Augustus Millne: The Raven Pages

Not quite sure where this is going yet, and obviously it needs a lot of work, but here is the intro to an original story:

Introduction

The boy scuttled along the alleyway, dodging over bins and around piles of useless crates, ragged clothes snagging on splinters as he squeezed past the wooden boxes.  He reached the back of the inn and began to climb the wall, vermin-like, to the man’s window.  Dripping sweat, hands shaking as he clung to the rough, uneven stones of the building’s back wall, the boy peered into the room through the slats of the shutters.  Wiggling his toes into better footholds, the boy waited.

            He wasn’t disappointed.  Less than a minute of hanging on the wall, and the man had entered his room, speaking softly to the boy who carried his luggage.  He dismissed the servant with a nod.  He continued to face the door until it shut, then turned to face the window and spoke.

            “You’re going to wear yourself out, hanging there,” he said.  “Come in and tell me why you’re following me.”

            He can’t mean me, the boy thought.  Ain’t no one could’a seen me comin’ ‘round this way.  He’s just talkin’ to be talkin’.  Or just in case.  He don’t know I’m here.  Couldn’t.  The boy put his eye back to the shutter just as the man came to it, pulling it wide and grabbing the terrified boy by his wrists.  The man heaved the boy, making not a grunt, and deposited him on the floor.

            “Now,” the man said in a low, smooth voice, “tell me why you’re following me.”  The boy raised his light blue eyes to the man’s black ones, and swallowed hard.

            “Wanted to see a bit o’ magic,” he spluttered.

            “You’re lying, boy, and I don’t hold with nonsense.”  The boy winced.  “Nor will I hurt you.  So, come, tell me why you’re here.”

            Silence.

            Then,

            “Fine.  You may leave the way you entered.  You have lost nothing, except perhaps the fee of the man who hired you.  You are no worse off than you were yesterday.”  The man turned his back to the boy again, clearly in dismissal, but the boy still didn’t move.

            “Yes?” the man sighed.

            “A-ain’t ya curious?  To who hired me, and what for?”

            “Why, not what for, and aren’t, not ain’t,” the man said.  “And yes, but not enough to deal with a muted vagabond.  Be on your way; if I must, I will divine the information.  For now I don’t feel even threatened—whoever it was didn’t bother to send a professional, so they cannot be too serious in their study of me.  Good-day, young man, and may the Raven take you under his wing.”  The man ended this speech so abruptly that the boy felt as though a curtain had dropped between them—not that he had much experience with curtains.  He pondered the man’s words for a moment.

            “I am so a professional.”

            “Oh?”

            “A professional is some’n who gets paid for their workin’.  I’m gettin’ paid for spying, so I’m a professional.”

            “Your logic has some serious gaps in it, young man.”

            “Logic?”  The man turned back to his trunks, striding across the room to reach them.  The boy scrambled to his feet and followed the man across the room until he stood mere inches from the man’s broad, black-cloaked back.

            “Logic: your pattern of thinking, the way you draw a conclusion from the evidence around you.  Why are you standing so close to me?”  The man removed his hat, brushing a bit of dust or soot off of it before hanging it on the wall.

            “How’d you know I’s standin’ close?” the boy asked.  The man turned around abruptly, and the boy took an automatic step back from the man’s now too-close face.  The man made a coughing noise which might have been an expression of derision at the boy’s question, or might have been a response to the boy’s street smell.  The boy waited, arms crossed, staring determinedly up at the man until, at last, the man sighed and looked into the boy’s eyes.

            There was a brief, but complete, silence.  Then the man shook his head once, hard, to the right—more of a twitch than anything—breathed in sharply, and spoke.

            “Well, you certainly weren’t invited in the regular way, but I suppose I can give you courtesy regardless.”  The man gestured, and a straight-backed chair moved from its place by the fire to rest beside the boy.  “Surely you’re tired.  Have a seat.  I can give you—“  here the man paused to inspect his pocketwatch—“seven and a half minutes.”

            “To do…what?” the boy asked, confused in a multitude of ways.  A normal nobleman, having caught a peeper, would’a thrown him out on his ear as a way of kindness.  This mark was no ordinary fellow, and not just b’cause he was supposed to do magic.

