“You’re lucky you have any path at all, Thistle. You’re a bastard. You follow it, or you leave. Those are your choices.”
And whose fault was that?
Looking back, it was a very childish argument, not that this should have surprised anyone. Errol Fírinne had never been the most mature adult, which was probably how he raised such an obstinate, childish son who would hear those words and read a challenge in them.
“No one’s stopping you. Leave.”
Well, fine.
“But you’re never welcome here again.”
Not a problem.
Or so Thistle thought, at the time. But then, most things seem like a good idea in the heat of the moment, and the most basic things are overlooked. Necessities like… Warm clothes. Preferably ones that were waterproof. It was actually sort of a shock to find just how insulated the Seelie Fae kept their kingdom. It was as if they lived inside a bubble of magic where it was always warm and never raining. Obviously he’d experienced rain before, they didn’t all spend every waking moment inside their walled city, but he’d always assumed that even in the outside world rain was a temporary state.
Apparently not in Galway.
In Galway it rained endlessly. Honestly, he couldn’t think of a time in the first six months of being out in the mortal world when he’d been dry. Or had had a meal that filled his belly--let alone a hot one. Another necessity he’d overlooked was his complete lack of useful magics. At sixteen he’d acquired little in the way of skills that weren’t inborn: a few tricks that were unique to his family’s bloodline, and that annoying little gift with the flowers. Anywhere else this might be something he could use to his advantage. Sell an endless supply of bouquets for money. But the people here were worn ragged. Many were leaving the port city for greener pastures in other counties between the endless surge of invasions and earthquakes ravaging the city in the past seventy five years, and the less than bountiful crops. No one wanted flowers. And what was worse, the British influence meant that those who still made up the dwindling population spoke not Gaelic--the Old Language, the Mother Tongue, the one language the local Fae population communicated exclusively in--but English. A completely incomprehensible conglomeration of vowels and consonants he couldn’t make heads or tails of.
After too many months of being chased out of barns by farmers and indignant milkmaids, he’d taken to hanging out in the back of a local pub--really the only pub--waiting to sneak food off the plates of unsuspecting patrons, or if he was feeling really bold, sneaking into the kitchen to grab something before it even made it out to the tables at all. He quickly found he had a knack for hiding in plain sight, completely invisible to the average mortal, which was easier done in a crowded and noisy pub than it was in the quiet barns full of easily spooked animals, so he’d also been able to catch some sleep there without anyone noticing. As long as no one tried to sit on him, he was generally quite safe.
Or, so he thought. Perhaps Thistle had gotten too cocky, assuming no one would ever notice him. After a whole year of living off of stolen morsels and naps under the stairs, he’d started taking larger and larger morsels of food from tables, sleeping in unoccupied beds, and sneaking clothing and coins and books out of unsuspecting traveler’s valises, until one day, he snatched an entire loaf of soda bread off of a bespectacled old woman’s table, and without warning her bony fingers were tight on his wrist.
“Put that back, you imp,” she hissed through what was left of her teeth.
Thistle was completely paralyzed for a moment, unable to comprehend just how he’d been seen—only another Fae could possibly see him—before he attempted to wrench his arm free of her grasp, only to have her grip tighten painfully.
“I said put it back.” she repeated.
Hands shaking, he returned the bread to the table. Her grip on his arm did not loosen even slightly. In fact, she pulled him close enough for him to count the whiskers on her wizened chin. “You’ve been at this a while, skinny. I’ve been watching you steal from these good people.” She tore a chunk of bread from the loaf with her free hand and stuffed it in her mouth. “Only the lowest of the low steal from people poor as these. In my day Faeries were supposed to be cleverer than that.” She grinned smugly.
Thistle blinked at her. What was there to be clever about? He needed to eat.
“You got a name?” She asked, stuffing another piece of bread into her mouth.
Name? Names were precious commodities. But oh it was just nice to have someone talk to him after all this time, even if she did have only about ten teeth in her entire mouth and hand strength like a snake squeezing the life out of a rat.
“Fírinne,” he replied raspilly--unused to using his own voice after so much time spent not speaking to others--giving his family name and no other, since it wasn’t any secret. There were many Fírinnes.
The old woman cackled. “Truth,” she said in that incomprehensible language nearly everyone around here seemed to speak in varying degrees. “That’s a terrible name for a thief,” she continued in Gaelic. “I don’t suppose you’re going to give me the rest of it?”
Thistle shot her a look that suggested she should know better, which was probably a bold move considering she still had her fingers wrapped around his wrist.
She laughed again. “Smarter than you look. Still, we’d better get you a real name.”
