[North 11] a friend of thieves

Irena dipped a hand into the bucket and scattered a handful of the dry sand. "I didn't do anything. At least...I was hungry, so I ate some berries. He said I was a thief, but I'm not a thief. A thief is..." she turned to look at Gia and Arkel, both of whom were staring at her. Gia had her fists on her hips, and Arkel had his arms folded.

"Did you pay?"

"You ARE a thief!"

Gia and Arkel spoke at the same time, Gia with her lip curled scornfully, and Arkel with something like delight in his voice.

Irena dropped the bucket, the sand spilling out onto the stone floor. "I'm not a thief, or a northwitch, or a gutter-rat or a...a... a chicken."

[North 10] Not quite the very best thieves in all of Astia

Gia started to run as well, and Irena was forced into a trot to keep up, her bare feet stumbling in the sandy dirt. She turned a corner and ran straight into the back of Gia, who grabbed hold of her sleeve and pulled her down into a crouch behind some stacked bales of fabric. Just in front of them, the street surface dropped away, with only small wooden platforms and a shaky staircase filling the gap. Hundreds of feet below, the river was like a strip of ragged grey silk, flecked with white. The wooden slats of the staircase were old and worn, and the only handrail was a sagging rope attached at intervals to the wall with rusty metal fixings.

Irena scrambled back from the dizzying sight. "I'm not going down there on that! It doesn't look safe at all," she cried out.

Gia jumped on her, and shoved a hand over her mouth to keep her quiet. Arkel smirked, "Don't worry, we're not going down on the shakeway."

There was a rumbling sound, followed by creaking. He pointed up over his head, "We're going on THAT."

Above them, a last great bale of fabric was being loaded onto a large wooden platform. It began to descend, slowly at first, but gathering more speed as the momentum built up. Arkel got up from the ground and turned to grin at Irena. "Ready?"

[brats] moving day

(Gah. Think of this as the writer's equivalent of preliminary sketches. I have a terrible problem with editing as I write, and then taking half an hour to write one sentence, so with this I tried really hard to just let the words stay as they are, constantly chanting to myself: adverbs are shorthand for 'I will fix this in the re-draft, not now, I will fix this later, not now, Tell in the first draft, Show in the re-draft...' -- I'm just messing around with the characters and seeing how they work together for now. But I'm not even supposed to be working on this story; I'm meant to be writing the first draft of Northspell, which I actually have a full plot worked out for. *sigh* Anyway, my new challenge is 500 words a day, so here goes. Which character is your favourite? I'm feeling a bit like Tekla at the moment, to be honest...)

***


Bee sighed and tried to find Tekla by patting the top of the blanket. It lunged forward and snapped, "Grrr, I'm a wild Outsider fighting dog and I'm going to bite you."

"No you're not," said Bee. "You're a four year old girl called Tekla."

Tekla peered out from under the blankets and made a face, "Now I'm baring my teeth at you. You're supposed to scream and run away," she added helpfully. "And then I can chase you."

"But I'm not scared of you," Bee said, drawing her hand back in confusion.

It was Tekla's turn to sigh. "It's a GAME, silly."