not to walk on that wounded foot too much, if you can help it.”
The urchin strode to the door with a sudden urgency, as if eager to get away before Ym changed his mind and took back the shoes. He did stop at the doorway, though.
“If we’re all just the same person trying out different lives,” the boy said, “you don’t need to give away shoes. ’Cuz it don’t matter.”
“You wouldn’t hit yourself in the face, would you? If I make your life better, I make my own better.”
“That’s crazy talk,” the boy said. “I think you’re just a nice person.” He ducked out, not speaking another word.
Ym smiled, shaking his head. Eventually, he went back to work on his last. The spren peeked out again.
“Thank you,” Ym said. “For your help.” He didn’t know why he could do what he did, but he knew the spren was involved.
“He’s still here,” the spren whispered.
Ym looked up toward the doorway out onto the night street. The urchin was there?
Something rustled behind Ym.
He jumped, spinning. The workroom was a place of dark corners and cubbies. Had he perhaps heard a rat?
Why was the door into the back room—where Ym slept—open? He usually left that closed.
A shadow moved in the blackness back there.
“If you’ve come for the spheres,” Ym said, trembling, “I have only the five chips here.”
More rustling. The shadow separated itself from the darkness, resolving into a man with dark, Makabaki skin—all save for a pale crescent on his cheek. He wore black and silver, a uniform, but not one from any military that Ym recognized. Thick gloves, with stiff cuffs at the back.
“I had to look very hard,” the man said, “to discover your indiscretion.”
“I . . .” Ym stammered. “Just . . . five chips . . .”
“You have lived a clean life, since your youth as a carouser,” the man said, his voice even. “A young man of means who drank and partied away what his parents left him. That is not illegal. Murder, however, is.”
Ym sank down onto his stool. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know it would kill her.”
“Poison delivered,” the man said, stepping into the room, “in the form of a bottle of wine.”
“They told me the vintage itself was the sign!” Ym said. “That she’d know the message was from them, and that it meant she would need to pay! I was desperate for money. To eat, you see. Those on the streets are not kind . . .”
“You were an accomplice to murder,” the man said, pulling his gloves on more tightly, first one hand, then the other. He spoke with such a stark lack of emotion, he could have been conversing about the weather.
“I didn’t know . . .” Ym pled.
“You are guilty nonetheless.” The man reached his hand to the side, and a weapon formed from mist there, then fell into his hand.
A Shardblade? What kind of constable of the law was this? Ym stared at that wondrous, silvery Blade.
Then he ran.
It appeared that he still had useful instincts from his time on the streets. He managed to fling a stack of leather toward the man and duck the Blade as it swung for him. Ym scrambled out onto the dark street and charged away, shouting. Perhaps someone would hear. Perhaps someone would help.
Nobody heard.
Nobody helped.
Ym was an old man now. By the time he reached the first cross street, he was gasping for air. He stopped beside the old barber shop, dark inside, door locked. The little spren moved along beside him, a shimmering light that sprayed outward in a circle. Beautiful.
“I guess,” Ym said, panting, “it is . . . my time. May One . . . find this memory . . . pleasing.”
Footsteps slapped on the street behind, getting closer.
“No,” the spren whispered. “Light!”
Ym dug in his pocket and pulled out a sphere. Could he use it, somehow, to—
The constable’s shoulder slammed Ym against the wall of the barber shop. Ym groaned, dropping the sphere.
The man in silver spun him around. He looked like a shade in the night, a silhouette against the black sky.
“It was forty years ago,” Ym whispered.
“Justice does not expire.”
The man shoved the Shardblade through Ym’s chest.
Experience ended.
Rysn liked to pretend that her pot of Shin grass was not stupid, but merely contemplative. She sat near the prow of her catamaran, holding the pot in her lap. The otherwise still surface of the Reshi Sea rippled from the paddling of the guide behind her.