Twelve Realms

Chapter 15

Lucia

I do not like Aerid at all.

He's rude, arrogant, and has practically no respect for me, the Temple, or Dea. Seriously, how can someone disrespect Dea so openly? Does he know nothing of the power she holds, or what she's done for the Twelve Realms?

I shake my head to clear it. I have to focus. I have a job to do, and however much it bothers me that Aerid has no respect for the gods, I can't let that distract me from my mission. It's more important than anything else.

Aerid sits on a rotting tree stump a few feet from the decrepit old house, mindlessly twisting the toe of his boot into the ground. He honestly looks very similar to my people, with his unkempt brown hair and brown eyes, but there are a few notable differences between him and the people from the Realm of Eternal Winter. 

For starters, he's much tanner than anyone I've met, which honestly doesn't surprise me. It's so much hotter here than it is at home, and I don't think I've stopped sweating since I got here. Even with the trees to filter out a lot of the light, the sun beats down with a relentlessness I've never experienced before.

What does surprise me about him, though, is how skinny he is. His clothes hang from his frame and his skin barely covers his bones in several places. Perhaps he's just naturally skinny. Why would anyone go to live in the woods when they can barely feed themselves?

He catches me looking at him. 

"What?" he says.

"Nothing," I say, feeling my cheeks grow hot. I open my notebook and look at the list of places I had written. Just seeing the names on paper makes me feel daunted. Then I realize that I have Aerid to bounce ideas off of now. Clearly he's better at this than I am, or at least he thinks he is.

"So," I say, flipping to a fresh page and preparing to take notes. "Where should we go first?"

Aerid tilts his head to the side as he considers this question. 

"Here," he says. 

I furrow my eyebrows, confused. 

"Yeah," he says. "Why would the Trickster hide in a village where the king would be looking for him, where all the villagers would turn him in in a heartbeat, where everyone would be looking for him? If he's hiding, he's hiding out here."

I raise an eyebrow. "In this house?" 

"What?" he says. "Oh. No, of course not. I forgot you're not from here. No, there's a whole band of these houses down here. This is just the first one I came across."

"Why would anyone build a whole neighborhood of houses and then just abandon them?" I ask, crossing my arms.

Aerid gives me a look, like I'm being stupid, and annoyance flares up in me again. I don't know why he thinks he's better than me.

"For multiple reasons. You can't grow crops or hunt in this area, the soil isn't the right consistency and the animals are all too wary of people. Also the king kicked everyone out of this zone a long time ago, he wanted to make it a vacation spot for nobles, but when he realized that the hunting here was horrible he abandoned the area and never bothered to lift the order barring people from living down here."

"Oh," I say. There's nothing more I can say, really. I'm starting to wonder if he's exaggerating about the king. I find it hard to believe that someone could be so selfish and inconsiderate, especially on purpose, and that no gods would take any steps toward having that leader removed. But then again, I remember the conversation I had with one of the nobles, so I guess these horrid deeds aren't so terribly far-fetched.

"Alright," I say. "So we'll start here. Let's get going, then."

"Right now?" he says. "Seriously?"

I give him a look. "Yes, seriously. What good is it going to do us to sit around and wait?"

He shrugs, but as he turns away I think I spy a hint of nervousness on his face. What does he have to be nervous about? He knows this area way better than I do. 

The next abandoned house is a ways away, and when we get there, I understand why Aerid chose to stay in the other one, because while that house is deteriorating, this house is simply unlivable. 

For starters, bushes and trees grow so closely around it that it's practically impossible to get into. The roof has caved in almost entirely, leaving barely any room inside. The floors are covered with shattered glass, people's litter and animal droppings. If I were the Thief, I wouldn't want to live here. Nevertheless, I can't afford to not be thorough, so I comb the place, checking  behind doors, in corners and in the little crevices that caved-in roof has created. I even find a basement door, but the staircase to go down has broken off after the third step and it's pitch black at the bottom. I'm not willing to risk going down there without preparing first, so I make both a mental note and a physical note in my journal to return here.

Aerid watches the way I examine the house with a mix of amusement, which irritates me, and worry, which confuses me. It could be that he's worried I'm going to get hurt, but he seems to only be going along with what I want because I've promised to free his realm from the tyranny of his king, so I don't think he really cares about what happens to me. 

Several times I ask him if he wants to come help me look, but every time he turns me down with varying degrees of rudeness, either by being unkind or by straight-up ignoring me. 

After about an hour I'm forced to admit that if the Thief is living in this house, he's made it very difficult for anyone to prove it, so we move on to the next house. 

All of the houses seem to be in a relatively straight line, which seems like an odd way to build a neighborhood, but Aerid assures me that there are more that I just can't see. 

When I was told I was to be finding the Thief, I can honestly say that I did not expect that I'd be digging through filthy abandoned buildings with one of the rudest people I've ever met.