The day started as most days did for Tommy. She woke to the sound of crying children in the large abandoned barn that served as the Littlelings home. The barn was cavernous. Two-story haylofts held up with wooden poles lined the walls, along which, orderly aligned, were the skeletons of horse stalls, the wood long since scavenged or burnt for fire. Children lied across almost every spot available in the hayloft, legs and arms hanging off the edges. Muddy waters covered the ground with hay floating amongst the debris. The cries came from the far part of the barn, where the newly arrived children huddled together at the corner of the hayloft. Tommy did not spare a thought for them. They had lived long enough to join up with the Littlelings. Most who did, survived once they became part of her family.

The rainy season was always the hardest on her and the Littlelings. It had rained for three straight weeks, and when it rained, food was hard to come by, as the townspeople in Varis did not leave about stuff to be scavenged or stolen. Fewer traders worked the Central District in the rains, and this made pilfering goods much more difficult. Sleeping conditions had become almost unbearable when the barn started leaking, leaving less room for the Littlelings to sleep. More and more children joined the Littlelings every day, and Tommy was becoming less sure of how she was going to feed and clothe all of them. She wondered often where all the children were coming from. Few enough of the children survived the streets of Varis, and fewer even of those made their way into the Littlelings, but even with that small amount, she saw a handful of new face each morning.

Tommy jumped down from the hayloft and left barn. The rain still fell from the sky, and she walked with her head down. She felt her belt and patted her three knives for reassurance. Even in the relative safety of Petra Jacobsen’s barn, she liked to know that her knives were within reach. She went over to the well and began pulling up the bucket. With the rains falling so hard over the past three weeks, the well was more filled than usual, and the bucket floated closer to the top. The Littlelings would be out soon to collect water. She drank the water and rubbed her face with the water and some mud until she felt cleaner.

In the rainy season, she accepted the cold and the wetness, but she hated the dirt. If she had one dream in her life, it was somehow to stay clean. Sometimes, she would walk the streets of Varis alone and watch the merchants and noblemen as they walked about wearing dry clothing with clean faces and hands. If she could have stolen their cleanliness, she would have. But for all her thieving, she had never found a way to steal that.

When Tommy returned to the barn, more of the Littlelings were up. The last evening patrol returned with the rising sun, and Tommy greeted them. There were fifteen children in the patrol, and the oldest was Henry, a boy of twelve who had been with the Littlelings for eight years. He held a shortened pitchfork and led the smaller children.

“Any trouble tonight?” Tommy asked.

“Nothings about, Tommy. It was so quiet it was hard keeping the Littlelings awake for our patrols. If it wasn’t for the rain pounding down on us, they’d be sleeping against the trees.” Henry smiled and thumbed over his shoulder to indicate his squad of children with more than a little bit of pride. Tommy returned his smile and nodded her head. Not one of the patrolling children looked tired. These children had lived out in the cold and the rain their entire lives, and they knew the price of having a roof over their head. They would never fall asleep during the patrols, or even think of shirking their duty.

“I find that unlikely, Henry. This bunch of rascals couldn’t fall asleep if the three bears had left their beds unmade. Go get some breakfast and then rest,” Tommy said, nodding over to the corner of the barn, where three Littlelings were mixing breakfast in a large iron cauldron with glimmering coal underneath it. “It looks to be another wet day. Once the rains break, I think the patrols are going to get tougher. The highwaymen are worse than us children when it comes to the rain.”

The children from the patrol laughed at Tommy’s statement and began talking amongst themselves. They were very proud of what they did to help Tommy, and Tommy was proud of them because they helped keep the Littlelings in the barn. Petra Jacobsen owned the barn. He was a successful nobleman who lived outside of Varis. Two years ago, he had built a new farmhouse and barn on the near side of the Eastering Road, closer to Varis, and on the opposite side of the property from this barn. The Eastering Road led east away from Varis, and the governors’ guards patrolled it often, including at night where the highwaymen were the most dangerous. The governors’ guards, which tended to stay near the city, patrolled the Eastering Road mostly, Tommy had heard, because of Jacobsen’s influence with the governors. Jacobsen was very free with his gold, at least with those who held power in Varis. When the bandits had descended upon the far side of his barn, however, not even his gold could sway the governors to risk their guardsmen to clear the road. Some of the murmuring Tommy had heard was that the governors were unhappy with Jacobsen because he contributed gold to the Church. This was dangerous business because if the Empress found out, she would not be happy with Jacobsen or the governors of Varis. But the politics of the Empress and the Church mattered little to Tommy. She was only concerned with housing and feeding her Littlelings.

The abandoned barn was near the smaller road on the far side of the Jacobsen farm, and the governors’ guards did not patrol it as heavily. Before Tommy and her Littlelings moved into the barn, highwaymen overran the area each night. They stole crops from the farm and set up tax points for travelers unlucky enough to be traveling at night.

