Chapter 2: The Owl
Sunlight came through the curtains thin and gray.
Jet rose from the hardwood floor and looked at the bed beside him. He had not slept in it. Most of the beds he came across were too soft for what his body had learned to want. Across the room, Noel was still on the floor in his clothes from the night before, staring up at the ceiling without moving.
Jet shuffled to the wall mirror and washed his face from the bucket they had been left. He took out his knife and worked it along his jaw, careful and unhurried, until the stubble was gone and the line of him was clean. He buttoned his shirt and pulled on his pants. He had thought, more than once, about getting better clothes. He had thought against it more times than that. There was already enough about him for people to fix on — the skin, the sword, the look they called Ret in most towns this far from the capital — and a finer coat would only give them another reason. Why hand it to them?
He buckled the scimitar to his hip. He always did this last, and he always did it carefully. Then he pulled on his overcoat and turned to the floor.
“Noel. Let’s go.”
Noel rose without speaking.
They went down to the tavern floor.
The room was nearly empty in the morning light. The chairs from last night were pushed in. The smell of stale ale and old smoke had not gone anywhere. Ember was behind the front desk where they had left her, though her shoulders were lower than they had been the night before, and her face looked less like a thing she was holding in place.
“You’re up early,” Jet said. He set the coins for their room on the counter.
Ember smiled. “I actually like the mornings. They’re qui—”
The back door banged open against the wall.
The owner came through it with mud on his boots, tracking it across the floor she had just cleaned. He moved past her without seeing the two travelers at all.
“Take care of that.”
“Of course, sir.”
She turned back to Jet and Noel. Her voice had gone flat in the space of three words.
“I hope you enjoyed your stay.”
“Yeah. It was fine. Thanks for everything.”
Jet held out his hand for hers.
She took it.
She felt the silver in her palm before she understood what it was.
Jet turned to go. Noel did not.
Jet looked back at him. Noel did not return the look. He was watching the owner.
“Noel. Let’s go.”
Noel did not move.
Then, in his low voice:
“He’s not your family. Is he.”
Jet closed his eyes for one breath.
Noel had set his hand on the counter. He had not taken his eyes off the owner. The owner turned, and his face did something quick that he covered with something slower, and he came toward them across the floor with the smile that Ember had spent three years learning to read.
“Of course I am.” He put his arm around Ember’s shoulder. He held out his other hand to her, palm up, expectant.
She did not look at Jet.
She put the silver coin into the owner’s hand.
Jet saw Noel’s fingers close at his side.
The door again banged open behind them.
“End of the week, boys! Drinks start early!”
The captain swept in with his soldiers at his back, the same four from the night before, and they pushed past Jet without seeing him, fanning around the counter to call Ember by name. The captain leaned on the wood beside Noel as if Noel were not there.
“We’ll start with the usual, Ember. And then keep going with the usual.”
The soldiers behind him laughed.
The owner half-bowed. “Welcome back, gentlemen. First round’s on the house for our town’s great protectors.”
Ember was already pouring.
Jet caught Noel’s eye and tipped his head toward the door.
Noel did not move at first. Then he did.
They crossed the floor toward the doors. Behind them, the owner’s voice rose enough to be heard without seeming to want to be.
“You know, captain. Those two have been making me nervous since they came in. And that one’s sword.” A pause. “How does a Ret come into a sword like that? I’d say he’s nothing but trouble.”
The captain’s head turned.
Jet kept walking.
They stepped out into the street.
The town was already up. Vendors had their stalls open along the road, vegetables in baskets, hanging cured meat, a man with a tray of carved wooden trinkets. Buyers haggled. A boy ran past with a rolled bundle on his shoulder. The morning had the ordinary noise of a market in good weather.
Jet wove through it without looking back. Noel followed two paces behind.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Jet said, low.
“That girl isn’t safe.”
“She isn’t in enough trouble for us to drop everything.” Jet did not slow. “And since when do you care about anyone.”
Noel did not answer.
Jet let out a breath.
“Is she the one you were sent to find.”
“No.”
“Then what’s the point. We can’t help every person we come across. We aren’t here to play —”
The shout cut him off.
“Where do you two think you’re going?”
The captain stood in the tavern doorway. His soldiers were already coming out behind him.
Jet did not turn. He quickened his pace and reached back for Noel’s arm.
“Not worth it. We’re going.”
He had almost gotten Noel moving when two soldiers stepped into the road in front of them.
