Free Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows by Winterborn Page B

army. You can make an honest living. But they don't take no thieves, and I don't want no thieves in my house. You want to stay with me? You don't steal." She spit. "You can beg, if you want. You can sit in the streets with your hands out. But you take what they give you, you understand?"
    He nodded, because nodding was safe.
    And she looked as if she was going to cry. "You're the only thing in my life I've done right," she told him, touching his hair and his face with her shaking hands. "The only one. Don't break my heart. Don't make a lie out of all the work I done."
    But it wasn't, in the end, his choice; it wasn't in the end, hers. That was the lie.
    "Teller?"
    He looked up. The surface of the kitchen table was as clean and polished as the counters. They were never this clean. It was a bad sign. Where was the inkwell, the messy blotters, the quills that, time and again, Jewel ATerafin destroyed?
    She had packed them away. Had cleaned house. Had left. That was the plan.
    She'd done everything she could to make them a home in House Terafin. They had jobs now. They had more money than he had ever dreamed of having. They had responsibilities that they could be—that they were—proud of. Jewel's little den of thieves. Jay's misfits.
    Because of her.
    Where was she?
    He didn't want to talk to Finch. He didn't want to talk to anyone. But he looked up and nodded when she called his name again.
    Didn't much like what he saw there. Hadn't really expected to. "What—what's the news?"
    She was so pale, so gray; he had learned to hate those colors when they resided beneath the soft peach tones of skin.
    "Half the Common's been destroyed."
    "We knew that."
    Finch swallowed. She started to speak, but the door banged the wall behind her, and they both looked up. Angel was in the door, hands on either side of the frame as if—as if he were trying to shore up his own weight. His hair was in full spiral, his one conceit.
    Finch gave conversational ground as easily as Teller did. "Angel?"
    "She wants us."
    For a moment, Teller felt a wild hope, but he killed it quickly.
    "Who wants us?"
    "The Terafin." He turned to look at the frame six inches above his hand. "Jay was in that market, as far as anyone's been able to tell. We've got her movements down just that far."
    Teller ATerafin lowered his head to the surface of the kitchen table and let it rest there, against the cool wood.
    "We're supposed to help her," Angel continued. "Word's out for Arann as well. Carver's already left with Jester."
    The gates of the Terafin Manse passed by him like a dream. He had seen them for half of his life, but every so often he would pause in front of them, to the amusement or the consternation of the House Guard, and touch their polished rails. Nothing encroached upon that brass patina, that endless shine; whole days were spent tending to their appearance, as if they were the House armor.
    Whole days, and more money than he and his mother would see in a month, when they had lived in the twenty-third holding, in the hundred, in the old city.
    He tried not to steal. He really did try.
    But there were nights when his mother came home emptyhanded, and her face was sallow with exhaustion and fear, her voice hoarse. He hated that fear. She would go to bed, and he would join her, and they would wake hungry and go to bed hungry until she left again.
    When he was seven, those nights came more frequently. She said it was because of her teeth, because she had lost two. It was true. Her teeth, her lack of teeth, changed the way she looked. But she was his mother, and he loved her fiercely, and with a child's terror.
    Those days, he would go to the streets himself—never at night, never then. And he would spend the day begging, and if that didn't go well, he would try his hand at worse. He always lied to her, though. He always told her that he had come by the money honestly.
    He thought she believed him, because she didn't beat him. He would take her out to the