Thirteen is an important age in the city, and in the empire. It’s the age when you are supposed to be apprenticed to someone and learn a trade—at least if you’re a regular sort of person who needs to work for a living. Since I don’t live on the right side of the canal, and don’t have servants to do my work for me, I officially fall into that category. It’s a big coming of age time.

Even though it was my birthday, and even though the end of the school year was only a week away, I didn’t have an apprenticeship lined up yet. Not because I didn’t try. But I only had one family business to go into, and Ornery would just tell me over and over that there was no such thing as an apprentice pirate. I think he said it mostly to get me to stop asking if I could be an apprentice pirate. “Yer either born a pirate or you ain’t,” he would say. Then he would point out where I lived and who my mom was.

Okay really, I didn’t have an apprenticeship all lined up because Ornery was being all protective. He and my mom argued about it every now and then. It was sort of awkward, so I didn’t make a fuss. I did explore some things on my own, but none of it came to anything. I just assumed I’d be moving on to a secondary school while Ornery made up his mind. Hanging out with kids from merchant families and poorer noble households wasn’t all bad, I would probably get picked on a lot, but it meant learning about more than reading, writing, maths, and a totally sincere respect for the imperial household. Besides, nothing would probably motivate Ornery to find me an apprenticeship more than getting me away from the corrupting influence of those types of people.

Howper, my best friend for as long as I can remember, had already left school half a year early to work in his dad’s shop. Sometimes he still used his morning deliveries as an excuse to walk me to school.

His dad was the neighborhood butcher, Nighuysen Family Meats and Provisions, probably the oldest and best butcher shop in the town. Even the servants from the nobles’ households would risk crossing the canal just to go shopping there. They normally only snuck over at night, and for different reasons.

No one could cure a sausage like Nighuysen’s. That may not sound like much, but you’ve never had a sausage made at Nighuysen’s. They were better than candy, and easier to talk mom into buying.

Just like his dad, Howper was really handy with a knife, like a surgeon, or maybe a mad doctor. Once he spent an entire morning frightening the other girls after we found a dead sailor with a really big…

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t tell that story.

Andi was going to be moving out of the city to go be a dye maker for a distant cousin of hers. It was where most of the kids in her family eventually went. Her parents ran a small shop that sold the dyes her relatives made. Most dyes are from plants and the dyes are best if they are made close to the field where those plants grow so they are still fresh and full of juice. I know because Andi told me.

She also told me that she would be living on the very edge of the Great Wastes, and some of the plants and dyes processes were so toxic the workers needed a wyrd to protect them while working. You could die a horrible death—convulsions, foam coming out of your mouth, all your skin peeling off, all sorts of horrible things—just from picking the wrong plant at the wrong time or spilling stuff on you that hadn’t been properly mixed and cured. Then, after she had me worried almost to tears, she confessed that until she was much more experienced she would only be allowed to work with safe plant dyes.

I was mad at her for at least half a day for scaring me with tales about how dangerous her work would be before telling me it wasn’t. Though trying to pluck black nettle leaves without the right gloves will slice your hands up but good, and her cousin’s shop is known for the deep purple dye they make from black nettle. Serves her right for scaring me like that.

Everyone was going to be doing something.

Yanse was even going to be starting with the apothecary.

I did that. I spent a lot of time convincing the apothecary, and his wife, who is also an apothecary, but pretends her husband is in charge, to take her on.

Yanse had always been really good at maths, wrote beautifully in precise, perfect letters, loved to cook, and was really good with colors and textures. She could also face down Howper’s most disgusting practical jokes with a straight face, so she was probably ready for anything. She was the one who took it away from Howper, beat him over the head with it, and then threw it away with a long, perfect arc into a nearby ditch. The looks on Howper’s face…

Oh wait, I was going to skip that story.

Anyway.

The seamstress guild wanted to take her on for her color eye, but she didn’t like sewing, and the apothecary agreed that someone good with colors and textures, and smells and tastes, is someone who, with some luck, wouldn’t mix the wrong things together and kill a customer.

Not that the apothecary ever killed a customer. He did turn a few purple though.

The apothecary may have been good at mixing things together, but his wife was a wyrd. She could mix things together and then improve them with magick. Her name is Nona, but I always just called her Mrs. Apothecary. She was small like me, with the gray hair and gray eyes of a wyrd. Unlike me, she was also graceful and serene in everything she did. Some wyrds are like that. I always wanted to be like her, even if serene and pirate weren’t usually words you heard together.

