He nodded.
“And the shaving brush? Will’s?”
He nodded again.
Shana had a small basket in the kitchen where Clover put the week’s grocery budget. The coins were in plain view, but he hadn’t taken any. None of this stuff was valuable. They were just small mundane objects we had handled.
We looked at the collection some more.
“Kaiden, how did your parents die?”
He looked down at his feet. “Mom got sick. She came home and her skin was burning up. She went to bed. In the morning there were circles of welts on her face and her breath whistled.”
Ring fever. Highly infectious and hard to cure. Sometimes it came into the city on ships, usually from the south, and burned entire city blocks before they caught it.
“I wanted to take care of her, but Dad took me to Sart’s house.”
“Who was he?”
“A tailor.” His tone dripped hate. “He borrowed money from Dad. Dad told him he had to take me as an apprentice. Sart didn’t want to, but Dad said the debt was registered so if Sart didn’t take me, he would take his shop. I didn’t want to stay there. I didn’t want to be a tailor, but Dad said he had to take care of Mom and he would come back for me in five days. He said not to worry. It would be fine.”
“He didn’t come back,” I guessed.
Kaiden shook his head. “I waited five days, then I waited three more. Sart would get drunk every night. One night he forgot to lock the room, so I snuck out and went home. The door was boarded up, so I had to get in through a window. It was gone.”
“What was gone?”
He met my eyes. “Everything. Mom, Dad, all of our things. Everything was gone. And then our neighbor came out and said Mom and Dad died. The city had burned our things to stop the plague. She told me to go back to Sart because that’s what Dad wanted for me. He signed a contract, and he wouldn’t want me to be a runaway apprentice. She said I had to honor my father’s dying wish.”
Oh god. His father had realized what was coming and he had gotten his son out before Kaiden either got sick or the city quarantined him in some cell while all of their belongings were destroyed. Kaiden would’ve come out an orphan with nothing to his name. Awful things happened to beggar children on Kair Toren’s streets.
“If you had stayed, you would’ve died, too,” I said gently.
Kaiden stared straight ahead at the wall.
“How long were you with Sart?”
“A year and a half. He was a shit tailor. He would drink and then he would beat me. I tried. I really tried because that’s what Dad wanted, but I got tired of him hitting me.”
“You fought back?”
He nodded. “He sold me to Derog in the morning.”
And we had rescued him. We were his new family. He wasn’t just stealing.
He was collecting pieces of us.
I was looking at the chest of Kaiden’s fears. He probably opened it and looked at his little treasures when he felt unsafe. If we disappeared from his life, at least he would have something.
He knew we were about to do something very dangerous. We had included him in the Butcher talks. Excluding him wouldn’t have worked—he would’ve just eavesdropped until he figured it out and it would’ve made him worry even more. But he was only twelve years old.
How to handle this . . .
“Your father didn’t want you to be a tailor. He didn’t want you to get beaten either. He just wanted to keep you safe, and he was out of time.”
“I know,” Kaiden said.
“Reynald is very skilled. Yesterday we went to confront Drugh. He brought two huge men with him. And then Reynald showed his face, and they fled.”