Jet stopped.
He turned.
The captain came down the steps at his own pace. The other soldiers fanned out behind him. The owner stood behind the soldiers with a small, comfortable smile. Ember stood behind the owner. Her hands were braced under the platter as if she had decided, sometime in the last ten seconds, that dropping it was the only thing she could do to make this day worse.
The street had gone quiet. The vendors had stopped calling. A woman near the cart of cured meat had put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder without looking down.
The captain rested his hand on the pommel of his sword.
“What business do you two have in my town.”
Jet read the street.
The eyes on them were not on him. Or not only. The eyes were on the captain. The faces were tight. The hands at the stalls had moved off the goods. The town knew this captain. The town had been waiting for the captain to do something for a long time, and it was watching now to see whether the watching would matter.
Jet found his angle.
He smiled.
“None at all. Couple of simple travelers. Heading home.”
“No simple traveler carries a weapon like that.”
The captain pointed at the scimitar.
“You two are either bandits, or something worse.”
Jet glanced at Noel. Noel was already set. Jet exhaled through his nose. Then he gave the captain the smile a man gives when he has decided to make a scene.
“All right. You caught us. We’re professional problem solvers. We do odd jobs. Mostly for the people who need it most.” He gestured at the scimitar. “Sometimes the job involves fighting bad people.”
He turned to the crowd. He raised his voice just enough.
“So. Anyone need any work done? Bandits troubling the road? Robbers? Anyone giving you problems you can’t get rid of?” His eyes came back to the captain. “Any drunken soldiers getting too comfortable with their station?”
The captain’s hand tightened on the pommel.
“You think you’re funny, Ret? These are royal soldiers. Each one of them is more honorable than the two of you put together.”
“Oh I know that.” Jet pointed at himself with mock seriousness. Then he turned back to the crowd. “I’m just wondering if your townspeople feel the same.”
The captain’s eyes moved.
He had not looked at the crowd until then.
He looked now, and Jet watched him see what Jet had already seen.
The captain cleared his throat.
“Of course they do.”
“Good try.” Jet nodded. “I almost believed you.”
A few people in the crowd had not yet decided whether to laugh. One did. It was small. It carried.
“Why wouldn’t these fine folk think you honorable.” Jet turned to Noel. “I mean. Honestly. Can you imagine a world in which day-drinking soldiers aren’t respected.”
“It’s hard to fathom,” Noel said. His eyes had not left the captain.
“We are more honorable than two degenerates like you.” The captain’s voice had gone louder.
“Prove it.”
Jet stepped forward.
“Better yet. Let your townspeople decide who deserves their respect. A fight. Hand to hand. No weapons. No killing.” He spread his hands. “If I win, you owe me ten silver. If I lose —”
“I’ll take that sword of yours.”
The captain stepped in before Jet could finish.
Jet shrugged.
“Fine by me.”
The captain looked at the crowd. The crowd was watching him.
“For ten silver,” he said, “the two of you should be able to take all five of us.”
Jet raised his hands at the crowd in mock surrender.
“Of course, captain. Take all the help you need.”
He unbuckled the scimitar and his short sword from his hip and laid them on the ground at his feet. Noel carried nothing. The soldiers stripped off their swords and dropped them in the dust. The captain was the last. He unbuckled his and let it fall with the others, and he was slow about it. Jet straightened, gave the captain a small bow, and the morning went still.
“At your ready, sir.”
Neither of them moved yet.
Jet rolled his shoulders back. He shrugged out of his overcoat and folded it once and laid it on the road beside his sword, then turned his head one way and the other until his neck cracked. Noel did the same with his coat. He set his feet shoulder-width and dropped his weight into them once, twice, easing it down into his hips, and brought his hands up loose. He shook the right one out as if it had gone tight in the cold.
The captain watched them.
“You won’t even stretch before a fight,” Jet said. “Pretty bold of you.”
One of the captain’s soldiers gulped before he could stop himself.
The captain looked at him.
The soldier straightened quickly.
The biggest of them came first.
He came low and hard, shoulder dropped, the charge of a man who had only ever won by being the largest one in the room. Jet was already not where the soldier expected him to be. He stepped inside the line of the charge, caught the man’s momentum with his hip, and pivoted. The soldier left the ground. As he turned through the air toward Noel, Jet was already turning back to face their remaining opponents.