Last year for my birthday Mrs. Apothecary gave me a box of chewy candies. They tasted like strawberries fresh from the field and when you ate one it turned you the color of the candy for the entire day. It was a day of all my friends running around town so brightly colored they were almost glowing, with lots of laughing and getting into trouble. Eating more than one a day was bad. The colors didn’t always mix well. Edwirt ate three at once and was sickly green all day, and just plain sick from the color magicks arguing with each other.

Mr. Apothecary, whose real name is Hermin by the way, liked to tell the story about how Mrs. Apothecary thought those up a long time ago to catch kids stealing candy from the shop. But parents got angry when their kids came home bright purple or blue and they had to stop. It wasn’t the apothecary’s fault they were caught purple handed. Some parents think their kids can do no wrong.

He always made everyone laugh when he told that story. You wouldn’t think a small, skinny, bald, constantly nervous man like him could be so funny and so contagiously happy, but he was.

Mr and Mrs. Apothecary were both small people. Wyrds are usually small. People say it is because energy that should go into growing them goes into other things instead. But Mr. and Mrs. Apothecary were both really small. Mr. Apothecary was not much taller than me and I could look Mrs. Apothecary straight in the eye without having to look up.

Sometimes people would whisper that they weren’t human at all, but fairies hiding out in the city for some reason. Not that I have ever met any faeries, so I wouldn’t know. But people whisper weird things all the time.

For my thirteen birthday, Mrs. Apothecary gave me a broom. She didn’t mean it as a present. I’d come over in the evening after the shop had closed to help clean up. It had been a terrible day, I needed a place to be unhappy, and it was as good a place as any. Besides, I’d said I would, and I wouldn’t really be able to sweep the floor without a broom. Well, I could, but I was only miserably unhappy, not trying to join some weird religious order. The Most Sacred Order of Extremely Penitent Grovelers, Scrapers, and Floor Lickers. There, I just made that one up… I hope.

I went there after a busy day of everyone asking me about the knife and the body and the letter. I told them everything I knew, which wasn’t much, but it happened at my home, so I got to be the authority anyway. I even made some really exciting bits up just because people kept asking for more.

It was all very exciting for a while. Then it started to sink through my self-appointed glory that in all that attention not a single person remembered it was my birthday.

Not one.

I wasn’t the center of attention for the right reason, and I was not happy. By the end of the day I was not only not happy, I was miserable. Some mysterious dead body was more important than me, and I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Then my friends called me snooty, and other things, and said I was just being mean.

People aren’t supposed to forget your birthday, especially your friends. It’s how you tell who your friends are. By the end of the day, I was ready to give Ornery a run for his money on being the most ornery person in the empire, even if I couldn’t harrumph to save my life.

When I arrived at the shop, Mrs. Apothecary was cheerfully organizing things, glancing at labels on shelves behind the counter and comparing them carefully to little cards with notes written in her delicate hand. Without even looking away from her work, she reached over and grabbed at one of the brooms in the cabinet next to where she was working.

She didn’t even look at me, she just handed me the broom. Well, more sort of knocked it into my hand. I had to catch it so it wouldn’t clatter to the floor. She was very focused on some very small print on one of the cards and not paying attention.

“Thank you for stopping by,” she said, wrapped up in her work. “It was a busy day with a few unfortunate spills from less than careful customers. At least they didn’t blow the place up.”

I think she meant the last bit as a joke, but she totally missed the dark cloud over my head that was just a single shade of dark shy of raining all over her floor and she took no notice of my lack of laughter. At least she didn’t ask me about the knife and the body and the letter. I probably would have screamed. Then, still without once looking up, she disappeared into the back room, lost in paperwork and things that needed counting and arranging.

I stared at the broom glumly. It wasn’t my normal broom. Usually, when I picked this broom up, Mrs. Apothecary would take it away from me and hand me another one. It was a weird broom, with a thick bamboo shaft and scraggly bristles made out of twigs and straw that had to be magicked, because there is no way they could sweep otherwise. And the broom swept really well.

