Talk.

  Idiot.

  Gwen eyed the stranger in front of her for a few moments, waiting for her vision to adjust to the pulsing glow around his head. Amber and rust, that is what he was, and it was distracting in the midst of the clamour of this tavern. The Raging Rat, she had read outside, a name she’d never heard before but which promised a certain clientele.

  A clientele she now belonged to, she grudgingly admitted to herself, if for no fault of her own.

  “I didn’t agree to this,” she said, not trying to hide how annoyed she was by the silly cat and mouse game he had just led her on. Gwen was cold, tired, hungry, and by coming to meet him, she had already agreed to follow his rules. Forcing her to prove her skills all over again was a tactic she had no trouble discerning, but it was a boyish kind of game to play.

  “Apologies.”

  Gwen blinked in surprise, not having expected any kind of response from him. “A necessary precaution,” he added with a shrug, making her focus on his aura even more closely.

  The licks of honeyed colour remained the same intensity, no sudden off-shoots or vibrations alerting her to falsehood or deceit.

  Well.

  Maybe a boy with manners.

  There had been words on the tip of her tongue but her eyes were distracted by the spectacle in front of her.

  It had been months since she had last met a mage, years since she had seen one this young. The gift still travelled without rhyme or reason through the realm, unbound by blood and heritage, but the sheer numbers of the dead during the war had thinned populations on both sides of the divide, and those mages that had survived the conflict had largely moved and settled in the East.

  And over here...

  Gwen’s stomach gave an uncomfortable twist as she recalled the latest news about the so-called Sisters of the Seed, their growing numbers, their detestable work. Public resistance to them was on the wane, even in Keveli, and Gwen herself had spotted the small groups of women dressed in sapphire green and ebony masks who were as eerie as they were spell-binding.

  It was all so very wrong.

  “I’m waiting,” the stranger interrupted her thoughts and made her focus back on him.

  Her hunger had awakened forcefully to the smells and sounds around her, and the clink of plates and glasses was too loud, almost mocking. It was an odd feeling, a new level of poverty she had not sunken to before, and she meant to conquer it, she just didn’t know how.

  “What do you need me for?,” she managed at last, a note of reluctance in her voice.

  She didn’t really want to know, didn’t feel like being here in the first place, and if her life had been hers to control ― really control ― she never would have tangled her fate with his.

  She couldn’t muster a voice that was enthusiastic or intrigued, only wary.

  “Is that how we’re going to do it?,” he asked in return, his voice a little bit dry.

  “Tit for tat.”

  “Deal.”

  He moved so quickly Gwen didn’t have time to be offended at the way his eyes briefly dipped to her chest. He was suddenly in front of her, his hands clasped on the table between them and his face far too close for comfort. It was a distraction tactic that worked, she had to give him that, but now his amber glow threatened to... touch her.

  It wasn’t technically possible. Gwen knew that, but she still shrank back a little as the stranger’s skin seemed to absorb the fire flickering in the grate next to them. It was the first real warmth she’d experienced in weeks and leaning back meant receiving less of it, but she was always one for better safe than sorry.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “I am going to rob the Imperial Palace.”

  Gwen couldn’t help it.

  A laugh escaped her lips before she could stop it, and it drew several curious glances from nearby tables.

  “You,” she choked out mid-laugh, seriously wondering whether she had misjudged his state of mind completely.

  “Well. Me and my... co-leader,” he said as he leaned back and casually draped one arm over the back of his seat. “Along with our motley little crew of friends.”

  “Were you dropped on the head when you were a child?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “You’re the leader of a gang.”

  “We call ourselves a guild.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Fair pay, for one.” He raised his eyebrows and with a flare-up of colour, his aura suddenly turned from honeyed amber into rust, leaving the feel of sandpaper on Gwen’s skin.

  She blinked, bemused by the sudden shift in his character.

  “Something you and your brother clearly have need of.”

  Bright of eye but dark of mind, Beware bad fortune’s favourite, her grandmother’s voice reminded her, the inflections so warm and familiar in her mind that they instantly filled her with longing. Always look beyond the mask.

  She remembered what she had replied, too, eight years of age and feverishly freckled: what of the ones that don’t wear one?

  Oh, silly child, her grandmother had said and taken her hands into hers. Gwen remembered them, long-boned and fine, adorned with knuckly rings. They ain’t born yet, and once they here, they gon’ be a fearsome thing to behold.

  Maybe you gon’ be the first.

  What would her grandmother have said to see her here now?

  Gwen squared her shoulders, reminded of her duty, and met the stranger’s eyes head-on. She let a moment pass, then reached into the innermost pocket of her coat and pulled out the leather pouch he had stolen from her, exactly one week ago.

  “Seeds,” she said as she dropped it onto the table.

  Eyeing first it, then her, the stranger remained where he was, neither leaning forward nor telling her to open the pouch for inspection.

  “Don’t look like any seeds I ever seen.”

  A good memory, clearly.

  Or just an outrageous level of chutzpah.

  But Gwen replied, knowing she had to get him to play along. “You wouldn’t have,” she retorted, unfazed. “They are from our home village, in the South.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “You wouldn’t have found it on a map even before it was burned, but it was a day’s and a half ride from Moodburn, the way the crow flies. A simple peasant village.” Gwen held his eyes. “I saved these for my brother so he would have something to remember it by.”

  “Kinship or Khanate?”

  Gwen leaned her head slightly to the side, surprised by that turn of questioning. She had expected him to ask for the name of the village again, had been prepared to tell another lie, the way her mother had told her to: stick to the truth and make it feel real.

  She was good at that.

  People generally thought her incapable of deceit, assumed her to be too upstanding, too correct, too good to play with falsehoods, but Gwen had learnt, early on, how to skim the truth and fatten it with vagueness. There were layers to her words when she had need to save her skin, and skilful ones at that.

  “Kinship.”

  This, however, was an easy truth to tell. There had been thousands of turncoats during the war and to this day, many families kept mum about what side they’d truly been on, but if Griffin was upset with her for not openly claiming their heritage, he would consider her a traitor of the worst kind if she placed their village on the same side as the khans. She was not going to risk his trust even from afar, nor was she willing to sully her own birthplace so.

  “Hm,” was all she heard from the stranger, a non-committal sound that could have meant anything.

  Gwen didn’t care whether he believed her or not. Allegiances had shifted so many times during the war that it meant precious little who had torched whom; what counted was that the khans had already lost what little of the population’s favour they had won, there, towards the end.

  When people had tired of the war, when loss had turned everybody’s hearts to stone.

  First stone, then dust.

  Gwen decided to use the moment of silence that had ensued to press her own point further.

  “What did you mean by ― oh.”

  But she didn’t get to finish her sentence as out of nowhere, a large, steaming bowl of stew appeared in front of her.

  “I didn’t ―,” she began, but the young steward only glanced at the stranger opposite her and quickly hurried away again.

  Gwen swallowed, eyeing the bowl. Her hunger was a mean little thing, urging her to pull the bowl towards her and ignore the world until she’d licked it clean, but her reason was not so easily overturned.

  She had honed it, year for year, against the hard bones of this world.

  With a deided effort, she pushed the bowl away from herself, but the stranger shook his head.

  “Eat,” he said, in a voice that was too matter-of-fact for falseness. “It doesn’t come with any strings attached.”

  Gwen blinked, trying her damnedest to detect any sign of malice in his colour.

  Nothing.

  For all her gift could tell her, he was being genuine, and it was the first time he had managed to rattle her. It showed in her voice, quieted down to a murmur.

  “Why?"

  He gave a shrug, letting her moment of weakness pass without comment.

  “I know what it’s like to be hungry.”