The Islanders

Chapter One - Freed

I can't remember the last time I saw the sun.  They've kept me locked up since I was a child.  My childhood was torn from me quicker than I could blink, and the blame goes to the two people I despise the most: my parents.  

Debt creeps up on many here in Venice, and most are enslaved for it.  But none experienced it as horribly as my family did. Her name was Gemma.  The only sister I ever had.  I was only 8 when they came for her; I can't even remember what she looked like.  

I still have no inkling as to when they took her, or why they whisked my parents away to a hidden location rumoured to be found underwater beneath the city.  But I never believed such nonsense; things like that were impossible.  I never saw them again.

I spent nearly five summers with a family known as the Stitches.  I hated it there.  I was treated like a donkey more than anything else.  Madame Stitch forced me to do the housework and prune her garden, in which she grew only thorns and crab-apple trees.  They abused me with their words as well as their fists.  Her husband was best known as the town drunk and would often beat me in his intoxicated stupor.

 The Stitch children were right little horrors, and considered it their personal duty to make my life hell.  Fire-ants and snakes would find their way between my sheets; I was woken each morning to a bucket of scalding hot water they went to great lengths to gather from the well and then boil for the sole intention of torturing me.  Once they even wedged rusted nails through the bottoms of my shoes.  I still have the scars.  

I had to steal on more than once occasion just to keep my belly full.  I never got caught, even when I pick-pocketed the rich.  When I was 14 I executed my first escape plan form the Stitch household.  But my absence was quickly noticed and I was discovered not five days later living in an alley.  I was hauled into law court and presented before the magistrate, whose powdered wig looked more like a mop than a hairpiece.

"What is your name, boy?"  Somehow, he had managed to speak with his mouth pulled down at the corners like a jack-o-lantern; his eyes were to big and too blue for his pasty face and protruding nose.  A greasy mustard stain was painfully visible on his velvet doublet.  Just the sight of him had made me wonder how such an undignified man could possibly allowed in law court.  

"Elf-f-fisio, sir," I had said, gazing at my dirty feet.   Back then I still stuttered.  

"Well then, Elf-f-fisio," he had said pompously, mocking me.  "You have run away from those who so graciously provided you with a home, correct?"

"N-not graciously, sir.  There is nothing g-gracious about the Stitches."

"Ungratefulness is a sin, youngster"

"B-but I have a right t-to be ungrateful.  I hardly believe you expect me to behave appreciatively when I'm beaten and abused as often as I am."

"He lies!"  Madam Stitch, accompanied by her barbaric offspring, had leapt to her feet just then and fed the magistrate some implausible story concerning my fragile mental state.  Had she been allowed to continue, Madam Stitch would have thoroughly convinced them I was deranged by the the closing of my trial.  But the magistrate called for silence.  

He peered at me with his child-like eyes and asked the one question I was dreading.  

"Boy...what is your surname?"

Thinking fast, I instantly responded with: "Ricci."

"He lies again!" Madam Stitch had crowed.

No!  I thought.  For once just keep your damn mouth closed!  How I longed to strangle her!  

"The boy's surname is Lepore."  She had cast me a devilish look.  With just one word she had gotten rid of me.

The whole room had drawn in a collective, shaky breath.  Whispers had flown.

"Alfrense's boy?"  "The son of a traitor?"  "Poor thing, hasn't a clue."  "Shame about the girl, she might have saved them."

"Enough!"  The magistrate had boomed, loud enough to send the pigeons perched on the window sill flying.  

"Is it possible?  Are you Elfisio Lepore, son of Alfrense Lepore: the enemy and betrayer of Venice?"  

Enemy of Venice?  Betrayer?  I had always been told my father had gambled away his expenses and landed us in so much debt that my sister was sent to a camp to work off the money.  I knew nothing of a betrayer.  

"That he is, your royallness!" began Madam Stitch.  "Biolographical son of the Traitor himself.  In fact he-"

"Let the boy speak!" ordered the magistrate, kindly ignoring her poor word usage.

"Y-yes," I had admitted, unaware of what I was getting myself into.  When i saw his look of rage, I had quickly added, "But I'm nothing like him!  I-"

"Men!  Take him to Kensigton Hall."

The prison?  Like hell they would take me to Kesington!  I had scrambled madly for a way to talk myself out of this, but nothing came to mind.  The dirty faces of Madam Stitch and her ogreish children simpered cruelly at me as the guards dragged me from the court chamber.  Before I knew it I was being hauled through the cobblestone streets, a public spectacle, and loaded onto a wagon full of straw.

The magistrate had appeared at the steps of the Court Hall, looking both sad and pleased.  "We will send for you when the time is right.  Take care."  In prison?  How would I manage that?  And with that he had turned and lumbered back inside.

That day my fate was sealed by none other than myself, Madam Stitch, and a mustard loving son of a bitch in a powdered wig.  

I have been here ever since in cell 204.  My ears have undoubtedly been permanently damaged due to the screams.  (Luckily, my cell is just a hop, skip and a jump away from the torture chamber.)   I have been waiting for them to send for me as the magistrate promised.  It has been five years and no news has come.  Until today.  I heard the welcome sound of footsteps thumping madly down the hall.  They stopped at my cell door.  

Greggo, a tall, bearded turnkey who guzzled far too much ale to be healthy wrenched open the door.  He grabbed my arm and clamped a pair of rusty fetters around both my ankles and wrists.  

"The Hollow Face want ter see yah," he grumbled.  

"Who's that?"  I asked as he dragged me down the hall.  He smelt positively foul.  

"Who's the Hollow Face?  Where ya been boy?"

"In a prison cell?"  I offered.  Was the man that thick-headed?

"Gah ha ha!  In a prison cell!  You sure are funny, kid.  This way."

He pulled me into the ourter court and I recoiled from the shock.  I screwed my eyes shut against the sun, whose warm rays might have been welcoming had they not been so painful.  I had been locked up for far to long.  

"Well, well, well, so you are the Traitors son.  You look just like him."  The voice was so condescending and cruel I felt ten times smaller than I truly was.  

I glanced up and gasped in horror.