It felt like it wasn’t really a broom so much as something meant to look like a broom, like a kid’s art project gone horribly wrong, but proudly set in the pantry by respectful parents anyway, or maybe one of those bundles of scented herb bundles shaped like brooms that you are supposed to hang up on the wall to impress people with their broomy aroma. I could have traded it for another broom, but the ugliness of it and the way it looked wrong for what it was meant for fit my mood. It if had worked as badly as it looked it might have been even better.

I scowled at the heavy broom. It was a broom. It didn’t care. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t even bother to try to remember my birthday.

I glumly worked doing glum things that weren’t anything like proper birthday activities. I was in such a dark mood that it felt much heavier than a broom had a right to be, like I was trying to drag around a small tree. With my heavy broom, everything was too much work and took forever. It improved the darkness of my mood a lot.

I slowly swept the dust and the spilled ingredients on the floor into little piles, and slowly swept the little piles into bigger piles, and then got the dust pan which was magicked to cheerfully suck up piles of dust and dirt and make then disappear to who knows where. No really, it would whistle a happy tune while sucking in the dust and everything. On a good day, you could find yourself whistling along with it.

Its cheer was not rubbing off today. Its magicked happiness made me want to throw it out the door in the hope a stray carriage of very lost courtiers in all their expensive finery would run over it and all the years of dust would come exploding out, covering the street, and them, in a dark, messy, sooty, satisfying murk. Then they would cough and sputter in rage and demand the entire neighborhood be executed for this affront. And as I was marched off to the block, I would mumble, “Serves you all right for forgetting my birthday.” All I wanted to do was go home, crawl under my covers, and be miserable.

The sun was down by the time I was done. Mrs. Apothecary appeared out of the back room as if she knew exactly when I had finished. Instead of a few coins, she gave me a small box of very nice chocolates, the most expensive in the shop. They were the type that were sprinkled with something that looked like flakes of gold and everything. I stared at them blankly, not understanding the box. Then she thanked me for making time to help in the shop on a day as important as my birthday.

It took a little for the words to sink through my gloom. I looked up at her with tears starting to fill my eyes. Then the tears kept coming until the world was a watery blur. It wasn’t that she said something terrible, but suddenly I didn’t know which emotion I was supposed to be. Inside my head was running around in circles and I couldn’t speak to say thank you. I started sobbing and sniffling. “Everyone forgot,” I finally managed to say.

She took a step forward and held me close as the flood gates opened and I cried myself out. She was no bigger than me, but I felt so terribly small wrapped in her calm warmth.

When I was done crying, standing there with my head down, red eyed, and wiping my nose on my sleeve—no happier than I was before but drained of the dark storm that had been building—she told me to keep the broom for now, because everyone needs a good broom to sweep their troubles away. Really, I was clinging to it so tightly she would have had to pry it away from me anyway. Not that it was all that comforting, but it gave me something to hold on to.

I trudged unhappily out the door, the chocolates now the thing hugged close like a precious treasure, and dragging the broom behind me. I trudged around the corner, I trudged down the alley, and I trudged into an empty home. Ornery and mom were still out somewhere, probably dealing with the blowback from the body and the knife. Even Officer Puppy was off keeping the city safe from the evil schemes of the rats.

I grabbed a small hunk of bread from the pantry and a candy from mom’s secret stash I wasn’t supposed to know about. The chocolates Mrs. Apothecary gave me were too nice for me to ruin the box by eating any of them. Then I went to bed early and alone, not caring that I was still hungry. I didn’t even bother to wash up for bed or take off my street clothes.

I hugged the broom for lack of anything else to hold close, and moped myself to sleep.

At least the day was over and it was too late for it to get any worse.

I totally missed the note on the big table in the middle of the main room. It was written in Ornery’s rough hand. It said I should stay at the apothecary’s place for the night. I never lifted my gaze high enough to see it. Though I did toss the box of chocolates right on top of it, covering it perfectly, without even trying.

All I really remembered of them was Mrs. Apothecary trying really hard to explain something to me. It was something terribly important that I needed to understand. But all I really remember from all her words was her saying, “Of course I knew dear, but there are some things you have to do by yourself.”

I remember those words because, right after she said them, she slapped me with a hard, sweeping backhand. The shock of her hitting me, and the sudden pain across my cheek, launched me right out of my dream and out of my bed with a gasp—driving my head straight into the stomach of someone standing over me, just as they drove a sharp knife down into the mattress where my neck had been.

