The Lightfoot Twins
The garden at “the Farm” was built for nothing and no one, and so it welcomed everything. It sprawled from the back of the house in a loose maze of raised stone beds and careless wildflowers, more suggestion than blueprint. Grasses and moss crept over the boundaries and smothered the old brickwork. A forest of apple and plum boughs heavy with young leaf and, in spring, drifts of pastel blossom that clung to hair and lashes and the corners of sleeves.
Kerrowyn crouched low behind a boxwood border, her face slick with the sweat of concentration, eyes narrowed against the glare that sliced through the branches overhead. Her hands were cupped in front of her chest, palms up, fingers tensed and ready. To her left, Kerric perched on his toes, knees wide, his mouth twisted into a crooked frown.
The white-linen tablecloth sagged in the heat, a ripple of uneven pleats. On the table sat a modest tea service, plates stacked two high, a bowl of sugar cubes with silver tongs, and two matching spoons. The Caretaker herself had stepped inside to fetch the scones, her footsteps muffled on the kitchen’s flagstone floor.
“Ready?” Kerric mouthed.
Kerrowyn nodded, and in the breath between seconds, they moved.
Kerric went first, flitting from their hiding spot to the far side of the table. He ducked under the hanging cloth, the tips of his fingers barely disturbing the hem, and set his gaze toward the kitchen door, scanning for any sign of movement.
Kerrowyn’s heartbeat measured time in the emptiness: three, two, one. The trick of it wasn’t moving fast. It was moving with nothing extra; no gesture, no angle, no wasted energy. She slithered from cover, and palmed both spoons from the table. Her hands, still child-soft but nimble, curled around the polished stems, and she let her gaze rest a moment on their reflection. They mirrored the flash of Kerric’s eyes as he grinned from the other side of the table.
She tucked the spoons into the poorly sewn pocket in her apron’s hem. Her own work, uneven and obvious if you knew what to look for. No one ever did.
The sugar tongs were next, but they required more finesse. She waited until the Caretaker’s shadow darkened the edge of the kitchen threshold. Then, with a flick of her wrist, she sent the tongs tumbling into her palm, snagging them mid-fall and curling them against her body.
The Caretaker’s voice drifted out through the open kitchen door: “If you two are up to mischief, remember what happened last time!” The warning was ritual, a sing-song threat with no teeth left in it. The spoons and tongs had already vanished.
Kerric flashed his fingers at Kerrowyn, counting. One, two, three. The two bolted with a practiced synchronicity as their Caretaker shouted after them with words that were meant to be threatening, but actually filled with pride. After a few minutes of running, the twins checked to make sure they hadn’t been followed before stopping to admire their haul; the spoons, the tongs, and a candied piece of fruit she’d filched from the plate on the table’s far edge. Kerric arched a brow, and Kerrowyn arched back, but she was already laughing, the sound pressing out through her nose in a quick, wheezing rush.
He let himself collapse onto the grass beside her, shoulders shaking. “Amateur,” he whispered.
Kerrowyn stuck out her tongue. “You’re jealous because you always get caught.”
He made a show of pretending to sulk, but the mirth in his voice betrayed him. “Only when you let me.”
The Caretaker’s voice rang out across the clearing, “Lightfoot twins! You’re not getting a crumb if you don’t show yourselves by the count of five.”
Kerrowyn and Kerric shared a glance, and for a heartbeat, the whole world narrowed to the space between their eyes: a flicker of grey-blue and violet, ringed with gold dust, and all the silent oaths that passed between them unspoken. “One day they’ll never see us coming,” Kerric said, and Kerrowyn knew he was right.
They emerged together, giggling, all traces of guilt worn smooth. The spoons and tongs would reappear, sparkling and freshly polished, at breakfast tomorrow, and the Caretaker would pretend not to notice the extra clink in the cutlery drawer. But in their pockets and in their hearts, the twins knew each prize was a trophy. They kept them catalogued in memory; every theft, every game, every day spent in that secret world they shaped with their own deft hands.
In the shade of the apple trees, they stuffed their faces with scones, cheeks ballooned and crumb-dusted, and dreamed aloud of what they would steal next.
The sun moved slow and content across the garden, the hour stretching thin and golden, and for a while Kerrowyn believed every prize worth taking could still be returned by morning.
At five, that was what theft meant.
Missing spoons returned polished. Sugar tongs found their way back to the drawer. Candied fruit disappeared into two small mouths, and the Caretaker scolded them with one eye laughing. The Farm was full of such mercies: adults who pretended not to see, doors that stayed unlocked, fields that ran farther than any child’s fear.
It was not the city. Not yet.
The Farm sat well beyond the Capitol’s proper teeth, tucked among low hills and orchards where the youngest Lightfoot children were kept until they were old enough to be useful. There, mischief was training under watchful eyes and forgiving rules. They could steal a spoon and learn the shape of pride without learning the shape of hunger. They could be quick, clever, reckless, and still be called inside for scones.
Kerrowyn did not understand then that this was kindness. She only knew she and Kerric belonged to each other, and that every wall, branch, table, and locked pantry in the world existed to test them.
By seven, the tests had changed.
