Never Knew Another by J. M. McDermott

of his work from a carpenter that didn’t mind speaking. When Jona got back up to the surface to report on the job, the wrong name slipped from his tongue. For a second, the carpenter was furious because he thought the wrong man had been killed. Jona described the man, and it was the right one, but the name was off. It was hard to remember everything he was doing in the night.
    Home, in clean clothes, he came downstairs where his mother cooked breakfast. She hugged him hello.
    “Long night?” she said, making conversation.
    “I just went out and about. Didn’t find anything at all. Didn’t even look.”
    “Have fun?”
    “Eh, not really,” replied Jona. “It gets boring pretty quick when you aren’t rich, and you have all night to remind yourself that you aren’t rich.”
    “We’re still nobility. Don’t forget that when you’re getting bossed around all day. Porridge?”
    “Thanks.”
    He sat down to eat. She joined him at the table, but didn’t eat anything. She never ate breakfast with him. She just watched.
    Spooning the porridge into his mouth, he tried again to remember the dead man’s name. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t conjure it.
    Later that morning, Jona was working with Jaime in the Pens. Some weed smokers had been stealing goats, and smuggling the stuff sewn into dead animals. They wouldn’t bother anyone if they hadn’t stolen the goats first. Jona and Jaime found a man they knew had done it. They pushed him against a wall to get names out of him of anyone else helping him. The man was terrified. A name hit Jona like a brick wall.
    “Grigora,” he said, out of nowhere, almost under his breath.
    “Who?” Jaime turned his head. He had the smuggler by the hair against a brick, names pouring from his lips like water.
    Jona shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “this fellow I met last night, is all.”
    Jona looked out at the horizon, wondering where he was going that night. He had heard that Grigora had a few friends that had gone sour over his death, and the Night King was already making plans for Jona to take care of them, too.
    When the smuggler’s confessions were done, Jaime punched Jona’s arm. “Wake up, Jona. Need you sharp.”
    “Yeah,” said Jona. That’s all he said to Jaime. If Jona had said the truth, he wondered who among the guard would turn him in and who among them were doing the same thing he was, working late into the night for the kind of people that they spent all day trying to find.

    ***

    Jona sat with his mother’s co-workers at the dress shop, all women as old as she was or more, and all of them chattering like Jona wasn’t even in the room. That suited Jona fine. It was Adventday, when people visit neighbors, and they’d come to drink bad mint tea and talk about dresses. The dressmakers loved to come to the Joni Estate—what was left of it. They loved to see how a noble lady wasn’t rich anymore, once proud and now making dresses with calloused hands from so many needle-pricks, and the special way the lips moved after years of pinching threads down. There but for the mercy of Imam, went all of the snotty children that wore the fine gowns they sewed.
    When they finally noticed Jona, too quiet, one of the dressmakers asked him politely about his work with the king’s men. He smiled. He knew the story to tell them. He told them about the time he beat a confession out of a young man just to keep one of the noble women that wore the fancy dresses happy. The noble lady had been offended by a brute because he had nabbed a purse from her coachman. Of course, the coachman was wearing his fat purse like a peacock’s tail down in the Pens and expected his noble seal to keep him safe. This noble girl begged Corporal Jona, Lord of Joni, to beat the petty thief until he confessed to stealing everything he ever stole in his life. He confessed to so many coins, a fistful at a time. Calipari kept track in a ledger. Once it got to be enough, the