If I’d been lying on my back instead of curled around the broom, I would’ve leapt straight into the blade. I still felt it slice across the back of my neck when I shot up. I screamed, diving away from the pain and the dark shadow over my bed and the glint of steel in their hand. The shadow staggered back a little from my butting into its stomach, but caught itself quickly.

It was too dark to see anything but vague shapes, but it was my room and I knew where the door was. I tried to get to my feet, tangled and tripping on the blankets. I made for the door. The shadow was faster. It was between me and the door in an instant. With the shadow blocking my way, I froze. Ornery had always insisted that I know how to fight, and made me take lots of classes in fighting and self defense. I could hold my own against the biggest of bullies, move faster, think faster, and leave them on the ground begging me to let go. None of it was there for me right then. I was disoriented and terrified and the back of my neck burnt like fire.

“This is for my brother,” a rough male voice hissed, reeking of whisky and other things, “not that you’ll be around to pass that along.” The shadow snickered darkly.

He lunged at me, blade swinging wildly.

I tried to leap to the side, but my foot was still tangled in the blankets. I twisted and fell flat into a corner of the room. I rolled over on my back, trying to move away from my attacker. His foot pinned my leg in place, his full weight on it, grinding it against the floor. He towered over me. He swung the blade down with a blow meant to slice me open from neck to navel.

The blade stopped with a splintering and a loud metallic clang. My arms went numb with a jolt. I still had the broom in my hands. Without even thinking I had thrust it forward with both hands to block the blade. There was no way a piece of bamboo cold stop that blow, but the broom had held.

The shadow swore and stumbled back. He carefully moved the blade to his other hand as I tried to find some place to scramble away to. There were chunks of splintered bamboo on the ground around me. I felt a piece of metal slicing across my hand from somewhere. Recovered from the shock of the stopped blow, he stomped down on my leg hard enough to make me scream and drew back for another blow. I let go of what was cutting me and grabbed the broom at the base so hard I drove some scraggly twigs straight through my hand.

I thrust the broom up with all my might, trying to push him back long enough to get out the door, just as he was driving down for another blow.

The broom didn’t push him back. He just seemed to fall into it. His blow never fell. He stopped there, a sash tight about his chest brushing my two hands, my arms straight, holding his weight upon them and still holding the end of the broom.

There was a long moment when nothing happened, his blade glinting an inch from my breast. The only sound was my breathing and my blood pounding my ears. Then the blade slipped and fell from his grasp, sharp enough to stick me through my jacket before clattering to the floor. He gurgled. He coughed. Something wet splashed my face. My arms buckled under his weight. He fell forward on me.

Terrified that he had me pinned there and there was nothing I could do, the silence passed and the terror returned. I started screaming. I struggled wildly under his weight. I kicked, clawed, screamed, and bit as I tried to crawl out from under him.

I pushed him off me. I got up and ran to the door. As I threw open the door, some little bit of me realized he wasn’t chasing me. He hadn’t even been fighting when I was struggling to get him off me. I turned slowly, holding tightly on to the door.

In the glow slicing in the door from the front room I could see him. He was clean shaven and dressed like a well-to-do rake. He looked like someone who made a living mugging rich people in dark alleys. He was lying on the ground, trying to get up on his hands and knees, and failing. There was a long straight blade covered in glowing glyphs sticking out of his back.

I started shaking and couldn’t stop.

The front door burst open. Mr. Apothecary and his wife charged in dressed in their bedclothes. He had a lamp in one hand and a pistol in the other. He was shouting, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?” The moment he saw me he stopped and stared, a look of shock on his face.

I stared back at him, half empty, half terrified, shaking.

He recovered, looked past me, pushed me aside, and went into my room. I backed away from the door, edging away from the bloody scene. The shadow was now just a human body lying awkwardly on the floor, an unknown man in a pool of his own blood. He was slowly ceasing his weak struggles against the blade that had pinned him.

Sunk into his chest you could still see the scraggly bristles covering the hilt of that blade. Someone had tried to kill me. I had killed them. Neither one made a very good birthday present. But at that moment I was nothing but scared, and the thought of a birthday was far away.

Mrs. Apothecary came forward and placed her hands gently on my shoulders. I jumped in spite of her tender touch, but couldn’t tear my eyes away from the body Mr. Apothecary was cautiously inspecting. I heard him swear. It sounded so odd coming from him.