The Farm fell behind them in pieces: first the orchard, then the Caretaker’s kitchen, then the long road to the Capitol, where smoke swallowed the sky and the streets grew narrow enough to press secrets flat.
Kerrowyn had known, technically, that she was small. All gnome children were small. But the city taught her the difference between small and breakable: human boots at shoulder height, cart wheels taller than her chest, counters built for hands that did not have to climb to reach them.
Duskwarren was louder, meaner, and much less impressed by clever children. Its alleys did not pretend not to notice. Its locks did not forgive. Its adults did not clap when you stole from them and brought the spoons back clean.
Still, Kerrowyn learned quickly.
So did Kerric.
And if the world had become sharper beneath their feet, all that meant was that they had to climb higher to get above it.
The tree behind the Duskwarren house had stood longer than the Clan warren itself, older than the current bosses, older than the newest locks, older, Kerric claimed, than the city’s name. It rose from the bramble like the spine of some ancient animal, its bark scabbed and flaking, limbs as thick as stone columns. Generations of Lightfoot children had adopted it as fortress, court, and gallows before they’d learned all their letters, their small hands polishing the lowest branches smooth.
On this day, the air was bright and thin, the sun straining to break free of the cloud cover, and Kerrowyn, never one for caution, had decided to climb all the way to the crown.
She started barefoot, as was her habit, her toes finding purchase in the cold, rough crannies of the trunk. The scars from last season’s fall still marred her ankles, faint white against her skin. She ignored them. Every ascent was a dare to herself, a wager that she could go higher, faster, or with less looking back than the time before.
Below, Kerric hovered at the tree’s base, arms folded across his chest in a gesture so like their mother’s that it almost made Kerrowyn laugh. He squinted up, lips pressed into a line, his worry shining through the frown. “I can’t catch you if you fall, Wren. I’m not that big.” he called, keeping his voice pitched low so the adults in the kitchen wouldn’t overhear.
Kerrowyn grinned down at him. “I’ll land on my feet,” she retorted, and then, with a showy lurch, she swung herself onto the first of the big horizontal boughs.
She climbed by memory, by instinct: left hand, right foot, right hand, left foot. Her fingers closed on a scar in the bark, an old nail, half-rusted, which she and Kerric had driven there in a contest of strength last summer. The memory made her grin widen. She ascended, shedding the world with every meter: the noise of the house, the stink of cabbage from the kitchen, the drone of their uncle’s voice from the parlor. Here, there was only the wind and the creak of branches.
At the third fork, Kerrowyn paused, her heart racing in her chest. The limb she needed to reach was just above her head, slick with last night’s frost. She balanced on her haunches, stretched upward, and caught the branch with her fingertips. For one awful moment, she dangled, her feet scraping for grip, and then she was up, straddling the limb, legs trembling with effort and relief.
The yard below had shrunk. Kerric’s face, tilted skyward, was a blur of color and concern.
“Don’t be stupid,” he hissed, but the anger was a mask; beneath it was something Kerrowyn knew well, a matching hunger, a secret wish to be up there beside her.
“Race you to the nest!” she shouted, and scampered sideways, hands and feet moving with a monkey’s ease.
The nest was wedged in the crook where two branches joined, a lopsided bowl of mud and woven twigs. It belonged, that year, to a pair of jays with shrieks louder than any cat’s. Kerrowyn peered inside, careful not to touch, and saw two pinkish, nearly featherless fledglings, their beaks stretching open in perpetual hunger.
She perched above them, balancing on the balls of her feet, and looked out over the rooftops and alleys. The city was a patchwork, all red tile and tar and the glint of glass, with the Brightfell River a silver snake threading through it. For a moment, Kerrowyn felt taller than the spires of the old Watchtower, untouchable.
Kerric’s head popped up beside her, panting. He’d followed the same route, but slower, testing each handhold before trusting his weight. “You’re gonna us both killed,” he gasped, but he was already grinning, eyes alight.
Kerrowyn nudged him with her elbow, careful not to unseat him. “We won’t die,” she said. “We’ll just fly away.”
Kerric rolled his eyes, but when he looked down at the nest, the hardness in his face softened. “They look disgusting,” he said, but he couldn’t take his gaze off the fledglings.
Kerrowyn’s voice dropped, as if she were telling a secret to the leaves. “I think they’re perfect.”
They sat in silence, the wind teasing at their hair, the city far away, and the world below irrelevant. For all their fights, their bickering and boasts and thrown punches, up here the twins were a matched pair. Two creatures built for daring and climbing and seeing what no one else could.
“Do you think we’ll ever leave?” Kerric said, so quietly she almost missed it.
Kerrowyn didn’t answer right away. She stared out over the top of the limb, at the distant black line of the Iron Peaks, at the clouds catching in the city’s highest towers. “Of course we will,” she said. “We’ll go farther than anyone. All the way to the end.”
Kerric looked at her, his expression inscrutable. “Together?”
“Always,” Kerrowyn replied. She meant it with her whole heart.
Below, the world turned and turned, but in the high branches, time stopped. They leaned against each other for warmth, for courage, for the comfort of knowing there was still a place where only the two of them belonged.
