I made it to the cistern before William lost it.

He’d been agitated all evening, probably because I hadn’t followed our daily routine. Normally, after dinner, we hit the markets one last time to pinch purses from clueless shoppers or swipe coins from unsuspecting vender and merchants. We’d stay there until near nightfall. He liked the hustle of the markets and the chiming of the bell of the nearby Agioi Apostoloi as it called an end to the day at the twelfth hour. He’d sit and stare at the cruciform church — the second largest in Constantinople — and rock and hum to himself while I perused the nearby open-air shops and stalls for potential unwilling donors to the Daniel-and-William-Have-to-Eat fund. 

But today we’d skipped the markets and were on our way back to Bojan’s an hour earlier than normal. Bojan was meeting with Darius, the Boss, the Afentikó, and hopefully selling him on my services. Today was supposed to be the day I went from a scrubby thief who stole only enough for a day’s food to a professional. I wanted into the inner circle of Darius and his men, to be someone respected, someone important.

Yet I was kneeling in front of my panicking older brother, rubbing the small of his back and whispering quiet, calming nonsense as he rocked like a ship at sea and bleated like a goat. He sat hunched over, his head cocked to the side, and stared at nothing in the distance with eyes half closed and lids fluttering as if he was trying to blink yet couldn’t quite manage it. The crowds of men and women who’d been sitting on the ledge of the cistern had fled at the sight of him, some even abandoning their full buckets of water or whatever linens they’d come to wash. They instead loitered nearby, staring with their judging eyes as my brother clenched a short, knotted length of rope in his left hand and frantically rubbed at its frayed edges with his palsied right.

It was my fault. I should’ve known that passing so close to the Agioi Apostoloi without stopping to let him listen to the bell or stare at the brown bricks would have set him off. His routine was as sacred as the services that happened inside the church, and altering them to speak with the afentikó was unwise. But what choice did I have? Darius wanted to see me at Bojan’s on the twelfth hour, so I would need to be at Bojan’s on the twelfth hour.

Which meant that William needed to calm down. Fast.

“It’s okay,” I said, voice low and relaxed as my hand continued to rub the small of his back. His only response was a loud whine as he violently shook his head back and forth and continued to rock.

The crowds murmured, some laughing and others pointing. I ignored them, something I was very practiced at, and kept speaking in an even voice. I doubted he understood the words. If he did, he never showed it. Yet he was calming, rocking less, moaning more quietly, hands fidgeting a little less frantically at the length of rope.

“What’s wrong with him?”

I flinched at the voice, despite how gently the words came. “Nothing,” I barked, turning to face whoever had been brave enough to approach us. “Just because he’s different doesn’t mean there’s anythi—”

I stopped, my voice caught in my throat, and laid eyes on Amina for the first time. I still recall the prickles on my skin, the flush of heat to my cheeks, the fluttering in my stomach. I could spend a great deal of time telling you of our first meeting, could recount even the finest detail, how she wore a white scarf loosely over her head, a wavy lock of russet-brown hair spilling free and cascading down the side of her face until it brushed against a sand-colored cheek. I could tell you of the flowing sky-blue dress that fell from her body like a river, how she smelled of fresh air and lilies and honey. I could sing songs of the brown of her eyes, how my heart nearly stopped when they finally met mine, how she smiled at my foolish gawking face, and how I swore I could die in that moment, so long as she kept smiling.

Yet every man who has been in love will tell you that it matters not the color of her dress or hair or cheeks or eyes. You may see Amina and feel nothing. Her smile may not stop your breath or grip your heart or bring a warmth to your soul like a winter’s fire. Her gaze may not hold you, may not make you offer her the world even after she breaks your heart. But I seek not to make you love her, only for you to understand how completely I did. 

“Will he be all right,” she asked. Her brow furrowed with genuine worry, her mouth a thin line instead of a mocking sneer. She looked at William with honest concern, something I’d never seen directed at either of us.

“He…uhhh…” I stammered, then cleared my throat and turned back to William. He’d stopped rocking, and his moaning was only a low hum at the back of his throat. “He’ll be fine.”

Her eyes fell to the rope. “Does that help?”

I stood, letting William drop his head against my hip as my arm slipped over his shoulder and he continued to fiddle with the rope. “It does. I think he likes how it feels.”

She studied him for a moment, tilting her head to match his. Her hands fiddled with the rope belt around her waist as she seemed to unconsciously mimic William. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked again.

