jaw tight and inhaled deeply.

“Look,” he started, then sniffed, flicking his gaze down the hall. “I know ya bin hittin’ the Snow hard, lately, an’ – an’ yer not thinkin’ straight—”

“Oh, fuck off,” Rorri spit, shrugging off Bilge’s hand. He stalked away and ascended the stairs without a backwards glance.

You can find story with these keywords: The Thief’s Folly (Book One of the Bloodlines Duet), Read The Thief’s Folly (Book One of the Bloodlines Duet), The Thief’s Folly (Book One of the Bloodlines Duet) novel, The Thief’s Folly (Book One of the Bloodlines Duet) book, The Thief’s Folly (Book One of the Bloodlines Duet) story, The Thief’s Folly (Book One of the Bloodlines Duet) full, The Thief’s Folly (Book One of the Bloodlines Duet) Latest Chapter