Page 7 of Overexposed

“I am very proud, but I am proudest that you smiled when you recognized the beauty in the lake,” he said, and I like to think he said it because he loved me.

It became a thing, these “adventures” with Tove. I began learning his moods, started to sense when I would be grabbed and dropped, in a city sometimes, sometimes elsewhere. With food sometimes, but mostly without. I became quite a proficient thief.

Tove watched me on these trips, not that I ever saw him. One time, a baker beat up a street urchin, who had nothing, no warm clothes, no warm bed, no warm hearth. The boy was thin, so very thin, and maybe two or three years younger than my own seventeen.

I remember that scene, strangely clear even after all these years. It was afternoon and a bright day, the sky above a perfect blue, the kind where the deepest color seems to loom right above your head. The roofs in the village were reed, and the funky smell of animals was thick in the air, overpowered only by the smoke from chimneys.

“Fucking thief!” the baker yelled and dragged the kid by one thin wrist.

I was better clothed than the baker because of the simple fact Tove had dropped me only two days ago, and stains had not yet appeared. I had no coin purse, but I had learned attitude.

“Still your hand!” I said and walked over to the baker.

The thief stared at me from a young, terror-stricken face.

“He stole from me, sir,” the baker said, as if that gave him all the right. He was a portly man with graying hair and flour stains on his apron. He smelled of fresh bread, and I remember how hungry I was. “Little thief,” the baker added and lifted his hand, clearly in a mood to add another bruise to however many he had already inflicted.

I caught his wrist. He was a strong man, used to heavy work, and I wasn’t. I had blue eyes then, and hoped they would convey some heat, strike fear in this righteous man.

“You might consider charity for those less fortunate than you instead of beating a child already beaten by his circumstances,” I said in as calm a voice as I could manage. I was very aware that this could end in a brawl with me on the receiving end of violence. In those days, broken skin and the infection that so easily settled there could kill you.

“They are like flies, sir,” the baker said. “I’ve seen so many, and the best way to deal with them is with a firm hand. How else would you expect them to respect another man’s work?”

The baker was, without mincing words, pissed. I let go of him. “I’d say this one has learned enough,” I said, and managed to get the boy free, take him by the hand, and walk away from there.

Tove met us around the next street corner. “You handled that quite well,” he told me.

“I barely handled it,” I said, and I remember the relief that flooded me at seeing him.

Tove looked down at the shocked boy, who hadn’t spoken a word to me, but then my heart had been racing, and I hadn’t spoken to him either.

“What’s your name?” Tove asked the boy.

“O-owain?”

“Owain. Hello. My name is Tove, and this here is Auris. You look very hungry. Should we find you some food?”

At the mention of food, Owain’s big eyes grew even bigger. You must understand, clean then was not what clean is now, and clean in Tove’s house was not what clean meant in a village such as this one. Owain was so caked in grime it was hard to tell his true hair color, and he smelled. His clothes smelled. For a man like Tove to speak with him and offer him food would, and should have been, suspicious. It said much about the state the boy was in that he just nodded, a wet pink tongue darting out to lick over his lip.

Tove being Tove, he led us into the baker’s shop. The boy was trembling and hid behind me, but Tove shielded us all well with his coin. There was some wonderful sass and several lovely examples of underhanded insults from Tove, but he delivered all of it wrapped in the kind of upper-crust language that you didn’t argue with, not unless you knew you could win. Getting bread out of this was good, but watching the first disgusted, then shocked, face of the baker was even better.

We found a spot to sit near the town’s market square, and I ate my bread only a fraction less ravenously than Owain did. The difference was that unlike Owain, I wasn’t looking around myself like an animal fearful of the snare, the net, the butcher’s knife.

“Your eyes are silver?” Owain said, but he didn’t quite make eye contact with Tove.

“So they are.”

Owain looked at me and said, “Ma says, sometimes children vanish. Bog spirits lure them, or draugar?” He had a tendency to make most of what he said a question.

“Tove is a friend. So am I,” I told Owain. “We can take you back home.”

Owain’s eyes went distant, empty, then misted over. I couldn’t read the expression then, hadn’t yet learned about grief and loss and the simplest, human pain. Tove read it well enough.

“Are you all alone in the world, Owain?” he asked.

Owain looked at the ground and chewed for a long time. Eventually, he nodded.

“Alone is not anything anyone should be,” Tove said. “Auris here is older than you, but he could use a companion. A servant. Would you like to be a servant, Owain?”

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