CHAPTER 7

To Grace’s obvious irritation, Red’s rhetorical question changed the character of the crowd facing me. A trio of the girls suddenly pushed forward, talking at once.

The young one with the curls asked, “Did you really steal the crown of Grimheld while the king still wore—”

The dark girl with the crossbow spoke over her. “—walked away with the golden idols of the Grey Dwarves of Blackstone Crag—”

The boyish one added to the din. “—actually you who emptied the treasury of—”

“—is it true that—”

“—both thieves’ guilds in Delmark?”

I felt suddenly overwhelmed.

Grace didn’t join the barrage of questions, and two of the other girls hung back with her, the tall redhead and a small mousy girl with almond eyes. As the three girls peppered me with questions I saw Grace’s expression of irritation shift halfway toward amusement, as if she got some sort of satisfaction from my discomfort.

I would have called the expression predatory on anyone other than a fourteen-year-old girl. Our eyes locked for a moment, and I could see she knew. She could read my face and saw that I had jumped in over my head just by implying I was “the Snake.”

Whose skin was I wearing?

Whoever this Snake was, at least half the girls in this little band looked up to him. In the face of the youngest, I saw something like hero worship. Fearless Leader let the others obsess without doing a thing to correct them or rein them in.

Oh, you’re a smart little girl, aren’t you?

Grace could have stepped in, questioned who I was directly, but if she did, at least some of her girls would resent having their assumptions challenged. Better to let the prisoner stumble on his own feet of clay.

Yeah, there was a reason she was in charge.

She watched as the Snake fans questioned me nonstop. At least I had some time to think about what to do because I couldn’t get a word in as the girls talked over each other and answered their own questions. She let it go on for a long time, enjoying my discomfort, then she cleared her throat.

Everyone stopped babbling.

Grace smiled all too sweetly at me, and asked a question that was way too perceptive.

“How does such an effective outlaw land naked by our campfire?”

I didn’t even need to answer that. It went right at the heart of my implied claim, and I could see doubt cloud the two older girls’ faces.

It irritated me because I hadn’t even been trying to con anyone.

I wasn’t about to be outmaneuvered by some brat. It was misplaced pride on my part, but I did a stupid thing.

I lied.

I rationalized it by telling myself that as long as at least some of Grace’s girls thought I was actually Snake, it meant that I would have them on my side. So I decided to leap from lies of omission to full-blown fabrication.

It was not a craft I was unskilled in. Even before I opened my mouth to answer, I saw Grace’s smile falter as she saw my own.

“Remember when I said that the blood was not my own?”

I had their attention.

“You know the town nearby here, about an hour’s ride?”

“Westmark?” the youngest one offered.

“That’s right,” I said, having no idea if it was or not. “You know why I was there?”

Everyone shook their head as my mind raced to find an answer for that rhetorical question. “I had just finished up an accounting in Delmark, leaving both guilds there with a smaller treasury than they started with. I came here with my haul to pay a visit to a woman—”

“Your true love?” asked the young one.

Well, thank you, little girl. “There’s no such thing in an outlaw’s life,” I said, shaping my lies to fit my new target audience. “Yes, she said she loved me, and I might have loved her . . . but she had family in the White Rock Thieves’ Guild, and while she’d helped me take the guilds for their gold and jewels, when I returned to give her share to her, she became greedy.”

A tale of tragic love and betrayal and I had the girls hooked. Half of them anyway. Even the small quiet one who hung back with Grace and the redhead started listening raptly. Grace herself wore an expression of growing disbelief. I couldn’t tell if she was reacting to my story, or to the fact that her group was buying my story.

I kept going, bringing all my skills to bear. I played up Snake’s reputation to the bleeding edge of what I considered plausible, making him a tragic hero who had suffered a lover’s betrayal that cut worse than any assassin’s dagger. Weasel’s goons became a squad of armed mercenaries. The ambush by the Sanhom Assassins became an epic battle of evils where I escaped clad only in my skin, carving my way out of the battle with a stolen dagger.

