Kit Sorrel

The second thief — a charming, reckless finder who is far too good, and was hired before Juno was

Kit Sorrel is about twenty-six, fair, unshaven, and permanently one drink into a story. He wears a coat that was very good about four owners ago and a smile he keeps loaded and cocked, and he loses at cards with such tremendous good humour that people rarely notice how much he is learning while he does it.

He is, by any honest measure, better than a man his age has a right to be. He reads a building’s mendings — the filled passages, the moved stairs, the walls that came back hollow — the way most finders read a lock, which is a talent nobody in Cinderwick taught him and somebody in Cinderwick paid for.

That is the trouble with Kit. He was hired to take the Cinderwick Nightingale two days before Juno Vale was, by a grey gentleman who never raised his voice, and he was told not to tell her he was coming — and he sat in a public house with the stolen drawings spread out on a table for two days, waiting for her to walk in and catch him at it.

Whether that makes him a liar, a coward, or the only honest man in the job is a question the book settles late. Juno takes his hand knowing every part of it, which is either the worst decision of her career or the first good one.

Appears in

The Cinderwick Job novelette