Free Dirty Eden by J. A. Redmerski

piece of cloth in one large crack and an old bed sheet in another.
    Tsaeb dragged his bag of riches across the creaking floor and stuffed it, with difficulty, underneath the bed. Jewels, rings, and a golden thimble tumbled out. He shoved them back inside only to have more fall out. Giving up, he draped a ragged, mildew-stained blanket sloppily over the side of the bed to conceal the stash.
    “I think I’ll stay in the room,” I said, taking a seat in a wobbly chair with uneven legs. I leaned back, my legs splayed and relaxed out into the floor. Absently, I broke apart the buttons of my dress shirt.
    “Better eat while we’re here.”
    “No way I’m eating anything from this place,” I sneered. “I’ll do just fine with my cheese crackers. Where’s my backpack, anyway?” I raised my back from the seat, looking around.
    “By the door.” Tsaeb nodded in that direction. “Suit yourself, but you’ll need something more than crackers in your stomach before we leave Fiedel City.”
    “I’ll take my chances.”
    I watched Tsaeb for a moment, eyeing the kid from across the room. He appeared harmless, like a child should, when he wasn’t running his foul mouth. His soft, boyish cheeks were speckled with freckles. His lashes were long and thick, black and perfect; the kind women pay high dollar for back home in my city. He even had dimples when he smiled, though his smiles were usually grins or smirks, and perhaps those dimples were the perfect disguise.
    Tsaeb moved toward his bag again and lifted the blanket in his fingertips.
    “Gotta look important,” he said slipping on the dead carriage driver’s oversized rings.
    “Won’t that make you a target?”
    “Yeah,” he answered, positioning a golden vambrace on one arm, “but a target that gets respect,” then the matching vambrace on the other. “And around here, if you got wealth, most think you got bodyguards sitting around in the shadows ready to pounce.”
    “Oh, like that wealthy man hanging from a noose six buildings down?” I shook my head. “ That kind of important?”
    Tsaeb stuffed several gemstones and gold coins deep in his pockets. He straightened his vambraces, which hardly fit his little forearms, and balled his hands into fists so that the rings would not fall off. He looked ridiculous.
    “You wouldn’t get executed because you’re rich, only if you try to kill the queen.”
    “Why do so many want her dead?”
    Tsaeb shrugged.
    He did a wonderful job avoiding the question.
    Against my vow to stay in the room, we headed back to the noisy tavern downstairs.
    I sat on a barstool, crushed between two men. The man to my left had a shiny balding head. There was more hair on his chin; long, gray and disheveled, where just below his bottom lip the coarse strands were wet with ale.
    “Bah! Morris McAlister has seen worse,” said the bearded man. The sound of his wooden mug hitting the bar top was brief.
    I wiped the corner of my eye where a few driblets of warm ale had ejected from the mug.
    Tsaeb had already eaten and now sat quietly, picking his teeth.
    “It’s like you’re talkin’ to yourself,” said the man to my right, with long brown hair, untied and unwashed. He looked at me. “One of them slave boys that talk in first-person...erm, third person...Ah! You know what I mean!” Then he turned back to the bearded man named Morris McAlister. “And what do you know anyway? You live in this tavern. Hardly ever see anything outside it.”
    “Morris knows well enough, you fool. He was there when Queen Agrippine — ”
    “For the sake of all drunken men here, Morris, stop using your damned name!” the brown-haired man said back at him. “You’re confusing me and I’ve known you for an unfortunate fifteen years!”
    Roasted swine filled my nostrils, but it wasn’t a pleasant smell. There was something about it, something rotten or spoiled. And the flies loved this place. The barmaids made their rounds, slapping away groping