Mrs. Apothecary turned me away from the room to face her. “Are you all right child,” she asked in a way that was both urgent and soothing. Her words broke through the spell and I collapsed into her a mess of tears and snot for the second time that night. She didn’t even complain that I was ruining her beautiful white gossamer and lace bedclothes with the blood that covered my hands and front.

I jumped at the sharp sound of a single pistol shot behind me, but couldn’t be torn from the comfort of Mrs. Apothecary’s arms. It was the weird, almost keening pop from a pistol that worked with magick, not gunpowder and lead. A weird burst of something swept past me, like a shout from an unexpected voice, but it was quickly lost in more tears.

The apothecary came back out of the room still swearing softly and saying something about a life locket. He was carefully holding the same knife the shadow had held. He quickly found some more glow disks to turn on so he could look at it better. It was a knife made for business, unpleasant business. The steel was smeared with something that was an odd shade of blue. He looked at it with a simmering mix of fear and hatred.

“Get the guard,” Mrs. Apothecary said softly to him.

The apothecary didn’t look up from the blade. He turned it gently back and forth in his hand. “This was meant to make someone suffer,” he said, “to die in as much pain as possible.”

“She’s not laying on the ground writhing in convulsions. She’s not foaming at the mouth, though maybe a little at the nose.” Mrs. Apothecary smiled at her joke. “She’ll be fine. Just get the guard.” He nodded, his normal nervous look taken over by a dark decisiveness.

Without a sound, he drove the knife deep into the doorframe of my bedroom and hurried out into the alley. He started shouting as he ran down the street to attract the attention of a patrol.

Mrs. Apothecary pushed me back to arms length to get a better look at me. She looked me up and down as I stood there wrapped in tears. “No worse for the wear,” she said, “except for some cuts on your hands. And not much of that blood looks to be yours.” She quickly yanked out a twig from the broom that was still sticking through my hand. I was too busy crying and shaking to even gasp in pain.

“You’ll be right as rain in no time,” she said brightly with a hint of a smile crossing her face.

Done taking stock of me, she let me fold myself back into her arms and cry myself out. After a short while, she said, “You do know you were supposed to stay at our place tonight.”

I pushed away from her and stared at her, confused, as the dreams I’d been having before flooded back into me. I stammered, but no words came out except for weak attempts at “you”. Then she said, “Of course I knew dear, but there are some things you have to do by yourself.” Then she smiled that warm smile of hers that she always used to cure little kids of their small injuries.

Her smile filled me with a warm glow and made me feel fuzzy headed. The shaking and tears faded. The events of a few minutes ago felt like something speeding farther and farther away, too fast to catch, and I was standing somewhere on a cloud, watching it all as the world slid softly into a different focus.

“He cut me,” I said between receding sniffles.

“Where?”

I rubbed my hand across the back of my neck, feeling the collar soaked in my blood.

“Let me look.” She turned me around and pulled back my collar.

“Not a scratch,” she said brightly.

She turned me back around. “Show me your hands.”

I held out my hands for her.

She turned them over in hers. “See, not a scratch.”

I looked at them. There was not a scratch. But they seemed terribly far away from me, like I was trying to look at them through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Right as rain. Just like I said.” Then she laughed. “I do believe your eyes are the wrong color again, young lady. I suppose we should fix that before anyone notices. There’s going to be enough questions to clear up tonight.”

She stared deeply into my eyes, and held me as my legs buckled, lowering us both slowly toward the floor until we were kneeling facing each other.

Suddenly, I felt a something rushing through me, something unraveling and letting go, an overpowering need to tell her about my dreams, and the things she had said to me there, but thoughts faded away as fast as they came, a manic buzz racing through me but not stopping long enough for me to grab hold of anything. All I did was stare at her, my mouth moving with no sound coming out, my thoughts slipping away before I could grasp them.

I was still kneeling there, blankly staring at her, feeling fuzzy and empty, when Mr. Apothecary returned with the city guard. He didn’t look like the nervous, funny man I was used to. There was something about him that felt powerful and dark.

I think Mrs. Apothecary said some more things to me while we waited for him to return, and they seemed like terribly important things that I needed to understand, but they faded like the dreams before them. By the morning they were distant, fuzzy things that probably never happened.