Cora shook her head, her scarf swishing back and forth. “I am not mistaken, Your Grace. The thieves always take a percentage, then the mayor’s men take their percentage, and then the merchants take theirs. Everyone says it is for our protection. The thieves’ cut is for our protection against the slavers that plague the roadways, but my father wants to take his chances this time—he can’t see any other way—and he wants to know if you can lift the tax, just this once. My family is on the brink of starvation, and we cannot spare anything at all. If the thieves take their usual cut, he won’t have enough left over in profit to buy supplies to feed our family through the winter.”
Briand’s eyes narrowed. “What?” she ground out.
The young woman repeated, in a softer voice this time, “If the thieves take their usual cut, my father won’t have enough in profit left over to buy supplies.”
Briand stood, her hand tightening around the hilt of her knife.
“Who,” she demanded, “has been fleecing the farmers as they come to sell goods in Gillspin?”
The room fell silent. The thieves shuffled.
“Who?” Briand shouted. Her voice rang loud.
A few thieves met her eyes. Some looked belligerent, some nervous.
“It was Rags’s idea,” someone said in a surly tone.
“To steal from the poorest among us?” Briand snarled. “And was it Rags’s idea too to keep it a secret from subsequent rulers?”
“I think Rags reckoned she’d live forever,” another thief called, and everyone tittered nervously. Some of the thieves eyed the doors as if they hoped they could slink away from the brewing confrontation. Others put their hands on their knives and swords.
Briand met Nath’s eyes across the crowd. He nodded, and slowly drew his knife.
“Who is taking this ‘tax’ from the farmers and locals when they enter the city?” Briand demanded, still standing at the end of her throne with the knife in her hand.
The thieves grumbled. The men she was watching looked at each other, their expressions dark. They did not volunteer any information.
“Do you recognize the men?” Briand asked Cora.
The young woman swallowed and turned to scan the crowd. “There,” she said softly, pointing at one of the men Briand had noticed. The one with the scowl on his face and the hand on his knife. “That one.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE YOUNG WOMAN pointed at the thief. “I remember him because he had a scar on his forearm. It was him.”
“Well?” Briand called to the thief. “What say you, accused?”
“Is this a trial?” the man growled, glaring menacingly at Cora and then Briand.
“Not yet,” Briand said. “But a serious charge has been leveled at you, thief. I want to hear your answer. What is your name?”
“I’m called Piercer. And I didn’t do it,” he said with a glint of a gold tooth flashing as he spoke. “The lass is mistaken.”
Cora’s jaw tightened. “I am not mistaken.”
The mood in the room changed to something cool and dangerous. The men standing around Piercer shifted, laying their hands on the weapons strapped to their waists.
Briand reached out with her mind and found the dracules, both of them napping in the queen’s quarters. They woke at her call and began to scratch at the door anxiously. Through their ears, she could hear Nath’s footsteps. When he unlocked the door, Vox and Sieya streaked from the room toward her location.
She focused on the crowd before her. Crag and Crispin had taken up strategic points at the edges of the crowd, both prominently displaying their weapons as well. Weasel, who perched in a high-up crevice in the throne room, straightened and became visibly watchful.
Piercer and his friends surveyed the room and then looked at Briand. Mutiny glittered in their eyes.
Briand breathed in and out. She wanted nothing more than to throw her knife and have it sink into the ground between Piercer’s feet. But fine marksmanship would not prevent bloodshed. The room was packed with people she cared about and people whose lives she was responsible for now.
She breathed in and out, controlling her temper, leashing the impulse to lash out.
The dracules reached the room and bounded to the throne. Everyone moved to give them a wide berth, for even in their dog disguises, they were terrifyingly huge.
Briand felt better flanked by her dracules. She leveled her best witching stare at Piercer and tried to channel Lady Valora. She did her best impression of a severe, cool-voiced noblewoman who was smiling through her teeth even as she delivered a threat. “If she is mistaken, then you have nothing to worry about. I will have an inquiry made into the matter. In the meantime—” She turned to Cora. “—I can assure you, your father will pay no tax to my people. In fact, I will make sure he has an escort to protect him from the merchants’ greedy hands as well.”
Cora blinked. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
Briand wasn’t sure how she felt about being called ‘Your Grace,’ but she let it go for now. Respect wasn’t a bad thing for others to see her receiving, not while she was still struggling to be accepted by the thieves.
She signaled to Weasel, who dropped down from his crevice and approached with a swagger.
“Take a few thieves you trust and accompany this young woman home,” Briand instructed him. “Talk to her father, find out what his experiences have been. And escort him back to the city so that no one robs him.”
“Thieves, protecting us from being robbed,” Cora said with a smile, and then she looked nervous. She put a hand over her mouth.
Briand arched an eyebrow. “Indeed,” she said.
When the young woman had left, escorted by Weasel and a few of his friends, Briand surveyed the rest of the thieves. One of them started forward with her money ready to drop in the bucket, but Briand held up a hand to stop her.
“There are going to be some changes,” she said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nath step into the closest side tunnel, his hand on his sword. He was ready should there be any trouble.
