The Hidden City Read Online Free Page A

lie.”
    â€œI was raised to be polite ,” she replied, the inflection implying clearly that he wasn’t.
    â€œAnd where have your fine manners brought you? To a home of ill-repute.” The words trailed into silence as he studied her expression. No, he didn’t want to frighten her—but he found that he couldn’t help himself; it was interesting to watch her deal with discomfort.
    His sister would have slapped him, hard, had she been here. But had she, he wouldn’t. He placed the backpack before the magelight holder, and made his way to what passed for a kitchen. The tabletop was littered with an array of dyes, powders, unguents, and the odd piece of clothing; the counters were likewise adorned, although the shadows leached everything of color. He opened a cupboard, pulled out cured, dry beef, and with it a jug of sweet water. The bread beside these was two days old, and it would probably break an older person’s teeth. As he wasn’t sure if Jewel had all of hers—her adult teeth—he brought that as well.
    â€œForgive the lack of cutlery, the lack of fine plates,” he said with mock gravity, as he placed the food on the table. “I’d offer you wine, but I have a suspicion you don’t drink.”
    â€œDepends on how thirsty I am,” she replied.
    â€œIf you’re thirsty, wine is exactly the wrong thing to drink.”
    She shrugged. Her shoulders inched up and down; they were tight and drawn in toward her body, as if, at any moment, she might have to ward off blows. Or other physical violence. It angered him. The anger surprised him. He would have bet money—his own—that he had long lost the capacity for that kind of anger.
    He split the beef evenly, and the loaf less evenly; it left a trail of crumbs for the mice. The water he sloshed into ceramic mugs. “Here,” he said, handing one to her. “Eat. Drink.”
    She eyed the food, hunger warring with wariness.
    It said much about her that wariness won. “Why are you doing this?” she asked him softly.
    â€œI’m hungry.”
    â€œI mean, why are you—”
    â€œI know what you meant; I’m not an idiot. But I’m hungry, and I dislike philosophical discussions on an empty stomach. If you’re determined not to eat, starve. You’ve probably become adept at it.”
    That brought a flush to her cheeks, and the color added something. Not beauty, not exactly, but warmth and life. She shoved her hair out of her eyes, pushed something off a chair, and pulled the chair up to the table, sitting down as heavily as her sixty pounds of weight allowed. Reaching over the ungainly lump that was the unopened pack, she grabbed the strips of dried meat and began to eat.
    â€œTo answer your question, Jay, I don’t know. I have no idea what I’m doing.” He swallowed warm water, brushed bread crumbs from the corner of his mouth, and looked at her face in the glow of magelight. At her disheveled hair. At her eyes. “It isn’t every day that someone steals my satchel in the streets of the thirty-second. I should have cut you; you were faster than I thought.”
    She shrugged, chewing slowly.
    â€œI thought leaving you with the money would be enough. I had no intention of seeing you again; I went out for a walk tonight, found these, and started back. But . . . I walked past your bridge on the river.” It would always be that to him, even years later: Jay’s bridge. “And I saw you there.”
    â€œYou could have kept walking. Everyone else does.”
    He nodded companionably. “I could have. But you could have taken what the farmer offered. You didn’t. And you offered to pay him for what he did manage to slip you the last time you visited. I don’t need to tell you how unusual that is.”
    As she frowned, he realized that he might be wrong on that last point. “You don’t work,” he said