Excerpt: Untitled

We lived in a world of shadow, the witch and I. The sun did not often find its way into our lives, bleak as they were, but that truly was a conscious choice the witch made, or so I understood. I do not know if it is the truth; I was very young when we arrived in Thenerai, to live on the fringes outside Asylomaer among the other poor and amid the rest of the outcasts. The witch thought she might find a reasonable living there, but ultimately she was wrong. The nobs she thought to sell her services to barely acknowledged her existence; they preferred to deal with the more established practitioners within the walls, and the other grubs like us couldn't afford what she sold most times. Many days, she barely earned enough to feed us. On the days when she did not, I did my part and ventured into the city to steal it, if I could.

I ran a risk every time I did, since in Asylomaer they dismember thieves even to this day. A thief loses his primary hand on the first capture, and he loses the other if he's caught a second time. One who manages to steal a third time loses his head. I had been lucky. I kept both of my hands, but I also did not take too many chances. If I could do it, I did. If I felt at all unsafe, I did not. On those days the witch resorted to other means of getting money for food.

She never had any trouble finding customers for that sort of work. She was an attractive woman, still south of middle age and lithe and dark in a way uncommon in Asylomaer, where most of the citizens were fair. She often told me that we had come from the west where the people are dark, but I never entirely believed her. She may have come from west, but I was not dark… or I was not dark like the witch. I did have dark hair, but the rest of me was quite fair, like the people in Asylomaer. I don't know where I came from. I never even knew the witch's name until I was fourteen, rather like I never knew my parents' names. The witch called me Sparrow. I don't know why, and I never knew who gave me the name. I don't remember my parents, either, if I ever even knew them, even as a small child. My only memory of a caretaker was the witch, and she would never talk of them, and I don't think she knew them, either. She never explained how I came to be in her hands, which I resent now. These are things I would have liked to know, the things most children know—who sired them, who gave them birth, what land they called their own. I never had any of that. I had just the witch and a hovel outside of Asylomaer, thievery and whoredom, since she did involve me in that when I was old enough.