Kared's Children - Chapter 7

That they were thieves, yes, in the early days, that much had been true. When they were younger, they would have considered the title high praise. They’d been pickpockets and hooligans, messenger boys for the low-life crowd to whom now they were legends. But, over time, their interest in material possessions had waned. As they’d become more and more adept at acquisition, as they’d learned how to trade instead in information, their incomes had stabilized and they’d been able to move away from the types of criminal activities that could have wound up any of their lives in the stockade.

Now, they threatened no one-at least, no one who didn’t deserve to be threatened. Now they stole from no one-except information that, in all honesty, even after their activities, its previous holders still possessed, and to which, too often, those holders themselves had not been entitled or even necessarily its original owners. No, they shared the wealth of existence, as Shaerden liked to say. They helped the spread of education, Raven said. And in the process of all this sharing, all this spreading, somehow, inexplicably, they’d become respectable. Pillars of the Taroc community, such as it was.

A frontier town, Gerald thought dreamily, Taroc was a good place to live. A port on the shore of the Great Southern Sea, the city was secondary to the central port at Star, to the east. Traffic usually flowed to Taroc only to supply the town with goods. The main supply lines for the kingdom ran upwards into the country from Star, which had a bay to protect the fleets from the weather and docks to handle the flow of goods downward along the eastern shore of the kingdom. Taroc, however, was in the corner of the peninsula, near the Calaran Mountains, cut off from the rest of the peninsula by the Taroc hills and Mount Taroc, and was far from the normal routine of civilization. It was easier here to become a pillar, when the nearest large city was Creg, many days to the northeast.

To live nestled between the mountains that marked the edge of the explored world and the sea, which, as far as he could say, no one ever had crossed, gave the inhabitants of the city their own peculiar senses of ruggedness and desperation which often passed for willfulness and strength. The quick thrived here, the quick and intelligent, and not necessarily the most polite. The six of them, friends, brothers in spirit and life if not blood, had managed to climb up out of the streets on the power of their own rough senses of justice. They never had betrayed anyone who hadn’t intended first to betray them. They were true to who they were-which, Gerald supposed, was as close to real honesty as anyone ever could be.

But all of that had changed today, when the news of the attack on Rowan had reached the city and when the Alaran had appeared. Gerald liked the mage. He liked his insight and his sense of humor. Benjamin himself seemed honest, but that might just have meant he merely was being himself. Gerald wasn’t sure, yet, based on all that he had seen of the Alaran, exactly who that self was. He was a mix, that one. A curiosity. He looked young, but he talked as though he had a sense of history that Gerald only ever had seen in the aged.

Gerald had no doubt, though, after that trick in the Council Chamber with the mark on his shoulder, that Benjamin was a mage. Gerald never had seen any anything like that on his body before, and by the time he’d climbed into bed, the mark had faded-but, based on the way Benjamin had acted, just because Gerald couldn’t see the mark didn’t mean it wasn’t there. He wondered how he had gotten it. It was one more thing about his life, which previously had seemed so familiar, so comfortable, that he didn’t know.