I admit I overdid it. But the first two rules of spinning a falsehood were: Tell them what they want to believe and tell them what they already expect to hear. Most of the girls hung on my every word.

Grace was no longer smiling, and the gaze she gave me could rival post-dragon Lucille in the smoldering department. However well my narrative had gone, she was the nominal leader of this little band—and given that I now saw that about half these girls had accessories made from human remains I realized that alienating her would be another in a long series of bad decisions on my part.

I couldn’t back up on the path I’d started down, but I could take an abrupt left turn. I had just got to the point where I’d been running naked through the woods clad only in assassin’s blood, and I decided to change the subject.

“Now you know how I ended up here.” I asked Grace, “Why don’t you tell me how you came to be here?”

“It’s not nearly as impressive as all that,” Grace said. The smile returned, cold and hard. “But we’re outlaws as well. Not that we’ve had a choice.” She pointed the dagger at Red. “Mary here was sold to the White Rock Thieves’ Guild when she was twelve. When she was fourteen, she was finally big enough to club her guard hard enough that he didn’t get up again.” Grace pointed the dagger at the quiet young girl that stood with her and Mary. “That’s Rabbit. What we call her anyway. She can’t talk because her tongue was cut out.”

“Oh crap,” I whispered, wincing a little.

“That’s the punishment White Rock gives to anyone who rats on their members—even when it’s telling someone what they’re doing to their kids. Krys there—” Grace pointed at the boyish one with the brown hair cut close to the scalp. “She’s been homeless since she was six and the Delmark watch took her dad to the dungeons. Laya there, with the crossbow, she ran away from an arranged marriage. And Thea—” Grace pointed to the girl with the strawberry curls. “Her parents had too many kids who weren’t boys. They gave her half a loaf of bread and left her in the woods here two summers ago.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“What about me?”

“Why are you here?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Least interesting of all. I’m just an outlaw from a long line of outlaws. Dad had no boys, so he taught me his trade. Unfortunately, the guilds in Delmark tend to think a girl’s only good for one thing. Just ask Mary.”

“So where’s your dad?”

“The guild also doesn’t take kindly to people teaching the trade to folks it doesn’t approve of. The duke of White Rock himself took a hot poker—”

“I get the picture.” One way or another, all these girls had lost their families. They became outlaws, but were outcasts even among outlaws.

A hard bloodless frown crossed Grace’s face. She walked up to me, pushing past the three girls in front of me. She spoke in a harsh, shaking whisper. “Don’t dare give us your pity.”

“I wasn’t—”

“I see your face. You’re nowhere near as hard to read as you think you are.”

“I just realized why you might have a grudge against White Rock.”

She chuckled and stepped back. “Not a grudge, a debt.”

I looked from her to the others, and the jewelry made from teeth and bone, and at the weapons and clothing they wore. “They sent men after you, didn’t they? They wouldn’t like anyone thieving without tribute.”

“There’s only one tribute they want from the likes of us,” Grace said.

No wonder they looked up to Snake. My own embellishments aside, Snake hurt the guilds in Delmark. These girls would obviously take some pleasure in that. In some sense that put us on the same side.

But the way they dressed made me nervous.

“When Mary thought I might be part of the White Rock Thieves’ Guild, you stopped her. You said something about rules. What rules?”

“It’s simple,” Grace said. “If someone doesn’t try to take from us what we’re unwilling to give, they get to live.”

“And if they do?”

She looked at me with very cold blue eyes. “We need food and clothing.”

Oh crap.

“They’ve sent a lot of men, but never figured out that rule.”

I could have ignored the implications of what she was saying, but she made a point of stroking her necklace of finger bones to help drive home the point. It also explained why none of Snake’s other admirers had followed me into this part of the woods. A pack of cannibal teenage girls might get a bit of a reputation that would even put off the assassins’ guild.

I know it put me off.

Just because things weren’t tense enough, the redhead Mary decided to add, “They’ve stopped coming, unfortunately.”