He scanned the building, rain bouncing off the red-tiled roofs — the same dull red common to every tithe-village scattered around the monastery. Bricce, a young boy of eight summers, sat half in shadow, sunk back against the wall as he watched another boy slip into a run-down house across the lane.
He pulled out a scrap of parchment and made a small cross against it with a stub of pencil.
The rain found its way down his collar, and he sniffed against the sudden chill of it. Then he was up off the wall, quick as a flash, and gone.
The room he walked into moments later was opulent, though Bricce didn’t know enough yet to recognise opulence when he saw it. It was simply where he went to give his report. He wasn’t allowed to linger.
It was the home office of the Takers — the crown’s own men and women, whose sole task was collecting orphaned children off the street. It wasn’t spoken of as a kidnapping ring, not by anyone who worked within it. It was sanctioned, official, a needed service in the eyes of those who ran it — the kind of thing that stopped pickpockets and minor crime before it started. If a child’s parents died, that child belonged to the crown until their eighteenth year, at which point they were “helped” into paid work — whatever work nobody else wanted, or the military, or the Order, depending on the sort of person they’d turned out to be.
Bricce was a watcher. His task was simple: look, mark, and report. He was good at it.
Inside the office, two other children already stood waiting to give their own reports, though the woman who took them wasn’t there yet. “Just a minute, my little sparrows,” she called from another room, her voice carrying easily through the thin wall. She emerged a moment later, adjusting the front of her dress in a way that suggested it had recently been in some disarray, a guard trailing behind her, red-faced and refusing to meet anyone’s eye.
“What news do my little sparrows bring me today?” she beamed at the children, and she meant it, in her own way. She really did like them.
She liked the money finding them brought her rather more.
Work came in fits and starts, the way it always did — busy stretches chasing new faces through the market, then long, empty days with nothing to do but wait for the next one to need marking.
He sat slumped in a chair, chewing on a particularly stubborn piece of dried meat, while the noise coming from the next room made it plain enough that the guard and the lady were at their usual business again. Bricce worked the gristle between his teeth, eventually pulling it free to examine it properly.
“Ugh,” he said, with real feeling, and looked over at the other waif sharing the room with him. “How long they been at it?”
“Dunno,” the other child said. “But my ears are bleeding.”
They both dissolved into muffled, badly suppressed noises, imitating the sounds coming through the wall with the gleeful cruelty only children seem capable of. “Uh — uh,” moaned the waif. “Yeah — yeah — so good,” Bricce added, and within moments both of them were circling the room, chanting it back and forth at each other, thoroughly pleased with themselves.
Then Bricce’s stomach let out a tremendous gurgle.
“I’m hungry,” he said, all the levity gone from his voice in an instant.
He sat back down properly this time. The other child, apparently done waiting, gave him a small wave and let himself out.
After another ten minutes or so, the pair emerged. The woman was, out of habit, still adjusting the front of her top. The guard’s face remained a deep, unrecovered red.
She looked to the boy. “Little sparrow,” she said, fond.
“That was the longest ten minutes of my life,” Bricce said, entirely innocent of what he was actually commenting on.
The woman laughed, delighted. “Mine too.”
The guard muttered something about it feeling considerably longer than that, then cuffed Bricce round the back of the head on his way past. “Cheeky git,” he said.
“Oi,” the woman said, sharp. “That’s my prized bird you’re clipping. Go on, get out.”
The guard stomped off, absently rubbing at himself as he went.
“I’m hungry,” Bricce said again, to no one in particular.
The door the two of them had come through swung open behind her, not quite having caught on its latch. The woman’s eyes flicked toward the gap for half a heartbeat, quick and guilty, before she caught herself and looked back to Bricce instead, her face arranging itself into practised regret.
“We’re a little tight at the moment,” she said. She rummaged through a nearby drawer, coming up eventually with something small and sticky, faintly grey with lint and whatever else had been living in that drawer alongside it.
“Here you go.” She pressed the sweet into his palm like it was a genuine kindness. “This’ll keep you going.”
Bricce took it outside and sat on the step, working the lint off it as best he could before he ate it, and found Yuland already there ahead of him, looking considerably less pleased with the world than usual.
Yuland was older, near enough grown, and grown meant something specific in this house — it meant a job, whatever job the crown decided a person had earned by turning eighteen with no better options waiting. Yuland’s turned out to be sewer tollman. Sifting through the muck beneath the streets, keeping the flow moving, keeping the city’s mess from becoming the city’s problem.
“That’s not a job,” Yuland said, staring off down the empty street. “That’s a punishment somebody decided to call a job.”
Bricce didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything.
“You know she’s got food in there. Real food. Money too, more than she’ll ever spend.” Yuland nodded toward the house behind them. “Keeps it all for herself and hers, and fobs the rest of us off with whatever’s gone soft in a drawer somewhere.”
“She looks after us,” Bricce said, though it came out less certain than he’d meant it to.
“Go and look, if you don’t believe me.”
Bricce didn’t believe him. Not properly, not yet. But the words stuck regardless, the way words do when some part of you already suspects they’re true before the rest of you is ready to admit it.
He couldn’t sleep that night. Food, his own head kept telling him, over and over, in Yuland’s flat, tired voice. Room. Go and look.
So he did.
The room was exactly as Yuland had promised it would be — meat, bread, fruit, wine, all of it sitting untouched and forgotten while children two rooms over went to sleep hungry on purpose. He found the money too, a small locked box not locked nearly well enough to keep out a boy who’d learned exactly how people hid things they didn’t want found.
He took a few jats. Not many. He didn’t trust himself to know how many was safe to take without it being noticed.
Then he stood over the food a long moment, and found himself reaching past the fresh bread, past the fruit that would have kept him fuller and longer, for the sweets instead — three of them, real ones, nothing like the lint-covered thing he’d been handed like charity that same afternoon.
He was still holding them when the door opened.
The woman and the guard looked at him a moment, the boy standing there with jats in one fist and stolen sweets in the other, caught entirely and plainly in the act.
Neither of them said a word.
They simply walked into the room, and closed the door quietly behind themselves.