“No more stealing from honest folk. No more skimming off merchants’ goods. No more pickpocketing in the square.”
The crowd murmured.
“Rags didn’t—” someone protested.
“I am not Rags,” Briand said. “I am Guttersnipe. I killed Rags. We will do it my way. If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
She heard grumbles, but no one raised an open challenge. In the doorway, Nath relaxed slightly but did not take his hand off his weapon.
“How are we supposed to earn our keep, then?” another thief demanded.
Briand smiled, a sharp flash of teeth. “Slavers plague the countryside. Stop their activity, and you can help yourselves to whatever coin they carry as payment for your deeds. Bandits and highwaymen are a similar scourge. Take from any of Cahan’s soldiers freely. But not the farmers and the townsfolk. Leave them alone. We will be protectors of Gillspin, not parasites feeding on it.”
“Protectors?” someone scoffed.
“Protectors,” Briand repeated firmly.
~
“There’s going to be trouble,” Nath said later as they sat around a table in the queen’s quarters. “These are thieves, not philanthropists.”
“I think they are capable of change,” Briand said. “But we have to unify them. Give them a common purpose, something to feel passionate about. I’m not asking them to do charity work.” She paused. “Besides, eliminating slavers is fun. How many of our thieves do you suppose were preyed upon by slavers, anyway? Sold to professional beggars when they were children, that sort of thing?”
Nath grunted. It was a fair point.
“We could have a uniform of sorts,” Cait suggested. “Like an army? Everyone could wear scarlet. Just like you. The Scarlet Blades.”
“I like it,” Briand said slowly. “Can you obtain enough fabric and dye?”
“I am confident we can,” she said.
Nath shook his head, bu
t he was smiling with half his mouth.
“And you,” Briand said to him. “Keep teaching the children. Some of them are nearly old enough that they’ll be able to go on missions soon. If we can teach them better things than begging…”
“What about me?” Crispin demanded. “I want to help. I’m just as good a tutor as Nath.”
“Ah yes. Feverbeet,” Briand said.
Crispin blushed but didn’t break her gaze.
“You,” she said, “will be tutoring our prisoners. And you’re going to teach everyone in the thief quarters about how to give rypters the slip.”
He grinned at her. “That I can do. I’ll have the whole lot of them impervious to rypters before you know it.”
~
That night, Briand woke to the damp stones of the prison in her dream.
It had been a while.
She raised her head and found Auberon watching her, a curl of a scowl on his handsome face.
“Dragon girl,” he acknowledged her.
The bars that had once separated them were still missing. Their absence unsettled Briand.
“The information I asked about the last time we spoke,” she said. “Did you learn anything?”
“No time for pleasantries, eh?” he said with a smirk.
She looked at him, waiting.
“I am not your personal servant,” Auberon said. “Nor am I your spy. And I’ve been a little… incapacitated. I can hardly stroll down to my father’s library at the moment.”
“Why?” she asked. “Where are you?”
His face darkened, and he didn’t reply.
The dream went dark.
~
The room faded as Briand woke to the lingering feel of lips on her brow, and the ghostly memory of a figure murmuring her name, and she opened her eyes in the darkness, reaching reflexively for her knife even as a thrill shot through her, because she instinctively knew who it was.
She rose and dressed quickly after splashing water across her face and torso and tucking knives into her boots. She crept into the hall and headed for the roof first. It drew her like a compass. She could feel him down to her bones, and she let that feeling steer her.
When she reached the roof, he was there, sitting with his arms braced on his knees and his face to the sky, which was pink with the promise of dawn. He didn’t look over at her as she pulled herself up, but one half of his mouth hiked upward in a ghost of a smile.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said as she settled beside him
“Lies,” Briand said. “You know I’m a very light sleeper.”
Her arm brushed his as she sat, and electricity leaped between them. Kael’s eyes were still on the horizon.
“I’ve come with gifts,” he said. “There’s something I think you’ll be happy to see. Would you like to see? We’ll have to go to the hall.”
“What gifts?”
“It’s a surprise,” he said.
“Hmm,” Briand replied. She too looked at the horizon. A few stars still glittered above them. “Perhaps in a little while.”
His hand found hers, and he drew her toward him as he turned to meet her. She tangled her other hand in his hair, and he wrapped his other arm around her waist.
Surprises could wait.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOME TIME LATER, when daylight had broken across the rooftops of Gillspin, Briand and Kael climbed down from the roof and stole through the quiet corridors of the thief quarter. Most of the thieves did not rise before midmorning, having stayed up half the night before, and thus Kael and Briand nearly had the place to themselves as they headed for the hall. Briand stayed close to Kael, not touching him even though she wanted to, but still wrapped in the intoxication of having him with her again.
“We should spar again,” she was saying as they reached the hall. “I want to learn more about those blades you showed me last time—”
The words died on Briand’s tongue as she stepped through the doorway and saw who stood inside the hall, bathed in the rays of morning sun.
“Surprise,” Kael said quietly.
Bran.