In exchange for the space in the barn, Tommy had put a stop to the robbers and agreed to help protect the property. At first, it had been difficult for both Jacobsen and the highwaymen to believe that a gang of children could thwart the highwaymen’s free run of Jacobsen’s farm. Much to Tommy’s satisfaction, they had underestimated the children, both their willingness to stand up and fight the older and bigger men, and their willingness to die during those fights. The Littlelings were armed with small daggers in both hands, and when they fought, they charged without thought to their own safety. Once within range of a highwayman, they would stab repeatedly any unarmored area until both the highwaymen and the Littlelings were covered with blood. Much of it would be the Littlelings, but after waves of children descended on the highwaymen, other of it would be the highwayman’s blood. Even small groups of heavily armed highwaymen were no match for the Littlelings. Groups of twenty or more children descending on armed men are not a fair fight. The armed men might kill or injure many of the children, but in the end, the armed men will be killed or run off, like bees swarming an attacker. The children learned early about living hard. There were never tears when one of the Littlelings died. It was the way of the gang, and a Littleling did not get out of their swaddling until they realized this.

This was not the first place Tommy and her Littlelings had lived. They had stayed in many places over the last ten years of Tommy’s life, sometimes barns, sometimes tents, and when their luck hadn’t held out, sometimes out in the open in a field or along the road. Tommy was born in Varis an orphan. She never learned who her parents were. She was raised in one of the city’s many orphanages, and managed to escape before she was six years old. By the time she was ten, she had a small gang of children, which she had trained using the skills she had developed on the streets. On the streets, children either fought and survived, or died. There was little free food available, and getting the food was only the first step. Keeping the food was the more difficult part. Tommy learned to sneak off with the food to feed herself, and protect herself when others came to prey on her. She killed her first kid when she was eight. After that, fighting was a way of life, and she taught herself its ways, working first with any sharp object she could find, then stealing daggers, which she kept sharp on stones she found along the road.

Tommy decided to skip breakfast and head to Varis. She gathered five Littlelings and set out. She used to visit Varis with more Littlelings, but the governors’ guardsmen had wised up, and they watched out for her and her Littlelings. The governors tended to avoid the gangs of children that plied their streets, afraid of what would happen to the population of children if their guardsmen did more than poke them to move them along. But even so, Tommy found it more difficult to move with large groups of Littlelings because the guardsmen would follow to ensure she would cause no trouble. It was difficult to pickpocket or steal goods when a squad of guardsmen followed her wherever she went. That is when she started traveling in smaller groups. She figured out that the guardsmen were not interested in her. She doubted they even knew who led the Littlelings. Instead, the guardsmen were interested in any large congregation of children, sure that a gang fight was imminent, and with the gang fight, the possibility that the good people of Varis would be injured.

Tommy and her five Littlelings walked silently along the road leading to Varis. The middle of the road was covered in water, and they stayed along the edge, where a muddy bump lined the area to the outside of the road, where the wagons pushed up the mud when they made their slow way along the road toward Varis. Tommy made a game of balancing along the middle of the bump, especially along the parts where the mud had hardened even in the rain. When they got closer to Varis, however, the bump became less pronounced, and the areas along the road became muddier until Tommy could not distinguish road from grass. They arrived at the gates just as the governors guardsmen were wheeling open the gates. The governors had taken to locking the gates at night during the rainfall to avoid the expense and danger of patrolling the roads around Varis. The governors seemed not to want to take any chance with the rain and the Empress’s soldier in town. Most of the gangs of children found shelter outside of Varis at night. Any children found sleeping in the streets would be bundled up to the many orphanages in the districts of Varis. The children learned quickly that the orphanages were fronts for workhouses. Tommy thought it was better that a child die on the street than chained in the workhouse.

The guardsmen waved them in when they passed in front of the gates. The road was empty this morning, most of the traders not bothering moving their goods in this weather. Two weeks before was the last time a wagon could have made it through the roads leading to or away from Varis. A few farmers carrying their goods in burlap bags slung across their backs walked along the road leading into Varis with Tommy. She paid them no heed. Most farmers were not friendly to the Littlelings. They were afraid of the Littlelings deciding to swarm on their farm and take their food. This happened rarely, however, since the governor was very strict about stealing goods from the farms. Without the steady supply of food in the summer and spring, and the storage of food in the colder months, Varis would not survive very long, and the governors did everything in their power to protect this supply, from the children, at the least. The highwaymen seemed less interested in food than in gold, which the governors of Varis had decided was not as valuable, at least not to the townspeople in Varis.

Word count: 2,131

Words remaining: 26,103

Caffeination: Tall mocha.

Feeling: I wrote about 800 words that I had to put it aside. It wasn’t writing, it was note taking about Tommy and her Littlelings. I realized it halfway through, and savaged the parts that somewhat made a story. I know, during November I’m not supposed to do that, but for my first part about Tommy, I didn’t want it to be too terrible that I wouldn’t want to return to it. Plus, it being a Friday with nothing to do tomorrow, I felt I had the extra time to do it better (I was going to say right, but we all know there’s no way I could do that in the first draft). In the end, I glued about 50% of the stuff I wrote about Tommy back in. I’m sure I’ll find areas to glue the rest in so I wouldn’t have wasted any words.