It was starting to get dark, as Wind pushed open the front door of their house, the wood catching a little against the frame.

The inside of the house wasn’t anything special, he thought, as he shucked off his shoes, shivering as his feet touched the cold tiles of the hall, but it was home.

A small latticed window by the front door let in just enough light to see where he was going, reflecting off the bright white plaster of the hall. Off to one side was the closed door to the parlour, and at the end of the hallway were the kitchen and washroom.

A set of narrow stairs led up to the first floor, where there were two bedrooms and a small, windowless room, used for storing linen and winter food.

Wind grunted, bracing himself against the wall as he climbed the steep stairs. Sure, they didn’t have a garden, and it was pretty small, but he considered himself lucky overall. A lot of the older houses didn’t have toilets of their own, instead sharing a toilet-block with the neighbours. He had a bedroom of his own here, and they even had plumbed water in the kitchen! How modern was all that?

He entered his bedroom, throwing his leather school bag onto the bed and sitting down with a thump. The room was small but comfortable, the furniture all made of the ubiquitous red wood used everywhere in the city for carpentry on a budget.

Against this wall was his bed, covered in a soft woollen mattress and with clean cotton bedding. In that corner was a chest of drawers, to keep his spare clothing in. By the open window, wedged against the foot of the bed, was a desk and a chair, and against the other wall was a small set of shelves, to keep his art supplies safe.

Finally, spread over all four of those walls, were his drawings.

The formerly-white plaster was covered with sketches and drawings, all drawn in a careful, light pencil. Most were simple, but he’d filled in more than a couple with watercolours, the few he deemed worthy.

In the corner under the desk was a tin of tightly sealed white paint and a well-cleaned decorator's brush. An unspoken threat to those drawings that failed to meet his standard.

Many other sketches and paintings were tacked carefully to boards, hung with string from the picture rail. Plaster was easy to repair, but it was better not to damage it if he could help it, they didn’t own this place. Over time he had covered the boards in scraps of paper, anything he could scrounge, every space filled with drawings of plants and animals and faces.

Sometimes the things he drew were from life, but rarely he also drew from books. He’d never seen a fox, but he had read about them, and he’d once seen what looked like a girl in the street, with red tufted ears and a thick red tail. Luckily for his social side, and unluckily for his artistic one, his mother had pulled him away before he could get himself in trouble, and he’d never seen them again. But the drawings had gone onto the walls.

Many of them were of cattle and goats and sheep. He’d spent a week once hanging about in the muddy yard behind the abattoir, capturing everything he could see in pencil and ink.

After a week of that, one of the butchers had invited him into their shop. Together they had slowly dissected a cow, taking it down to the bone. He’d learnt all about different cuts of meat, and how muscle and tendon worked together. That was on the walls, too.

Wind sighed, sitting up with his hands on his knees and staring past the neat pile of paper and the two bottles of ink on his desk. Red and blue. He hadn’t left them there, but his mum had been through his room while he was at school, placing them out in the open. Probably in some sort of passive-aggressive gesture of “I know exactly what you’ve done, and I’ve fixed it.”

Maybe if he hadn’t taken the blue then they wouldn’t have noticed the theft, but he’d wanted it so badly. It was the colour of the sky, of fresh rain, of magic. A deep, dark blue with a shimmer of something else under the surface, a hue he could never achieve with watercolours.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

He hated that she’d had to do that. But more than that, he was angry that he’d been caught, and that she’d had to break into their emergency funds to fix his stupid mistake. He was as bad as the Monarch, giving into baseless greed without thought of the consequences.

He dropped his weight back onto the bed, hands behind his head, and gazed at the caulked and tarred boards of the ceiling. In a couple of months he’d be out of school for good, and then he could finally get a job. He even might be able to get a place at the abattoir. The work was hard, but the money wasn’t bad, and the butcher who’d taken the time to show him the cow had hinted heavily at the possibility, but it wasn’t what he wanted.

He’d seen what it was like to be trapped in a cycle of pointless physical labour, what that did to a person, day in, day out. His mum would never admit that she was unhappy, she claimed her job loading and unloading the mail carriages was fulfilling, but he knew it wasn’t. How could it be! She created nothing, merely moving around that which belonged to other people, for pennies a day. Enough to cover rent, but not much else.

He just wanted to draw. To see the world and commit everything he could see to paper and ink.

He’d heard tales of a mage far to the east, who could Change paper into paintings with a touch of their mind. He would never be that, he had only a small talent for magic. Enough to adjust a line slightly here or there, but that was it. To go from a piece of blank paper to a perfect, lifelike image right there on the page… That was true magic.

But, he considered, rocking his head back and forth, his small talent was fine. More might take some of the joy out of it. That struggle of turning all the facets of life into pencil on flat paper was part of the joy, watching it evolve on the page in front of him. That trick of the eye, where the drawing went from being a collection of lines, to all of a sudden a face, apparently having been there looking back at you all along. That might not be capital-m-Magic, but it was love.

He sighed and spread his arms out. He should try venturing into Sellers Street again, maybe see if he could scrounge himself an apprenticeship.

Sellers Street wasn’t what you’d expect. You’d think by the name that it would be the main street of a town, but instead, it was a narrow lane off of Huntsgate, in the old part of town. Narrow enough that if you stood in the centre and stretched your arms out, you could almost touch both sides at once.

Over the centuries, the buildings had been built up to three stories high, and with the greenway and balconies and bridges above, it was almost always dark enough that artificial lighting was required, even during the day. The cobbles set into the ground were old river stones, deeply pitted by rain.

Filled with booksellers and art stores, even the street itself was thick with the smell of old paper and fresh oil paint. He’d only been there twice, but both times were seared into his memory. It was, Wind decided, still staring up at the ceiling, magic given form.

The first time was on his eighth birthday. They, he and his mother, had toured the art supply stores together. He’d admired the quires of thick white paper and the bright displays of oil paint, absorbing the atmosphere like a lizard basking in the sun. He’d gazed up at the endless array of brushes and pencils and paints, and had been completely overwhelmed.

When the tour was over and they’d been into every shop, they’d purchased some pencils, and a small knife for him to sharpen them with. He had used those pencils until there was nothing left of them, and then begged for more.

His second visit had been only a few weeks ago, alone this time. A friend of a friend had passed along that there was an old man who owned a shop there, who had rat-like features and liked to buy paintings and drawings from up-and-coming artists.

Wind had taken along five of his best. Three different plants in watercolour, one pencil sketch of a goat with particularly striking features, and the inked drawing of the fox, done using the stolen red ink. The man had hummed and hawed over them, his whiskers twitching and his eyes small but sharp, before pronouncing them all trash. Except for the fox. He’d given Wind five shillings for it, that was a whole crown, and the largest amount of money he’d ever held. He had reverentially hidden it under the foot of the bedpost, his own emergency fund.

Grimacing, Wind clambered to his feet and, lifting the bed, retrieved the coin. It was heavy in his hand, much larger than the pennies and farthings he was used to. The metal had a deep golden sheen to it, with none of the patination he expected from copper and bronze.

Looking away, he shoved the coin into a pocket and collected some papers and pencils into his shoulder bag. He’d wanted to give the crown to his mum for her birthday, but that ship had sailed now. Hopefully it would be enough to cover what the school had fined her.

As he finished his packing and reached over to pull the small window closed, he could hear a siren in the distance, muffled and far away, but still distinct. That could only mean one thing.

The Dragon was coming to town, he was going to have a front-row seat, and then he was going to fleece that old rat for everything he was worth.