I HAVE WONDERED what my twelve-year-old self would have thought of the night we were about to have in that city. Errol Thebes was crossing the sky, leaping from tower to tower on the back of a furred projectile that had entered this world through his ribs. Meanwhile, I was finding my way with the muse of the dance.
My twelve-self would have loved this.
The year I was twelve I used to lie in my sack every single night, thinking the same grand things. Soon I will be splendid, I thought. They’ll send me early to the roofs like the best of all the pelts in this guild. I will be wild up there and run faster than everyone. Roof masters will refer to me behind my back as indispensable. Everyone will love me like men love Arthur and Beowulf and Odysseus, the way they love my cousin Errol. I will be perfect. I’ll not have any time to think about life after the roofs. All the kelps I once knew will wish they were me. And while I am in high places I’ll find a girl so enticing she will take all of my attention. She will be so beguiling, every runner, especially Errol, will writhe with jealousy when they see her with me. And on some night when I have chased her around the roofs all night I will take her clothes off, first her tunic and then her leggings.
That is as far as I ever got, when I was twelve and alone in my bedroll.
And then I was thirteen, and fifteen, and seventeen. Not a kelp, not a guilder: a mearc-stapa, in our grandmothers’ tongue. A haunter of the borderlands. And it was tonight: the tenth of Rhagfyr of the fabricated year of DCCXIII. My roof master was gone. And my birth had been forgotten. And I had garlic breath from the soufflés Ping had made us for supper, and I was wearing my red wool tunic with the torn armpit, and I had brought with me a pack of cards, and my old flat pillow I’ve had since I was four. Was I staying? Was I going?
It was a blur. I was seventeen, but I was my twelve-year-old idiot self. This runner with her hands on me, she was infinitely unexplored, a world outside my walls. Her hair was still wet from the swim. I could feel her pulse behind her ears and in her chest, and then she put her fingers in my mouth and on my hip bones and pulled up my tunic and found my belly button and kissed me on my mouth while she touched me where only my own hands had ever been. I smelled her sweat and tasted my tears.