“I wonder who she was before,” Petra whispered.
“A person who could be used and thrown away,” Astrophil said pityingly. “I have read that there are thousands of orphans in Prague. She was probably someone who would not be missed.”
“Even if nobody misses her, I bet she misses the person she used to be.” Petra laid her hoska at the girl’s bare, dirty feet.
And that was when she felt invisible fingers dip inside her shirt and snatch away her purse.
10
The Long-Fingered Thief
PETRA SPUN AROUND and caught a glimpse of a dark blur ducking around a corner not far ahead. “Hang on,” she told the spider. She sprinted down the street. She was swift and nimble. She would have been pleased by how easily she jumped over obstacles and swung around corners if she hadn’t been so worried about losing sight of the boy running ahead of her. He had stolen just about all the krona she had.
The Gypsy was twisting and turning down the narrow lanes, hoping to lose her. But, as his bad luck would have it, he ran down streets that Petra knew from this morning, and she remembered very well how this area was laid out. Suddenly he turned right. Petra gave a satisfied half smile. He had just disappeared down a blind alley. His only way out of the street would be to slip brazenly into one of the shops or homes. Petra sped up to prevent him from doing exactly that.
When she turned down the alley, he gave her the look of a hunted animal. She seized him by the arm. “Give it back!”
“I ain’t got nothing of yours!” he shouted. “Let me go!” He kicked at her, but she gripped him firmly.
“What’s going on here?” The belly of an officer turned the corner of the alley, soon followed by the man who owned it. He trundled toward them. “Did I hear some shouting? This little Gyp stole something from you?” He looked with disgust at Petra’s prisoner.
The squirming boy froze, and stared at Petra with an expression of utter fear. It was the first time she saw his face clearly. His dark skin was scarred by the pox. The notch across his left cheek had probably been made by a knife. Beneath brows that looked like they were drawn by two strokes of a thick goose quill drenched in ink, his tawny eyes stared. Petra’s first impression was that they were cracked, because their yellow color was marked by so many flecks of green.
What do they do to thieves in Prague? she asked herself. In Okno, men and women were thrown into the local prison for various periods of time, but children who stole were usually left to the mercy of their parents and sometimes had to labor for whomever they had wronged. From the boy’s expression, however, Petra gathered that the law here didn’t send boy thieves out to the orchards to pick fruit for grocers. So she said, “Oh, no, sir. No, we were just playing a game.”
“Is that right? Thought you’d waste an officer’s time, then? Cause a big fuss for nothing? Get everyone worked up?”
“I’m very sorry, sir. You’re right. We weren’t thinking. We were playing Catch the Pig Tail.” She glared at the boy for remaining silent. Why did she have to come up with all the excuses? She kept a good grip on him with her right hand, for she suspected he wouldn’t think twice about running away at the earliest opportunity—and with her purse, which he must have tucked away somewhere inside his clothes.
“Hill-folk and their idiot games! I have a mind to take both of you in just for annoying me.” The officer’s red beard quivered as he frowned. “Unless you got a good reason why I shouldn’t.” He looked at Petra meaningfully. To her surprise, the boy did the same. They both seemed to expect her to do something.
“Well, yes. Um, I’m really, really sorry. Both of us. We’re—” she stammered.
“Petra.” Astrophil’s hushed voice in her ear was tired, as if he couldn’t believe he had to explain. “He wants a bribe.”
“Oh! Of course.” The officer and the boy relaxed as she reached into her pocket with her left hand and pulled out two small coins. She dropped them into the man’s outstretched hand.
“That’s it?” His face fell.
“Well, my people, they’re just poor brassica farmers.” She gave the boy a look that she hoped said “I can catch you again,” and slowly let him go. She reached into her pockets and turned them inside out to show their emptiness. The boy did the same.
“Street urchins,” the officer harrumphed, and turned to lumber back out of the alley.
When he had left, Petra pounced on the boy and ducked both hands inside his shirt.
“Hey!” he shouted. “You foul-handed harpy!” She plucked her purse out from under his armpit. “I was gonna give it back! Give a lad a chance!” He stumbled away from her, his stained and sweaty shirt askew. She glared at him and then glanced inside the pouch to make sure everything was in it.
The boy drew himself up and smoothed down his shirt. “Now, normally I’d expect you to buy me breakfast, seeing as how you almost sent me to the gallows. But”—he grinned, catching her outraged eyes—“since you’re a lady and I’m a gentleman, I suppose it ought be my treat.”
AS THEY WANDERED down the crammed streets, she asked the boy, “Am I so obvious?”
“What, that you’re fresh from the hills, like the scratch said? Too right you’re obvious!” He had an odd way of speaking, and an accent she’d never heard before. His voice had a swing in its step, like someone walking in the city on his day off.
“No. Is it so obvious I’m not a boy?”
“Well …” he drawled. “It’s not like you’re the only one to have that idea. When we first arrived in Prague, my sis thought it’d be easier to move around the city alone as a boy than as a girl. Her getup worked for about five seconds. But she’s a real stunner, a drop-dead good-looker. She takes after me. Don’t worry, though. You do all right in a pair of trous, but I got a sharp eye.”
