Chapter 7
Aris And The River Queen
For seventeen days, Mrs. Dunbar's kingdom under Blackfriars Bridge became Aris's fortress. Her network of outcasts-skeletal meth addicts, hollow-eyed war vets, and fierce street kids she called "her boys"* – shielded him like a pack guarding wounded kin.
A dry alcove behind a waterfall of frayed tarpaulin, lined with stolen thermal blankets Hot stew from dented cans, warmed over barrel fires. "Nicked from Tesco bins," grinned Maggie, 15, fingers sticky from pickpocketing.
Old Tom, a former combat medic, reset Aris's broken hand with vodka and a splint carved from driftwood. "Thorn bones heal fast" eh?"
Mrs. Dunbar ruled with a knuckleduster and a heart of scar tissue. At night, over flickering flames, she'd rasp stories of her time as a soldier before.
But safety was an illusion. Aris felt it – the tightening noose. Hunters scoured the docks. He knew with a bounty in his head it was only a matter of time before he was found.
Looking back at how he spent his days here
The First Night
Rain lashed the underbelly of Blackfriars Bridge, drumming on plastic tarps strung like battle standards. Aris Thorn, heir to nothing, hunted by everything, collapsed against a sodden refrigerator box, shivering, so violently his teeth drew blood from his lips. The Thames stench – rotting algae, diesel, and human waste – filled his nostrils.
He'd outrun the mercenaries through Docklands, his broken hand a white-hot brand, only to hit the wall of exhaustion here, in this dripping kingdom of the damned.
A shadow detached itself from the deeper gloom. Small, hunched, wrapped in layers of grimy wool. An old woman, her face a roadmap of wrinkles under a moth-eaten fur hat. She held a chipped enamel mug steaming with something that smelled of cheap tea and petrol.
"Lost your crown, duckie?" Her voice was gravel dragged over stone yet cut through the rain's roar. Aris flinched, his hand instinctively scrabbling for a weapon he didn't have. "Who are you?"
"Dunbar. Vera Dunbar." She thrust the mug at him. "Drink. You look like death's apprentice." The liquid burned his throat, harsh and sweet. "Saw you scrabbling down the bank like a half-drowned rat. Recognized the eyes."
Aris froze. "What eyes?"
"Hers. Lady Elena's." Dunbar tapped her own rheumy eye. "Like storm clouds over water. Saw 'em the day she gave me fifty quid for a sandwich and told a copper to piss off when he tried moving me from St. James's." She studied his ruined clothes, the aristocratic lines of his face etched with grime and pain. "Thorn, ain't ya? Heard the wolves howling your name."
Shame warmed with desperate hope. "They're lying. I didn't kill Silas."
Dunbar cackled, a sound like stones tumbling. "Course you didn't, boy. Atticus Thorns don't get their own hands dirty. They pay others. Or frame others." She nodded towards the darkness behind her. "Come on. Can't have Elena's boy freezing to death on my doorstep."
She led Aris to her domain, which wasn't a hovel. It was a fortress sculpted from neglect. Tucked behind a massive, rusted pylon supporting the bridge, shielded by a waterfall of heavy, frayed tarpaulin, lay a surprisingly dry space. It smelled of woodsmoke, damp wool, and something herbal – thyme, maybe, stolen from a rooftop garden.
The walls were stacked pallets reinforced with corrugated iron, draped with thick, moldering theater curtains salvaged from God-knew-where. Graffiti swirled across them – not gang tags, but intricate, fading murals of dragons and stars. The floors were layers of salvaged carpet, worn thin but dry, covered in mismatched rugs. At its heart, a repurposed oil drum glowed with a low fire, its metal sides punched with star-shaped holes casting dancing light.
An ancient, gutted armchair, its springs poking through faded velvet, piled high with blankets. Dunbar pointed a gnarled finger. "Yours. For now. Don't get comfy."
Shadows stirred. Maggie, maybe fifteen, all sharp angles and sharper eyes, mending a jacket by firelight. Old Tom, a grizzled mountain of a man missing three fingers, stirring a dented pot over the flames. Benny, twitchy and hollow-cheeked, fiddling with a broken radio. Eyes, wary but curious, watched Aris from the gloom.
"These are my people and from now on they are yours too," she said, introducing them one by one to him. "My boys," Dunbar announced, not affectionately, but with a fierce possessiveness. "Mind your manners, or I'll mind 'emfor ya."
Days blurred into a rhythm dictated by survival, far removed from Thornhaven's gilded cage, and in those days Aris learned a lot about the streets. Starting with guard duty. The hour before true dawn, when the city held its breath, was the safest.
He'd stand sentry with Maggie or sometimes Benny at the river stairs, scanning the mist-shrouded banks for movement that wasn't rats or swans. Maggie taught him to read the water's flow, the way light caught on distant lenses, the unnatural stillness that meant watchers. "See the crows?" she'd whisper, pointing to birds unusually clustered on a warehouse roof. "Nervous. Something spooked 'em. Could be fuzz. Could be worse." Her eyes were ancient in her young face.
Also taught how to scavenge by Benny, who knew every skip, every careless delivery dock. Aris learned the art of invisibility – moving like smoke, taking only what wouldn't be immediately missed. A crate of slightly bruised apples from Spitalfields.
Blankets were left momentarily unattended on a park bench. Discarded newspapers not just for news, but for insulation. Benny, despite his twitches, had a fox's cunning. "Rich folk throw away gold, mate," he'd chuckle, producing a slightly bent silver fork. "Just gotta know where to look."
Dunbar's word for acquiring essentials. Aris, guided by Maggie's nimble fingers, graduated from scavenging to targeted acquisition. A pharmacy near closing time, Maggie creating a diversion ("Oh, officer, that man just stole my purse!").
While Aris, heart hammering, slipped antibiotics and bandages into his pockets. "For Tom's leg," Maggie stated flatly afterward, no remorse, only practicality. Aris felt a thrill that wasn't entirely fear.
Evenings around the oil drum. Tom's stew – a perpetually bubbling alchemy of whatever was scavenged that day: tinned vegetables, mystery meat, stale bread thickening the broth. It was never enough, but it was hot and shared.
Dunbar presided, dispensing watery tea laced with cheap rum she called "medicine." Stories were currency. Tom spoke of Belfast, his voice a low rumble, the firelight glinting off his missing fingers. Maggie spun tales of escaping a children's home, fantastical and dark.
Benny rambled about pirate radio signals from another dimension. Aris, initially silent, began tentatively sharing the stories of his past and childhood, and some time later the group bounded. Later that day, Old Tom, once a Royal Army medic, was their doctor. He reset Aris's broken hand properly one grim afternoon, using vodka as an anesthetic and a smooth piece of driftwood as a splint, bound tight with scavenged bandages. "Thorne bones," Tom grunted as Aris bit back a scream, sweat pouring down his face, "hard to break, harder to mend. Hold still, boy."
"Or I'll knock you out properly." The pain was excruciating, but the care – rough, unsentimental, yet undeniably present – was a balm deeper than any Thornhaven physician had ever offered. Dunbar watched, her knuckleduster – a heavy, crude thing of tarnished brass – resting on her lap like a scepter.