“I like my name,” he blurted. Parts of it anyway.
“Can’t go around with just one name, people won’t like that, gonna figure you for what you are right away.”
What he was. What was she that she could see him when no one else could? Some breed of Fair Folk, and solitary. And he could see why. She chewed loudly with her mouth open. She’d probably been ousted from her clan. “Would you let me go, now?”
“No,” she said, and shoveled the last of the bread down her gullet. “I have use of you. And don’t you argue, or I’ll expose you for the thief you are. Don’t think the locals won’t have you swinging from the gallows when they find out what you’ve taken from them.” She stood and swung her cloak over her head, and whisked him out of the pub and through town, all the way down to the docks. She didn’t stop or slow down until she reached a small, dingy looking, whitewashed building. The paint was rapidly flaking away to reveal the gray wood underneath. She flung open the door, and finally released him, shoving him into the middle of the dimly lit, gray room. There was a desk in the back corner, with a man hunched over it, and just beyond that, a dying fire in an open potbelly stove.
“Got your cabin boy, Captain,” she said gruffly in that damned other language again. Thistle glanced at her over his shoulder in disbelief, unsure exactly what was going on, but getting a fairly good idea. At some point on their venture over, he’d stopped attempting to be invisible, which he now felt had been the wrong choice. But what option did he have now? Surely the man in the corner had seen him, and if he tried to escape… That Fae woman was quicker and stronger than her years, that was for certain.
She shot him a look that told him he’d best play along, or else. Thistle had no question that she’d make good on whatever that or else might be, so he stood there, in the center of the room, while the man stood from behind the desk, and let his eyes sweep over him.
“Kind of scrawny,” he mumbled, stepping out from behind the desk to circle Thistle like a vulture. He reached for Thistle’s arm, pinching at it and shaking his head with disappointment. “Has he got a name, hag?” The man asked finally.
“Jack O’Brien,” the woman replied, “Doesn’t speak a lick of English, though. Hope that’s not a problem.”
The man frowned. “He’ll have to learn. Don’t have much use for a cabin boy who can’t read or write in English. Is he smart?”
“He’s very clever,” she replied, and then repeated it in Gaelic, clearly for Thistle’s benefit. At the moment he wasn’t sure that was an asset.
The man did another sweep around Thistle and sighed. “Fine. I don’t suppose there’s anyone better in these parts any longer.” He returned to the desk and pulled a small bag out of one of the drawers. “Can’t give you much on account of he can’t speak English.” He removed several coins from the bag and returned them to the drawer, before bringing the substantially lighter bag to the old woman. “Take it and get out of here.”
The way her eyes narrowed and lips puckered told Thistle that at least some part of her plan had not gone as expected. She snatched it out of his hands and tucked the bag into a pocket in her cloak, before pulling Thistle into a rib-crushing embrace. “Alright Fírinne,” she whispered gruffly into his ear, but at least she was back to speaking the language he could understand, “Nothing personal. I gotta eat too, you know.” She held him out at arms length. “Don’t forget, you’re Jack O’Brien now. And I just saved your life, so give us a kiss then.” She turned her face holding her wrinkled cheek toward him.
Knowing she probably wouldn’t let go of him if he didn’t, Thistle obliged. She cackled, gave his shoulders a painful squeeze and without a backward glance, swept out the door.
The first term Thistle learned in English was his job title. Cabin Boy. As far as he could tell, it meant a lot of back breaking work, witnessing a lot of rude gestures from the sailors, “accidental” jabs and kicks in the pants, and derogatory (not that he could understand it) name calling.
It also meant learning English so that he could (eventually), take notes for the captain. So when he wasn’t helping to swab the deck or pick eyes out of rotten potatoes in the galley, he was holed up in the Captain’s cabin with primers and books clearly designed for small children.
It was easier to learn to read and write it than speak it, however. Probably because that was what the Captain pushed more. He didn’t need Thistle--or, he supposed Jack was who he was supposed to be now--to be able to speak. Just to take notes. It was a matter of months before he could manage to write well enough, at least to the Captain’s standards. When he’d done a good job, the Captain would sometimes reward him with a coin or an extra portion of whiskey after dinner. A bad job usually meant an extra turn at latrine duty. An extra bad job meant a caning, which made the latrines look like an enjoyable time.
Thistle got very good at avoiding both.
