The Price {Completed}

Chapter Thirty-Four

After the women we were allowed into the ranks, the war changed. Sides were blurred, the Common Army surrendering after their supplies ran low, and the Vigilant taking up those who were not immediately executed for royalist blood or crown sympathies. The armies of the two kings now faced what was left of the Common Army, as well as the Vigilant Men, and sometimes the two sides were not exactly against each other. There came rumors of Vigilant escaping to the royalist armies, and royalist battalions defecting to the Vigilant Cause. It became so tangled, that no one quite knew which side was which, and the fighting reflected this in the utter destruction of Rumonin.

The buildings of the city were scorched shells of their former glory. One-family homes were soon reassigned to multiple families, and the facades faded and peeled, revealing pitted bricks and boarded windows. Holes were punched in roofs to vent smoke from fires to keep children warm during the snowstorm that blew in with a dark fury. The river grew heavy with the sewage of so many, and more than once it carried a bloated body to the shore where children picked its pockets and then left it to rot wherever it washed up.

I spent the months on the street, looking for ways to keep alive. Perhaps the one good thing to come from the deepening war was that the man-power could no longer be spared to hunt the alleys for those sickly men and women that escaped the draft. It was likely that the men in charge knew that starvation and the cold would eventually drive any sane person into the arms of the armies, but they did not count on the ingenuity of the draft dodgers. While we were not allowed an official job, as those were still controlled by the Vigilant Men, we still found ways to earn a coin or two. And theft was always an option if you were fast and cunning enough.

I managed to barter most of my extra clothes in the early days for some coins which I hoarded carefully to make sure that I wouldn't starve immediately. I soon was left only with my winter dress, boots, Ferdinand's socks over my stockings, and a heavy scarf over my hair. Nothing else could be called mine, even my ballet slippers. They sold for next to nothing, since they offered no protection or warmth. I managed to bargain a slice of bread for them, which I made last for three days.

My bedroom was any doorway that could protect me from the falling snow. I would huddle up against the cold stone, hoping that the occupants of the building wouldn't come out before I could vacate. It was never a restful sleep, but it kept me from falling over during the day.

With no other way of making money, I turned to that profession of any street urchin. I picked pockets and stole, trying to target any man in a uniform that looked able to handle the loss of his pocketwatch. That limited my targets to nearly none, and I was soon forced to turn to the job I'd held with Rachel a few months before.

There were more dead now than ever before. Royalist or those loyal to the Cause, they were all carted to the same place in an effort to keep the streets clear enough for the Vigilant army to defend against the kings' armies. The Vigilant tried to continue their appropriation of the dead's valuables, but they were slowly moving more and more of their workers to the front lines. This left a few hours at night where the bodies were left unguarded in a dead-end alley, piled high and still mostly unpicked. That was the sliver of night that I and other women and children oozed in from the dark alleys to try and find anything that might keep us alive.

The majority of what I found went to the two women who made it their business to decide which of the street urchins were allowed to pick the dead and which weren't. They weren't of the Vigilant, but they certainly were vigilant. They stood nearby, watching the alleys to make sure no soldiers were about, and let the scrawny children and other women do the work for them. I was awarded a few coppers at the end of the day, depending on how much I could hand over to them. Sad as it seemed, the icy coins made up for staring into glassy eyes and accidentally grazing ice-cold skin.

On one night, I was by far not the only woman in the pile of bodies. There were four others, eying me angrily as I went straight for the officers and reached into the inner jacket pockets of their fine uniforms. The best pickings were from the men who looked better dressed, and I knew enough by this time to go straight for them. The other women, given the chance, would have done the same. The more you brought to the mistress of the robbing ring, the better coins you got at the end of the night.

I fished up a few pocket-watches, a gold monocle, and an entire handful of coins. I put them all in the small pouch at my hip that I guarded with special attention. One of the other women inched closer to me, her eyes straying for just a second to the bag before flicking away to something else. She rifled through the pocket of the corpse next to me, and I stood to move away. As my back straightened, and my hand went to the treasures at my hip, the woman suddenly lunged, grabbing my legs and knocking me to the ground. I screamed, my head smacking against the chest of some body, and my legs getting tangled in my skirts so that I couldn't stand up.

"Give it here," the woman barked, smacking me across the mouth and struggling to rip the bag from my hand. I tried kicking her, but the other women swarmed over, all wanting a piece of the spoils. One pulled a thin knife, once used to skin apples, and handed it to the woman on top of me. She smiled, revealing gappy teeth lined in black, as she took the blade and lowered it to my neck. The blade cut a stinging line into my skin, and I felt the glistening dribble of blood run down the side of my neck and into my ear.

"Stop!" I shouted, releasing the bag and letting her take it. She laughed and barked at me like a dog before standing up and turning to her accomplices. They didn't stick around, knowing that they had the best haul they would find. They wandered off into the night, taking with them what would have been my dinner for weeks. I groaned and pressed against the wound on my neck, the blood leaking between my fingers. I dug in my pocket for one of the various hankies and brought it to my neck.

As I lay on my back, a horrible thought came to my mind that someone might think I was one of the dead, covered in blood in ash. I jerked upward and tried to untangle my feet from my petticoats and the nearest corpse's jacket. As I worked, my eyes flickered upward for a second, scanning the alley to make sure none of the children left were approaching me. Instead, I saw the woman in charge of distributing the coins at the end of the day. She stood at the bottom of the pile of bodies, watching me as I struggled to my feet.

"You should head home. There isn't enough time to pick enough to earn anything from us," she said, her eyes gleaming hard and cold in the moonlight. I wanted to protest, fight my case that I should be owed at least a pittance, but I knew I would get nowhere. The items stolen from me were in her pockets already, and she didn't care that I had been the one to find them in the first place.

I climbed down to the street, and hanging my head, dodged past the children now lining up to drop off their loot and earn their coins. The alley where the bodies were dumped was just off one of the main streets that was used as transportation lines between the pockets of Vigilant Men soldiers. Wagons rumbled by every so often, stuffed with men or supplies. Or corpses to be dumped. The few civilians that dared the night air huddled on the sidewalks, walking to their destination with as little sidetracking as possible.

I made my way to a less used street, one populated only in the morning, where I might find a good doorway to sleep in. This street ran by the old Wellington Lodging House, now reduced to a leveled pile of debris that had already been picked over for anything that could help the Cause. I wasn't there when it was destroyed, and I was glad I had gotten out when I did. I knew that not a few souls had gone down with the building.

I had made a habit of finding resting places near the old lodging house. I felt it was, perhaps, a case of hiding in plain sight, should Rachel or the Vigilant Men still be looking for me. Not to mention that I knew the area around it well enough to be able to dodge anyone should I need to. The little nooks and crannies were as familiar to me now as my own name.

I made my way to a doorway I'd found luck at before. They had wooden steps, which were able to keep warmth a bit better than stone, and the residents rarely left before dawn. I only had to wake before the sun and I could scurry away without a single kick to my ribs.