“Nothing,” I said. I intended to put venom into my voice. I’d been asked that same question a thousand times, and not once had anyone cared to hear the answer. Yet she was concerned, motherly almost, and I found myself speaking to her in the same calm, even voice I’d just used on William. “Nothing,” I repeated. “He’s just…different. Not wrong.”

The corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. “I like that,” she said. “Different, not wrong. That can be said about a great many of us. What is his name?”

“William,” I answered. “I’m Daniel.”

“Amina,” she said, meeting my eyes and smiling more fully. My heart thumped, and I felt like a fool. “It was nice to have met you, Daniel.” She knelt in front of William and put her hand on his knee. I flinched, waited for him to panic again, then, for the briefest of moments, he made eye contact with her. “And you, also, William.”

He gave a low moan as if trying to respond, then his eyes were wandering again, focused on nothing, blinking furiously, and I could have sworn his cheeks reddened.

“He’s never…” I trailed off, unable to even finish the thought. 

“Never what?”

I studied William, saw the same distracted and distant brother I’d always seen. “Nothing. Never mind.”

She gave me a final smile that radiated warmth, then said, “Goodbye, Daniel.”

And with that, she was gone, disappearing into the crowd and leaving me standing by the cistern with mouth agape and heart racing.

***

My leather boots squelched on the muddied footpath. The morning’s rain still hadn’t cleared and only added to the filth and excrement that ran in brown rivulets toward an overflowing sewage drain. The refuse was supposed to empty into the Propontis south of the city but instead it only collected at a clogged drain, where it rotted and filled the alley with stench and disease. Shanties and shacks pressed together like a mouthful of crooked and rotten teeth, and men sat in the mud at the edges of the path in their stained breeches and flea-infested wool cloaks. Some slept in a drunken stupor, and others held out begging hands as if anyone who traveled this alley had anything to share. Farther down came a splash and a fresh wave of stench as someone likely emptied the contents of a chamberpot into the mud.

We were home.

Well, not exactly. Home was a word that had lost all meaning ten years ago, yet we were at the place where we’d slept the last few years since Bojan plucked us off the streets. It wasn’t much of a step up, but his home at least had a roof to ward off most of the elements. And he was patient enough with William, even if grudgingly, though I suspected my skill at thieving had a lot to do with that.

We made our way to the dilapidated porch in front of Bojan’s shack. It seemed to shake in the wind, and it might have been held up by nothing but abandoned hopes and dreams. A lopsided stool sat on the rotting wooden porch, none of its four legs the same length, and it creaked and groaned in protest as I sat William atop it. I paused a moment to be sure it held, then turned my gaze back out into the alley and watched as the rats picked at the waste in the coming darkness.

And waited.

The door to the home was shut, though I could hear the faint sound of voices inside, which meant that the Afentikó was already here. I didn’t like that the conversation was happening without me, that Bojan would have to sell me to Darius before he’d even speak with me. I wasn’t one of Bojan’s little urchins, some useless boy still learning how to steal. I was a man, nearly eighteen and already a good thief. 

It chafed me even more knowing that Nilus sat inside with them.

Nilus was older, but only by a year or so. He’d done jobs for Darius before, and Bojan had invited him inside to help convince Darius to take me on. I doubted Nilus had anything good to say about me, despite the fact that I was the better thief. He was a blunt instrument, cracking skulls in alleys and taking coins from their dead bodies. He could barely string together a sentence of three words, yet his ruthlessness had attracted Darius. Unlike Nilus, I had a deft hand, in and out before being seen and I didn’t leave any corpses behind.

“I don’t care!” The shout came from inside. I didn’t recognize the voice, which meant it was probably Darius. I’d never met him before, only heard his name mentioned in the shadows. “I don’t need a kid who can steal. I need a man. One who’s not afraid to get his hands bloody. And I especially don’t need his idiot brother.”

I flinched at that, though I didn’t have any time to get angry as the door scraped open. William jerked in surprise and stumbled from the stool. I grabbed him before he fell, then pulled him close so he could bury his face into my side. Bojan exited first, his tunic as dirty as his face. His near forty years of living in this squalid alleyway had grayed his beard and taken enough hair to make him look like a tonsured monk despite the fact that he was anything but. He saw me helping William and frowned. 