After about a year, he could understand the language a bit better. The consonants were still harsh on his ears, though the majority of the sailors spoke it with a lilt that was almost appealing. Not quite as pretty as the language he’d been brought up speaking, but not so terrible now that he could understand it. By the second year he could speak it quite fluently, though he kept that mostly to himself. Believing him to be unable to understand them, the sailors frequently spoke freely around him, and secrets spilled to the Captain brought more coin than any of his other duties.
“Keep this up, boy and one of these days you’ll have earned enough to buy your way off this God forsaken ship,” the Captain commented one day.
Buy his way off?
That was an idea he hadn’t considered. Didn’t know it was an option, though some kind of escape was at the back of his mind. There were only a precious few years before his aging would slow down dramatically, someone was bound to notice sooner or later. Money came to him slowly--ha’pennies at a time, sometimes--and though by the third year he’d been promoted from Cabin Boy to working in the Galley under the cook (not much of a promotion, but at least it meant he got to steer clear of the latrines), he wasn’t exactly bringing in much, and he often spent most of what he had when they made port--a few drinks here, a new pair of boots there, tobacco for his pipe, a bottle of whiskey to squirrel away when the rations got low--which meant it would likely he’d be found out before he ever saved up enough to buy his way off the ship.
But the rest of the crew--at least, a good many of them--always had money. Not just because they were paid better either. They were just as good at burning though their hard earned gains--if not better--each time they made port, but they always seemed to double what they had while they were out. It didn’t take Thistle long to figure out it was the games that made this possible. Mostly dice, though some were fond of cards, and the most rough and tumble of them brawled or boxed (or bet on said brawling and boxing). Or, when they were feeling particularly nasty, threw Thistle into the ring and bet against him, hoping he would lose. And he usually did. At least at first.
It didn’t take long to figure out how to rig the dice games. Being at sea made him even more disconnected from his magic than he’d been in Galway, but he could still manage to manipulate the dice to land just right every time. Or at least, just often enough not to raise suspicion. Cards were harder. He could only manipulate the shuffle about half the time, and only after being on land for a good solid week, so he only tried it on occasions when the shore leave was long enough, which wasn’t often.
He was twenty two (at least, he was pretty sure, time was hard to track after he was no longer taking down the Captain’s log) before he saved up enough to buy his way off, and then another year went by before he was sure he’d saved enough to make sure he would be comfortable once he no longer had a ship to call home. And, he supposed, after five years, it had become so, in an odd sort of way. Not that he’d miss it, or the crew who’d made certain he never felt safe or welcome for a single moment in all that time, though for months afterward, he had difficulty sleeping in a bed on solid ground without the rolling waves to rock him to sleep in his bunk.
The Captain was a little sour when Thistle handed over the bag of coins containing the key to his freedom, but a deal was a deal. In the end, he snatched it from Thistle’s hand in a similar fashion to the way the old hag had snatched her coins from the Captain the night she’d sold Thistle into servitude. He suspected that she’d gotten the worse end of the deal. The bag she’d gotten was conspicuously lighter than the one Thistle handed to the Captain, he remembered the way the other one jingled, and it was not nearly so noisy as the money he parted with.
London, England -1818
The first thing he did was buy new clothes. The tailor was dubious of his requests until he dropped two silver coins in his hand and asked if that would cover it.
Clothes, he’d heard someone say once, made the man. Which was precisely what he aimed to do: make himself into a new man. Not Thistle Winedrop Fírinne, not Jack O’Brien, but someone completely new. Someone important. Someone with money. Someone who could have whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, who’d never been hungry, or spit on, or tripped while lugging chamber pots to be emptied over the side of the boat.
A small, nagging voice in his brain remembered his father and his furious attempts to regain his position in the wake of Thistle’s unplanned appearance and the hasty marriage that followed, and tried to reason that this plan was not so different. So, he was a Fírinne. He’d always be a Fírinne. He’d keep his name as a reminder. A holdover from a time he’d like to forget, but shouldn’t.
But that didn’t solve the problem of a first name. He’d need one to secure lodging. His new clothes wouldn’t stay nice long if he didn’t have anywhere to keep them. He walked down the streets of London contemplating this problem, turning names over in his mind, rejecting from one by one, not wanting to share a name with any of the men he’d known thus far, but not having many to choose from, and he only wanted to do this once. Choose a name now, and wear it forever.
It was only by chance that the glanced to the right of him at a poster being glued to a wall outside the theatre building where the lodging advertisement had led him.
Julius Caesar Featuring: Junius Brutus Booth as Mark Antony, and Edmund Keane as Brutus!
Julius.
Julius Fírinne.
Yes.
That would do.
His lips curled up in a slow, lopsided smirk as he stepped into the building, and the woman behind the desk smiled back.