            “I’ll begin by answering your question,” the man said, still standing, leaning on his cane a bit.  “I knew you were standing close to me because I wear a pendant—“the man gestured to a heavy copper-colored disk strung on a ribbon around his neck—“which has a proximity charm placed on it.  It communicates to me magically when someone is close.  Especially if they are abnormally close.  Now.  Does any of what I just said to you make sense in your mind, boy?  No, I can’t just call you boy.  First, tell me your name.  Then answer the question.”

            The boy swallowed.  “Matthew.  My name is Matthew.  I’m thirteen years old, and I been on me own since I were—“

            “Matthew, we have many things to discuss, not the least of which is your grammar, but those things will be dealt with in their times.  First,” and as the man said first, a calm settled onto Matthew, “I need to know if my description about magic made sense to you.  Can you tell me what you understood of what I said?”

            “Oh, aye, th’ts easy, that is.  You’s got a pendant-thing which combines its magics wif your magics to tell you who’s what’s and where’s on your person.  That right?”  The man had sat down (in a seat Matthew would have sworn wasn’t there before) during Matthew’s speech, somehow conjured up a pipe, and was smoking quietly by the end of Matthew’s rapid utterance.

            “That is, if I understand your street slang well enough, unusually right.  Most people wouldn’t understand magic to hear it explained, and I’ll tell you why: it’s because it can’t be explained in words.”

            “But then how come I understood you plain as day?”  The man took a long draught from his pipe, then blew the smoke out of his nostrils slowly.

            “That is the question,” the man said.  “And the answer is- here!” On “Here!” the man whacked Matthew’s calf with his cane.

            “Blimey! Why’d you hit me?  I fought this were gonna be a friendly-like chat.  Here, it hurts!”

            The man, however, was not listening to Matthew’s cries.  He was focused on the tiny corner of fabric that his cane had torn from Matthew’s pants—or, more accurately, on the black stretch of skin beneath it.

            “What’re ya doin’?  I know what’s legal and what ain’t, and hurting a child sure as hell ain’t—“  The man covered Matthew’s mouth with one hand.  With the other, he widened the hole in Matthew’s pants to reveal what looked like a small tattoo of what was clearly a raven.

            “Would you care to explain, Matthew?” The man asked, standing and backing away, an accusatory finger pointed at the raven symbol.  Matthew sighed and straightened himself in his chair.

            “I don’t see what my birthmark has to do with any business that’s yours, sir.”

            “I don’t see how my magic is any business of yours, either, but here we are, the spy, the spied-on—or, rather, the almost-spied-on, and the raven.”

            “So my birthmark looks’a bit like a raven.  Ain’t no big thing.  Bet there’s stranger out there.”

            “Oh, my dear Matthew, there’s stranger out there than you can imagine.  But to begin with, there’s stranger in here.  Pardon me, I must remove my shirt to prove my point.  One moment.”  And then the man was undressing, casually tossing his coat so that it hung, then rapidly unbuttoning his overshirt.  When he had removed his undershirt and neatly laid it aside, he turned his attention back to Matthew.

            “This is my birthmark,” he said, and turned around so that Matthew could see his back.

            Matthew’s jaw dropped.  The man’s back, as well as being strongly muscled and brutally scarred, had an ink-black birthmark of a raven in flight, its feathers brushing the right shoulder on one end and the left hip on the other.  It was unmistakably a raven, so detailed the boy could hardly believe it wasn’t a painting.

            “Are you alright, young Matthew?”  Matthew shut his gaping mouth as the man began to dress again.

            “You-you’re like me, sir.  Or, or I’m like you.  Somehow.  Maybe it don’t matter much, but I always kinda hoped that my birthmark meant somethin’, and I can’t help feelin’ now that it do, and that you know about it somehow.”

            “Oh, Matthew, it matters.  It matters a great deal.  Not just to you and me, but to the world in general.  We, the Raven-born, we keep this world turning.  We keep the world safe.”  The man swept an enormous bow, gracefully and yet manfully, and leaned close to Matthew.  “I am Augustus Millne, Chief of the Raven-kin.  Welcome to the circle.”