Darius came a step behind him and looked almost an exact opposite: clean-cut and freshly shaven, he wore a fur-lined velvet cloak clasped across his chest with a silver chain that somehow glistened in the moonlight. He managed a look of both disinterest and intimidation as he scanned the porch. His eyes went from the broken railing and rotting wood to the wobbly stool and the filthy alley behind us. He frowned, then looked at me with a cool judgment, the calm of someone who knew he was better than you, and I desperately wanted to be able to do the same.

“Bojan tells me you have good hands,” he said.

I nodded, not knowing what else to say. Darius was everything I wasn’t, and I needed him to accept me. I knew in that moment I would do anything to be like him, to be him.

“I have a locksmith. Several, actually. What else can you do?”

“What else do you need?”

He scoffed. “Nothing you have,” he said, then glanced at William. “What’s wrong with him?”

Just as before, my instinct was to get defensive, but I knew shouting at the Afentikó would get me killed instead of accepted. “Nothing,” I said through gritted teeth. “He’s just different.”

“Different?” He said nothing for a long moment, and my heart thudded against my ribs and skull at the same time. “Why do you think you should work for me?”

I’d expected the question and had the answer ready. “Because I’m better than this,” I said, waving a hand at the filthy alley and rotting porch and muddied path. “I’m better than all this. I deserve more.”

He grinned. It was an arrogant, unhappy, joyless grin, and I felt envy burn within me. “You deserve more? It seems to me you’ve gotten exactly what you deserve. Why does an arrogant orphaned thief deserve any more than this?”

I tried to stand taller. “Because I’m better than this,” I said again.

“I doubt it. Ever killed a man?”

“Not yet.”

He studied me, eyes narrowing to thin slits. “Can you, I wonder?”

I’d meant to respond with a yes, but something in me hesitated. It was that hesitation, along with another only a day later, that changed my life.

“I don’t want him,” Darius said bluntly.

“W-what,” I stammered. “Why?”

“Because you’re a scared boy.”

An immediate rush of anger swept over me at the word. I hated that word. “I’m not a boy,” I said, teeth gritted, jaw clenched tight.

“No?” He snorted a laugh, then turned to Bojan. “Get me when he’s taken a life.”

And then he left, brushing past me as if I was nothing more than the lopsided stool William had been sitting on. He strode down the alley, the men sitting in the mud flinching away as he passed. His long cloak flowed behind him, and the edges grazed over the filth beneath him, yet if he cared, he didn’t show it. Likely he had more than one servant solely in charge of cleaning his cloak. He stood out like a golden tooth in our set of rotten gums, and I nearly smiled despite the insults I’d just received. That would be me. I would wear a fur-lined velvet cloak instead of this ratty old one, clasped with a silver chain instead of a wooden brooch. People would step aside without a word. They would fear me and respect me and—

“Come on,” Bojan said, pulling me from my own thoughts, “let’s get inside.” He started to step back through his door.

I watched Darius round the corner and disappear into the city. “I don’t like him,” I said, though that was one of the boldest lies I’d ever told. I liked him. More than that, I envied him.

“I don’t care,” Bojan replied.

I finally took my eyes from the alley and turned to Bojan. “He keeps calling William an idiot, I’ll kill him.” 

“No, you won’t,” he said. “He’ll call your brother whatever he likes, and you’ll shut up about it.” He glanced toward William. “Unless you got something to say?”

Silence.

“Didn’t think so. Now come inside.”

The floor of packed earth was covered in rushes that had once been tied together but had been coming apart for weeks. A cabinet coated in mold and rot hung wretched and neglected in a corner. A door on the far wall led to Bojan’s room, and a pair of hay-filled bags that served as beds nestled into a dusty corner. The single window threw a jagged patch of pale moonlight through a broken shutter.

Nilus sat in one of the only two chairs in the room with a circular table in front of him. His nose bent to the side, likely from too many fights, and his disheveled and greasy brown hair hung over his face and shoulders. He looked exactly like the thug he was, yet he wore a cloak that was nearly as impressive as Darius’s, fine leather shoes with thick soles, and a quality cotton tunic dyed a deep blue. He had a thin smirk on his face, not far from the cocky grin that Darius had just flashed me, and he ran a whetstone down the blade of his hatchet. Bojan sat across from him at the table and scooped up the pair of dice he seemed to never be without. They were bone, the pips stained black with coal dust and ash. He rolled them around in his half-open hand.

“Why didn’t he want me?” I asked, and Nilus snorted a laugh. “Shut up.”

