City of the Uncommon Thief by Lynne Bertrand

Author:Lynne Bertrand [Bertrand, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

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I held volume one of The Three Kingdoms in my hands, setting my mind to wander on the subject of the warrior Liu Bei.

My father had hollowed the name Liu Bei from the center of the 389th page of the book. Ultimately he had not used that name on any one of his own children. (Least to best, we were Heimdall, Ragnar, Ketill, Bellona, Bergusia, Alekto, Megaera, Tisiphone, and Odd.) However, there was a Liu Bei in Thebes guild. A woodshop accountant, five years older than I was, a twitchy guilder who pilfered food from the guild pantries and hoarded it in his bench.

I opened to the page with Liu Bei hollowed out of it and stared. My vision wandered from the hole to something I had not seen before. Deep in the gutter of the book, where the two pages met, was a minuscule smear of dirt. I flattened the book and looked closely. The smear was not dirt at all. There were four tiny letters—SCIU—written in lead along the stitch line between the pages. Tiny letters, squared off at their corners. My father’s hollow. My father’s handwriting. A shiver went up my spine.

Sciu?

I reached for the volume containing the tales of Odin and Freya and looked for my siblings’ names. There was a hole in the text where “Ketill” had been cut. And there, in the gutter of that book, across from the hollow, tiny letters spelled ratt. I found the same minute designation—ratt—where Ragnar’s name had been cut. And ratt again, next to the hollow at Heimdall.

I whispered, “Ratt, ratt, ratt, and sciu.”

Alone they meant nothing to me. Together they were abbreviations from the language, not to mention the field guide, of Pliny: rattus, rattus, rattus, sciurus. In the common tongue: rat, rat, rat, and squirrel.

“What did you know about beasts?” I growled at my dead father. What on earth did you know about anything?

I went to a shelf and grabbed a copy of Beowulf. I had visited this book and this page a hundred times as a kelp, jealous that Errol had a real name from a real tale, more jealous that my da had once cut that name from one page in the book, while he never managed to remove my name from anywhere. Erol, in the ancient tongue, meant the “earl.” The knight. I found the hollow. When I pressed the book open, I saw, for the first time, my father’s handwriting in the gutter. He had written cerv.

“Cervus,” I said. “So there, Errol Thebes. Not a tiger or a bear, not an eagle. Merely a deer.” It was foolish to feel smug about this. What was I even talking about?

I was suddenly reminded of a night in the guild tower. I grabbed the tales of Ovid, Virgil, and Apollonius from the shelves and flipped through their pages, seeking a hollow at the name Orpheus. It’s harder than you might expect to find a name that is gone. When I finally found that hollow, I pressed the page open and saw, in that tiny squared-off handwriting, Xov.

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