They reached the door of a pub called the Shorn Lamb and the boy led her through a maze of stuffy rooms. He brought her to a table in the corner and ordered two big bowls of stew from a woman with more blue tattoos on her arm than teeth in her mouth.
After she left, the boy stuck out his hand and pumped Petra’s when she took it. “Name’s Neel.”
“I’m Petra,” she said.
She still had her doubts about Neel, however, and so decided to warn Astrophil. She would try communicating with him silently. Yeah, right, she told herself, like that worked the last thousand times you tried it. But she concentrated. She felt something tickle in the back of her mind. Had she imagined it? She followed the slight buzzing sensation and focused on it. It was like the almost-silent hum of Astrophil’s internal gears, a sound she heard so often in her ear that she forgot about it. But the humming in her mind now was something she felt, as if Astrophil were inside her head. Certain she would not be heard, she nevertheless thought hard, Lie low. If he discovers and takes you, he could sell you for more krona than he can imagine.
The hum skipped. But Astrophil controlled his surprise, and sent this stern thought to Petra: There is no need to worry about me. Keep your eyes on him. I have been lying low, in case you did not notice.
An astonished, elated feeling washed through her. Astro! Astro?
What?
You can hear me! I can hear you! I did it! I did it!
Yes, yes. You did. But we can celebrate later. For the moment, I beg you to be sensible and pay attention to that street thief you have inexplicably decided to befriend.
Neel was studying her. Excitement had illuminated her face. “You’re a moody one,” he said. “Glowering one moment and glowing the next.” He paused. “And you’re quick, for a kitchin.”
“A what?”
“A kitchin morte.”
“Um …”
“A girl. A kitchin is a girl.”
“Oh. So … is that word from your language? Your voice sounds different. Of course, no one here talks like folk in Okno, but you … are different,” she finished lamely.
“Kitchin morte is Cant. I got my own language.”
“What is Cant?
”
“Cant’s what the Company of Rogues speak. The Company’s like a … like a guild. A group of no-good-doers who work together.”
“You mean thieves.”
“Thieves, sure. And jugglers, tinkers, actors, hucksters, ruffians, coney-catchers, cardsharpers, play-beggars, hey-passers, pot-whippers, fortune-tellers, and the like. And their kids.”
“Are you part of the Company of Rogues?”
“Nah. I got my own people.”
“You’re a Gypsy.”
“The word Gypsy … well, it’s not exactly in a crate.”
Petra paused. “Do you mean ‘inaccurate’?”
He swallowed a mouthful of the stew and then pointed at her with his spoon. “It ain’t right, see? Gypsy means ‘Egyptian.’ I don’t come from Egypt. We call ourselves Roma, and we speak Romany. It’s a funny thing …” he trailed off, looking at her. “It’s strange you caught me lifting your purse. Roma are flash thieves. And I have never been caught.” He was silent for a moment. Then he lifted his right hand and pinched his forefinger and thumb together.
Petra yelped and dropped her spoon. She rubbed her left arm, which had been resting on the table several feet from Neel.
“Interesting.” He lifted his hand again.
Petra resisted the urge to slap it away. “It is not so interesting if you’re the one getting pinched.”
“Very interesting,” he pronounced, lowering his hand. “You weren’t supposed to feel that.”
“What did you do? How did you do it?”
Neel lifted his hand again. Petra’s spoon lifted into the air and plopped into her stew. “Eat up.”
She stared at him. “Can you move things with your mind?”
“Nah. It’s more like …” He flexed his hand. “Like I’ve got extensions. Like my fingers are real, real long but you can only see a little bit.”
“Doesn’t that get in the way? When you eat with a spoon, are you grabbing it with the tips of your real fingers? Are the invisible parts hanging around and jabbing into your face?”
He laughed. “That’d be awkward! No, the ghosts come and go. If I feel myself wanting something, like a fine ribbon for my sis or to play a joke on someone, my fingers just kind of grow longer. The ghosts go away when I don’t need em. It’s very useful.”
He took in her expression of rapt attention. Then he leaned forward across the table.
“Did you ever hear that people who lose a leg sometimes feel the part that’s missing?” he asked. “That they can twitch their ghostly toes and feel an ankle that ain’t there?”
“No. Is that true?”
“Of course it is. Why, I met a rogue who’d got his leg crushed by a horse. The mangled bits were chopped off below his knee, but he swore he could still feel jolts of pain in his ghost limb and had dreams of walking.”
“How do you know he could really feel the leg that wasn’t there? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.” Petra was uneasy at the thought that someone might still feel a missing part of the body. Could her father feel his phantom eyes? Did they cause him pain? He had never mentioned it.
“I don’t care if you do or don’t believe me. Just pretend to believe me for a spell. Course, if you don’t want to hear my story, a Roma story that normally someone who isn’t Roma wouldn’t hear …”
“Tell me.”
Neel smiled. “Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, our people lived in the desert. They trained horses and elephants. Now, both are beasts you can train and ride. But they sure don’t think alike. If a horse loves you, he loves you across hot coals and battlegrounds and buggy swamps. But an elephant needs to know why you want something. He has to agree that what you’re doing makes at least some sense.
