The Box Read Free

on his knuckle, and thought of the damned box as he followed the Sczarni thug to the kapteo’s tent.
    Among the Sczarni, a shoemaker is never just a shoemaker.
    Tent. Here they were in Magnimar, a city that boasted more buildings than it did people to live in them for much of the year, and the chief of the Wreckwash Blades lived in a damned tent. The courtyard was central to an entire block of tenements, all bursting with the Blades’ families, but the kapteo himself maintained the central position in what resembled a typical Varisian traveling camp. Tents and wagons littered the area, as did the slow cookfires of a dozen potato-faced matrons, busy monitoring their spicy chap’vwlash trail stews with one eye while keeping the other fixed on the chaos of their barefoot grandchildren. An ironsmith pounded out nails at an open-air anvil, a turner hunched over a foot-pumped lathe, and a gaggle of women took turns milling at a portable grindstone. If it were not for the clotheslines stretching overhead from window to window, Kostin would have forgotten he was in the city at all.
    They came up short of the kapteo’s tent, a green silk dome that was as humble in size as it was rich in material. Kostin’s escort snapped his fingers for attention and performed a curious gesture, a raising and parting of the hands before the face. “Do this when you enter. Let me see you try.”
    Kostin obeyed, imitating the gesture perfectly and adding a few flourishes of his own.
    “Good enough,” the guard grunted. Kostin thanked him.
    The man spat on the ground. “I do not show you for your thanks, muschi-uepoi, but only so that you do no dishonor to the kapteo.”
    “Well, thanks anyway,” Kostin muttered as he stepped inside the tent.
    In the smoky light of a single, sputtering lantern, the kapteo of the Wreckwash Blades was hard at work mending shoes.
    “Ah… Kapteo Giuleppeschi…?” Kostin asked, confused. Could this really be the captain of a criminal clan?
    “Sit,” said the old man, not bothering to look up from the floor and the simple leather shoe he was hunched over. Arrayed about him were well-worn tools of the shoemaker’s trade.
    Kostin performed the gesture of obeisance he had been shown, uncertain if the man had even seen it, and sat down cross-legged on a brocaded pillow.
    Waiting in silence, Kostin watched the kapteo’s strong hands draw sinew thread through the tough old leather of the shoe. After a space of time that Kostin could not measure, the kapteo spoke.
    “In life,” he said, putting down the shoe and raising his washed-out blue eyes to look directly at Kostin for the first time, “we do what we must. My father made shoes, and so I have the skill. Your father was a good man, Kostinnavolus, and so I wonder why you are perhaps a bad one?”
    Startled to hear his full name from the mouth of a stranger, Kostin blurted, “You didn’t know my father.”
    The kapteo nodded. “True. I only knew of him. There was a time when I knew all the comings and goings of the People from Rag’s End to the Underbridge. He was a good man, as you know. He would not cross silver with us, with any clan. And for that we loved him in our way—he was as the stone that does not feel the storm. A strong man is like that, yes? Do you follow?”
    “I…” Kostin was at a loss for words. He glanced down at his dirty breeches, ash-smeared from the scorched remains of his father’s home. He was conscious for the first time of smelling like smoke.
    “But you are here, now.” The kapteo grinned, leaning back in evident satisfaction. “And that can only mean you have failed him, yes? You are a boy in trouble, a boy in a man’s body, just as any nestling who has hid like a child from the world.” It was said mildly, matter-of-factly, but the venom of the old man’s words was palpable.
    Kostin, anger kindled, locked eyes with the kapteo and bared his teeth.
    “A friend is an enemy’s enemy,” Kostin quoted the old Varisian