Noel set one foot, slipped his head a finger’s width to the left of the airborne man’s path, and hit him once on the chin as he passed.
The soldier dropped to the road and did not move after.
The crowd made a sound that was not quite a sound.
One of the captain’s men leaned in to him, voice low.
“A Ret with a sword like that. Fighting like that.” He glanced at Jet, then back. “I’ve only ever heard of one man like that.”
The captain’s eyes came up.
His mouth opened slightly.
“Are you —”
He swallowed it.
“Are you Jet? The Owl?”
Jet smiled.
There was something in it the captain did not like.
“That’s right.”
The crowd began to mutter.
One of the soldiers turned his head toward the captain.
“He works for —”
“Quiet.”
The captain’s voice cracked across the word. The soldier shut up.
The captain stood there.
Jet turned to Noel without taking his eyes off him.
“Hear that. My name made him nervous.”
“Remarkable,” Noel said. “Seems like they’ll make anyone a captain these days.”
The captain’s face changed.
He came at Noel.
“You three. Take the Ret. I have the brute.”
The fight was not long.
Jet drew the three.
He took half a step back, then half a step the other way, then he was inside the closest soldier’s reach with a knee under the man’s elbow and an arm hooked through his armpit. The soldier went sideways into the dirt. Before he had landed Jet was moving again. He did not finish men. He moved them. A heel into the back of one knee dropped the second. A spinning kick caught the third in the side of the helmet and rang it, and that one came at him angrier and slower, which was what Jet wanted. He let the man swing. He stepped inside the swing. He elbowed him in the throat just hard enough to make him gag, and then he was past him and onto the second man again, who was getting up off his knees and not for long.
It looked like a dance to the people watching. Ember had never seen anything like it. Each soldier’s armor — the same armor that should have made them harder to hurt — was the thing that kept them where Jet wanted them. They were always a half-step behind, and the road was getting browner with the mud under them with every grapple.
Noel stood across from the captain in the middle of the road and did almost nothing.
The captain came at him with a right hand. Noel was not there for it. The captain came back with a left. Noel was not there for that either. The captain swung again, breathing hard now, and Noel rolled his shoulder a finger’s width and the punch went past his ear and the captain stumbled forward into the space where Noel had been, and Noel hit him once in the ribs as he passed.
Something in the captain made a sound that armor was not supposed to let make.
The captain straightened and came again.
Noel slipped under the strike. Hit him once on the side. Stepped back.
Again.
Slipped. Hit. Stepped back.
Noel was bleeding from both hands. The plate on the captain’s ribs and shoulders had opened the skin of his knuckles on the first three strikes and had not stopped opening it since. He did not seem to notice. His face had not changed since the fight began. Every time he hit the captain he hit him in the same place, or near enough that the difference did not matter to the body underneath. The captain’s breath was coming louder. The man had hit Noel once in the very beginning of the exchange, a glancing blow off the temple, and that had been the last touch he was going to get.
The crowd had stopped making noise.
No one had come out to see a man beaten down to the road. No one turned away.
The captain swung wild.
Noel ducked under it as if he had been told the punch was coming a day in advance, came up with his weight set into his hips, and hit the captain on the point of the jaw.
The captain went down.
The street was quiet.
Then it was not.
The townspeople started to clap. A few at first. Then more. Jet swept a bow at the dust.
“Not bad,” he called, “for two honorless mercenaries.”
A scream cut through the cheering.
Jet turned.
Noel was standing very still.
There was a knife in his back.
The captain was on his feet behind him. He had not stayed down. His face was bloody and one eye had closed, and there was a short blade in his fist — one he must have kept in his boot when he gave up his sword. He was smiling.
He twisted the knife once and pulled it out.
Noel went down face first.
He hit the road hard enough that the dust came up around him.
For one breath nobody in the street moved. Not the vendors. Not the soldiers. Not the owner.
Jet’s hand went for his hip.
His hand found nothing.
His voice came out smaller than he had meant it to.
“Oh, no.”
The captain laughed.
“What? Nothing to say?”
The hand closed on the captain’s throat from behind.
It lifted him off the ground.
Ember took a step back. She had not told herself to.
The captain’s feet kicked once in the air. The knife dropped from his fingers and rang on a stone. He clawed at the wrist holding him up and his clawing did nothing. He twisted his head to see what had hold of him, and what he saw was Noel, on his feet, in a shirt soaked dark, looking up at him with eyes that were not the eyes of a man who had just been stabbed.