“The Roma used to be split into three tribes, not four like we’ve got now. The Ursari is the tribe best at training animals. Fact is, they still sell animals to the gadje”
“What’s the gadje?”
“Outsiders, you know. Like you. Now, there was one Ursari tribesman named Danior who was better at handling horses and elephants than the rest. He also had a clearer way of seeing things than most of the Ursari. It gets hard to like someone who’s always better than you, and the Ursari leader especially didn’t like Danior. Soon he began to downright hate him. So one morning Danior woke up alone in the desert. His tribe had left him high and dry. He had his tent, but no water and nothing to hunt with. And that’s sure death in the desert.
“He plodded along in the burning sand, looking for water. You can’t last long like that. Soon he lay down and waited to die. Then it struck him that he could hear something. It was the sound of many hooves. He thought maybe his tribe had come back for him, so he hefted himself up.
“But it wasn’t the Ursari. It was a group of gadje, and pretty important-looking ones at that. Seven mean-eyed warriors on horses were in the lead. Behind them walked an elephant carrying a man who was the most important one of all.
“Now, Danior recognized most of the horses and the elephant, too, because he had trained them. And who was the gadje on the elephant? It was none other than the desert king, who had a goldglittering wife and eleven pretty children.
“Danior raised his hands, asking the warriors for help. They stared straight ahead, like he didn’t exist. Then Danior begged the horses to help him. The horses, though, loved their masters like Danior trained em to. So the horses listened to their masters and ignored him.
“Then came the elephant. The desert king tilted back and forth on top, in a little house that was strapped onto the elephant’s back. Danior saw that one strap was loose and dangling down, and he reached for it.
“The desert king looked down, drew out his sword, and slashed it, cutting off every single finger on Danior’s hands.”
Petra gasped. “What happened then?”
“The elephant knew Danior for who he was, and she didn’t agree with the desert king’s treatment of him. So she reared up. She shook off the house and the wicked king with it. She reached out with her long nose and wrapped it around Danior. She ran off fast, faster than the horses and faster even than you, Pet. She took him to an oasis, where she lowered him into the water. She scooped up mud and patted it over Danior’s hands to stop the bleeding.
“The funny thing was, after his hands healed he discovered that the ghosts of his fingers were far better than his real ones. The ghosts were longer and dead quick. They could flash out and grab a desert hare by the ears. Danior hunted, and he learned to use his new fingers.
“But Danior had a score to settle with the wicked king. When he rode out of the oasis on his elephant, he headed straight for the capital city, where the white palace stood tall like a hard flower.
“That night, he snuck toward the palace. His invisible nails clicked open locked doors. Soon, he was in the nursery, looking at a row of princes and princesses snug in their beds.
“Danior was a fair man. He led away only ten of the wicked king’s children, one for every missing finger, and left behind one son. That prince grew up to hate the Roma for stealing his family, but he also hated them for not wanting him, too.
“When Danior reached the city gates, he loaded his new children into a big wagon, promising them kindness and freedom. He hitched the wagon to the elephant, and the great gray beast galloped over the sand.
“That’s how Danior began a new tribe of Roma called the Kalderash. They’re a secretive lot. Also too snobby for my taste. But that’s what comes from thinking your great-great-great-great-whatever-grandda was Danior of the Ursari, and that your relations were princes and princesses.”
“What did Danior do to the Ursari?”
“Do?”
“Well, they left him to die. He avenged himself against the wicked king. Didn’t he avenge himself against his tribe?”
Neel looked at her as if she had sugges
ted the sky was orange. “You can’t avenge yourself against your own people.”
Petra saw what he meant. It was hard to say who had been crueler to Danior, the wicked king or the Ursari. But family is family, even if they abandon you in the desert.
“Are you a member of the Kalderash tribe?” Petra asked.
“Nope. The Lovari. We’re players—you know, we act and sing and juggle and fiddle and the like. But it sure doesn’t pay well.”
“You have magic skills.” She looked at him with respect. “And you’re so young.”
“I’m not. I’m older than you.”
Petra was skeptical. He was a few inches shorter than she was. “How old are you?”
“Well … I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
He shifted uncomfortably and began eating again. “Truth is, it’s not uncommon to have long fingers like I’ve got.”
Petra considered pressing him to explain why he didn’t know how old he was, but then it occurred to her that she also had things she didn’t want to share. Instead she said, “Really? Lots of Gypsies can do what you do?”
“Roma.”
“Sorry. Roma. Are they all long-fingered?”
“Nah, not all. But plenty. The Gift of Danior’s Fingers runs strong with the Kalderash, but it pops up everywhere in the Roma, cause of marrying across the tribes. It’s very useful for us Lovari, since I can pick a pocket or two whilst my cousins put on a puppet show. Though other people aren’t supposed to feel it when you use them. Which makes you”—his yellowy eyes narrowed—“right odd.”
They were both quiet for a moment. Neel ducked his head down and continued eating his stew in silence.
Perhaps, Astrophil offered, he is wondering what he has gotten himself into. Might you not do the same?