Chapter 1

The child was spindly thin, filthy with mud and wrapped in a too-large cloak. She barely stood on her two feet, limbs quivering like a caught rabbit. Her large eyes were pure amber and she carried a note in her hands that she handed to the innkeeper's wife before taking a large old bag of a brown material, from within her voluminous cloak and from that bag, extracted a handful of coins and a key. She put the key back in the bag and placed the coins solemnly into the innkeeper wife's hand.

The innkeeper's wife towered over the child, her big hands accepted the coins and she ushered the child into the darkness of the inn, the door slammed shut and immediately it were as though she was in a different world.

It's like the old world, the little girl thought straight-forwardly, shrugging the large cloak off. The innkeeper's wife, actually a widow though she often lied that he was in the barn, went to stoke the fire and then to grab a large jug from the kitchen, a round wooden board piled with wedges of cheese and pieces of bread. She carried a knife in her spare hand like a thief should.

"Mistress Brower," another thief drawled, lounging in the chair by the stoked fire, "so my little sneak's come back?"

"Yes sire," the widowed innkeeper's wife said, placing the food and drink on the table. The man savagely speared a hunk of cheese and nipped it. "Then come forward, Sneak. Tell me. Is it real?"

"Real as me, sir," Sneak replied, standing taller in a brown leather jerkin, plain brown skirt and stout boots. Her hair was cropped short. "Ten years of hiding, sir."

"Ten years!" the thief mused this, trying to calculate it.

"Must have been born half a year after Roger's fall," Sneak said for him.

"And it's mother's not of our guild," the thief mused. "How sad. How much easier it'd have been."

"It is a she," Sneak informed him. "She is ten years old. She has her father's eyes and her father's magic. She will—"

"Be very useful," the thief finished, jerking his hand: Sneak shut up rapidly.

"Get some rest," the thief said after a moment. "You'll be riding harder tomorrow. You'll be delivering a message to my smiling friend."

Sneak's eyes narrowed. "He has not been one of us, sire, not since the Fall. Not since the coronation. Not since he took the Lady's hand—"

"He still likes our game," the thief interrupted. "And I still enjoy my predecessor's intelligence. It's a damn good difference from the simpletons surrounding me right now!" With that, he stood up, took the tray of cheeses, tossed a piece of cheese to Sneak who caught it gratefully, gnawing it quickly, and he left the room.