He met my gaze, still grinning, then went back to his whetstone, the scrape of metal filling the small home.

“You haven’t proven yourself yet,” Bojan answered.

“How can I? You give the good jobs to him,” I said, pointing at Nilus with my chin, “and leave me with the scraps.”

Nilus scoffed, and I took an involuntary step toward him. Bojan frowned at me. “You know that’s a lie,” Bojan said. “I give the jobs evenly, spread them around. You choose to steal in silence and let the targets go unharmed. That’s not the kind of man the Afentikó wants.”

“So what do I do? Go kill someone for no reason?”

“Doesn’t have to be for no reason,” he said. “I got a job, if you’re interested.”

I paused, felt Nilus’s cocky glare. “Go on,” I said.

Bojan studied me for another moment before speaking. “A guy checked into the Lattice today,” he finally said, and I winced. The Lattice was one of the finer inns in Constantinople, the kind of inn that people like me avoided. One look at my patched breeches and stained tunic and I would’ve been dragged from the inn and sent instead to the Pot Belly or the Brown Leaf taverns, where men of my stature were the norm and not the exception.

“How am I supposed to get into the Lattice?”

“Not my problem,” he said. “There’s a guy there, some pilgrim joining the crusades.” He rolled the dice, got a four and a six, and frowned. “I need you to kill him.” 

Crusaders had been arriving since last summer, though at first they’d been little better than farmers with pitchforks, sickles, and hatchets. Lately, however, the pilgrims that showed up were professional knights and soldiers led by princes from the west.

“Is he a knight? Like the others?”

Bojan scooped the dice, rattled them again in his hand. “I’m told he’s not, though he’s someone of status. He has a meeting with the emperor tomorrow.”

“Sounds important.”

Bojan shrugged. “Maybe. According to the Afentikó, he dropped off a chest full of goods in the inn. He also brought three pack mules and an Italian guard.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. I could’ve handled a pilgrim, even an important one. But an Italian guard? How was I supposed to kill a trained man-at-arms?

As if sensing my worry, Bojan added, “They checked out two rooms. You shouldn’t have to deal with the Italian. And from what I’ve heard, the pilgrim’s no fighter, likely only has a walking stick and a carving knife to defend himself with. You’ll need to get to the Lattice while he’s meeting with the emperor tomorrow. Hide in his room, gut him as soon as he walks in, then pick the chest and steal whatever he’s got worth stealing.”

“Why do I need to kill him to do that?”

Nilus laughed. “Told you,” he said.

I scowled at Nilus. “Told you what?”

“You’re scared,” he said, wrapping a leather sheath around the head of his hatchet. “Scared to kill someone.”

“I’m not scared,” I said, putting a heavy dose of false confidence into my voice. It must have been obvious, because Nilus only smirked. I wanted to punch that cocky smile off his face.

“That so?” he asked.

I stepped up to Nilus, stood over him as he sat. He said nothing, only kept grinning, and I felt my blood run hot. “Want me to show you?” I asked. “Right now?”

He tossed the hatchet onto the table, where it landed with a heavy thud, then stood. “I don’t even need that,” he said, breath hot in my face as he inched close. “All I need is my hands, you mouse.”

My muscles tensed. I wasn’t afraid of a fight, even against Nilus, yet he’d killed a dozen men already. A fight would end with me on the floor, likely covered in my own blood, but I’d never backed down before, and I wasn’t about to then.

“Sit down,” Bojan said, his firm voice filling the small shack and probably saving me a bloody nose.

Nilus smirked again, then sat. I glared at him for another long breath before finally stepping back.

“And no,” Bojan went on, “you don’t have to kill him to rob him. But you’re the one trying to impress Darius. You have to show him you can shed blood before he’ll work with you.”

I stood taller, trying — and likely failing — to imitate Darius’s hard stance, that look of carefree arrogance that I so wanted to be able to wear. 

“I need a weapon,” I said.

“I know.”

“And a new cloak,” I added. “Or they’ll throw me out.”

“I know,” he repeated. “That’s why you and Nilus have a job tonight. At the docks. Should get you enough for a new cloak and a weapon.” He nodded to Nilus. “He’ll fill you in.”

Nilus winked at me, and I balled my fists at my side. 

“Let’s go,” he said, then added, “kid.”

Before I could reply, Bojan stepped between us with a length of rope. “You’ll need this.” He looked at both of us, his face hard. “And behave. I don’t need you two killing each other.”