Her cousin sat on a barrel at the back of the room, eyes shut as if sleeping, but he straightened and opened them when he heard footsteps. His watchful expression, vigilant no doubt because he was in a thieves’ den, evaporated at the sight of Briand.
“Bri!” he called across the room. His voice echoed.
Beloved Bran. The one person who had listened to all her secrets when they were children. Who didn’t laugh when she missed the target with her knife, who helped her sneak into the stables to ride his father’s prized stallion, who stole sweetmeats from the kitchen and sneaked them to her when she was hiding from the cook in the garden and hungry from no dinner.
Swallowing a sob, Briand launched herself at her cousin, stopping just short of him as she saw his crutches.
“Are you healed enough? Can I touch you?”
In response, he grabbed her in a hug. Tears prickled at her eyelids, and she clung to him like a lost child.
When she drew back, she saw that he was blinking back moisture too. They both laughed shakily.
“You don’t know how many times I’ve imagined seeing you again,” she said.
“I do,” he said with a laugh. “I’m sure I’ve matched them in my own imagination. I’ve thought of you every day since we last saw each other, Bri.”
Briand ran her hand across her eyes. She looked down at his trousers, and at the left leg, where the pants were pinned up at the knee.
“Are you in pain?” she asked.
“At this exact moment, no,” Bran answered with a smile. But she saw the bruised shadows beneath his eyes, the nervous twitch of his hands as he leaned back on the barrel.
“Oh, Bran.”
He brushed her hair over her shoulder. “Let’s talk about you. Thief-queen, eh? I never knew I would be related to royalty one day. Do you wear a crown of Dubbok cards?”
Briand snorted. “I ought to make you kneel and beg my queenly forgiveness for a comment like that.”
But they were both smiling.
He glanced over her shoulder and straightened slightly. Briand turned enough to see that Kael was still standing a short distance away, giving them privacy to talk.
“Sir,” Bran called. “Are you not proud of our guttersnipe?”
“Very proud,” Kael said gravely, his face impassive.
Briand gave him a piercing stare that promised stabbing with knives and, if one knew to look for it, perhaps some kisses too, and Kael raised one eyebrow at her. He was serious now, all commander and Monarchist with Bran looking on, but she didn’t miss the faint smolder in his eye when she bit the bottom of her lip. His mouth twitched as if he wanted to smile, and he turned away toward the door as if expecting someone else—and trying to avoid giving himself away.
“Bran isn’t the only surprise,” he said in a carefully controlled voice.
“Briand!” a booming voice rang out, and Tibus appeared in the doorway.
“We brought a few more friends,” Bran said with a laugh. “And, I should add, we’ve all been strictly warned not to call you—” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “—dragonsayer.”
Briand hugged Tibus, delighted to see him again after several months. “Does Nath know you’re here?” she asked him, and the old soldier shook his head.
“Haven’t seen him yet. I can only imagine he’s off somewhere scolding a pupil,” Tibus said with a grin.
Maera stepped into the hall behind Titus, a coat of dark green sweeping the floor, her dark red hair piled atop her head in a crown of curls and braids. She wore trousers and a vest like a man, but no one would mistake her for one even at a distance. She was, as always, stunning and perplexing in equal measures.
Her mouth curved in a smile at the sight of Briand.
“Hello, thief-queen,” she said with an approving dip of her head. “You’ve managed to accomplish quite a bit since we saw each other last. I
must say, I’m impressed.”
“Tibus!” a voice hollered, and Nath burst into the room with children streaming behind him. He ran to his old friend and clapped him on the shoulder. “I had no idea you were— Look at you, you look terrible— Where have you been sleeping, in a mud puddle?”
“Glad to see you too, Nath,” Tibus said fondly.
“Maera,” Nath added, nodding at the Tasnian spy. “Good to see you again.”
Maera was like a cat, Briand thought. You didn’t approach her; she approached you.
“Hello, Nath,” Maera said with a smile. “You look as cantankerous as ever. Who are all these children? Have you turned into some sort of nursemaid?”
Nath looked around him in bewilderment. The children, who’d clustered together in a sleepy clump, blinked back at him like owls. “Oh, these children,” he said, as if he’d just discovered them. “Why, they are my pupils. I’m trying to stuff some sense into their heads,” he added, but his words lacked any venom that might make them convincing.
Tibus, Maera, and Bran all looked intrigued at the idea of Nath teaching children. And lightly horrified.
“Who is being punished in this scenario?” Bran asked with a laugh. “You or the children?”
“Oh, hush,” Nath snapped. “They know better than to misbehave, and I am a fine and gentle tutor.”
Maera put a hand over her mouth. Tibus guffawed.
“You were my tutor once, Nath,” Bran said. “Gentle has never been used in the same sentence as your name.”
“Well,” Maera mused, tapping a slender finger against her chin thoughtfully, “I imagine one could say that Nath has the skills to gently eviscerate his enemies, so as not to bloody the floor.”
“Aha!” Tibus said, laughing. “You stand corrected, Bran. And I’ve seen him do it, too. This one time in Dorreglorn, when we were fighting swamp pirates, Nath used a fork to cut out a pirate’s—”
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