Chapter 2

Kestrel awoke to a crashing noise.

Instantly alert he scanned the dark alleyway. His eyes peered into every nook and cranny of the tight corridor. He didn’t see anything, but one could never be too careful in the streets where cutthroats, thieves, and murderers were the law.

Fiell was well policed, but as in every city everywhere, where there was money to be made there would be whole world of crime regardless of policing and more often than not the authorities were in on it.

Kestrel, who still had weeks of dirt caked on him, and who’s long brown hair hung from his head, limp and itchy, was extra cautious. One had to be on the streets of Fiell. That caution was the only reason that he had survived so long living on the streets. He could barely remember a time before the streets.

His eyes scanned the darkly shadowed alleyway to find where the noise had come from. Kestrel relaxed his shoulders and stepped out of the fighting stance that he’d assumed when he found the source of the crash, a mangy old dog who’s skin hung tight against its bones with madness in its eyes. Kestrel bent and picked up a stone and hurled it at the creature, who bolted away.

The dog was like him. A survivor. It knew when to fight and when to run.

Kestrel wanted to return to sleep, but he was now awake and alert. He knew he wasn’t going to return to sleep anytime soon. It didn’t matter though, they needed to leave anyway. They had stayed in this particular alleyway too long. It was time to find a new place. If you weren’t in one place too long, you survived longer. Kestrel had seen too many of his peers die because they found a nice alley and refused to move on from it long past the time they should have left. He wasn’t like them though. He wasn’t a fool. He knew that he couldn’t stay in one place too long.

“Best to move on, we’ve stayed longer than we should,” Kestrel thought as grabbed his ratty tattered outer cloak he’d been using as a blanket.

Kestrel was glad for the warming Spring days. Winter at the foot of the mountains was often deadly for street dwellers and if one didn’t know the prime locations, they were likely to freeze to death during blizzards that often came down from the Kearn range and smothered Fiell in white during the harsh winters. Spring though, brought life and warmth. A warmth he desperately missed.

Kestrel himself had nearly died of hypothermia during his first winter on the streets. To this day, he still wasn’t sure how he’d survived that nightmare.

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He’d learned from it though.

Kestrel learned from everything. It was the only reason he was still alive. He didn’t know anyone else who came to the streets as young as he had and survived. To live you had to learn.

“Time to move on,” Kestrel said as he shook his companion, a tiny redheaded whelp of a girl name Cillia, awake.

It had been on one of his forays closer to the city guard's barracks that Kestrel had found her, looking barely five years old, abandoned to the streets and near lifeless.

They’d been together for two years since then. Kestrel figured the girl to be the bastard whelp of some bored infantryman and a random prostitute too strung out to think of anything beyond her next high.

Cillia had looked like a skeleton with a swollen belly when he’d first laid eyes on her sitting on a trash pile, too exhausted to even cry.

He’d been filled with righteous anger at the sight, and had sworn profusely under his breath as he’d picked her up and offered her half of the loaf he’d purloined earlier in the day.

She had clung to him the rest of that day. By the time the tiny girl let go, he was bruised from the tightness of her grip. By the end of the day Kestrel knew that he’d give his life to protect that little girl. He’d shield her from the Hell that had swallowed him on the streets.

Kestrel himself hadn’t been much older than young Cillia when his own mother had died penniless on the streets and he didn’t want to see the young girl addicted to sage-weed or worse opiates like his mother had been, or whoring herself out on some dirty corner like most of the other girls after they got their first bloods.

The little thing deserved better than that and Kestrel had promised himself he’d do his best to give it to her. Caring for Cillia gave his life the purpose he hadn’t known he’d needed.

He would protect her with his life.

He poked the girl to wake her. Cillia rolled over, away from his prod. “Let me sleep,” she grumbled.

“Nope,” Kestrel grinned as he ruffled her red hair.

She tried to swat his hand away, but she kept messing with her until she was sitting up and laughing at the game it had turned into and any desire to return to sleep had left the little girl.

“Kes, where are we going?” Cillia asked sleepily as she rubbed her eyes trying to massage out exhaustion from them.

“I dunno yet, but we’ve been here way too long. You remember what happened to Nails when he stayed in one place too long,” he replied.

Nails had been another young street-rat, about ten years old, he’d been found by city officials and had disappeared. Nobody knew what’d happened to him, but there were whispers of the Inquisitors somehow being involved.

Kestrel wasn’t sure if he believed the mythical Inquisitors were real, but he knew something was going on in the streets, and the disappearances couldn’t all be due to the city guards. They could be harsh, and they weren’t above the occasional beating of beggars, but in all his years Kestrel never saw them murdering children.

Regardless of who’d taken Nails, it didn’t matter. Kestrel had stayed in one place too long. They should’ve left their nest days ago.

It was dangerous to stay in one place too long. Survivors didn’t do that. Survivors were always on the move.