The city is unkind to its strangers. This is the first lesson imparted to me by an entity wholly separate from Ma.
Twice I am shoved aside by rushing merchants and their glum sons, sent stumbling into their booths that line the riverine street like chunks of quartz. Twice my fall sends crashing to the cobblestones a rain of sparkling wares; and twice I am spat at by a flock of silk-lathered merchant wives, descending upon me like sparrowhawks.
I jerk backwards when a woman with a face made all of angles sweeps down from her perch and snaps her teeth at my neck. The consonants she makes are so jumbled by her tongue, so different to Elder and Ma and I's lyrical words, that I am swept across the street again before I realize she'd called me a thief.
"I am not a thief!" I scream, and scream again, this time in wordless fury, when my voice is drowned to death by the gleeful laughter of the city.
Fleeing into the shadows of another alley, I grope inside the eye of my mask and clutch at the cool stones of the sapphire necklace. The high noon sun shines bright and misleading, summer-yellow instead of winter-bleak, and I recoil farther into the dwindling shade.
I will die here, and my body will be collected days later and left to rot in an unmarked grave.
I am becoming ever more certain of my future when I am broken from my reverie by a soft voice, drifting above me. "Are you alright?" she asks, but made faceless by a halo of blazing sun, she is just another merchant's wife, just another laughing boy.
I turn towards her, hissing. "Does this alley belong to you? Are you here to sweep me out of it, back into the street?"
My grip tightens on my sapphires; they are the only solace, the only physical reminder I have that I am apart of something other, something better, than this city and its rat-filled sewers. Pain spikes my stomach; bile fills up my throat.
Only an hour in the city and I am already smelling of it; of spoiling, of tar, of vermin. I will die here, and there will be no one to mourn me but the moon.