“To kill so frivolously,” Noel said through his teeth, “are you even human?”
He slammed the captain into the road.
Dust rose around them in a slow column.
Jet was already moving.
He crossed the distance in three steps and crouched beside the captain in the dust. He took a wrist. He found a pulse. He let out a breath he had not known he had been holding. Above him, Noel was still standing, and Noel was looking at the captain in a way Jet did not want him to look at anyone.
Jet stood.
He turned to the crowd.
“It’s all right,” he said, loud and easy. “He’s alive.”
He turned to Noel. Same voice. Different face.
“You’re lucky that knife missed your heart, Noel. You need to be more careful.”
Noel grunted.
Jet faced the crowd again.
“A captain of the royal army just tried to kill an unarmed man in front of his town. That’s a court-martial offense. You all saw it. There will be no trouble convincing the high command. They’ll send you a new squadron. You won’t have to live with these men anymore.”
The crowd was silent.
Then the crowd was not.
The applause came in slow at first, then in waves. Men came out of the watching with rope. The soldiers were dragged into the dust and bound where they lay. Jet bent over the captain, took ten silver from the man’s belt purse, and stood up with it in his fist.
Ember crossed the road with the platter.
She did not seem to know she had carried it the whole time.
Jet took a drink from her with a small smile. Noel took two and drank one of them down without stopping. He handed the empty glass back to her. He looked at her a moment longer than he needed to. Something passed behind his face that did not finish. Then, carrying the remaining drink, he turned and joined Jet, and the two of them walked out of the town.
A few hours later, Ember was at the front desk of the empty tavern.
She had been sitting there for a long time without moving. The day had not yet caught up with her. The captain. The fight. The knife. The way Noel had risen from the dust. The owner had stood over the bound soldiers for an hour after, talking to anyone who would listen, trying to argue the town into giving them another chance. He had not succeeded. He would come back, and he would come back angry. She had been getting ready for that since the door shut behind him. She was good at getting ready for things.
The door opened.
She braced.
It was not the owner.
It was Jet.
His shirt was dark with sweat. His chest was rising and falling like a man who had run a long way and not stopped to think about it on the way.
“Jet —” She was on her feet before she had decided to be. “I didn’t get to thank you for —”
“Why are you working here?”
The question came in before her sentence had finished.
She blinked.
“I — I need the money.”
“Then why stay here?” Jet did not blink. “There are other taverns. Other towns. Why this place?”
The lie she had practiced for three years did not arrive.
“I was brought here,” she said. “They — gave me to him. I don’t have anywhere else.”
“Anywhere is better than here.”
Her hands had started shaking. She had not given them permission.
“I can’t.” Her voice came small. “He bought me from — from people. If I left. They would find me. They would bring me back. They would —”
She did not finish.
Jet looked at her.
His face changed.
“You want to come with us?”
She stared at him.
“What?”
“My group. It’s me, Noel, and four others. Becca, Liz, Ben, and Homer.” He paused. “We were all alone once. We all had nowhere else to go.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know how to fight. I don’t know how to do any of what you do.”
“We can teach you.”
A pause.
“It won’t be easy. I won’t lie to you about that. It won’t always be safe. But it will be better than this. And if you decide you want to leave us, we’ll let you go.”
She did not answer.
Jet searched her face, and for a moment his carefulness slipped.
“Don’t you want more than this?”
Ember flinched.
The words seemed to land on him too. He looked away. His jaw set.
“Sorry.” His voice lowered. “That wasn’t fair.”
He looked back at her. Not with pity.
“I just mean you don’t owe this place the rest of your life because someone dragged you into it. You don’t have to stay bought.”
Her hands were shaking again.
Jet saw it. This time he did not push.
“It’s your call.” He turned to the door. “I don’t know what’s going to happen if you come with us. You have to decide.”
He walked toward the door.
She watched him walk.
She thought about the wrath of the owner. The men he had bought her from. The road she did not know. The dust the captain had made when Noel slammed him into it. How her arms had stopped shaking, for a few minutes, while she stood behind the owner with a platter in her hands and watched two strangers fight for nothing she could name.
“Wait —”
Jet turned at the door.
Ember opened the register.
She took a handful of coins.
She held them in her closed fist and crossed to him.
“Take me with you.”
Jet looked at her closed fist.
A small smile.
“Let’s go.”
The Silent Beggar's Anthology 