The Royal Thief

Chapter Twenty-eight: Only If I Get Caught

Stealing wouldn't be the hard part. It never is when you're the Thief.  No, that wasn't the reason I was pacing back and forth on the battlements. The hard part was deciding who to steal from.

The land of Solangia was split into, at the moment, thirty-eight fiefs and eleven cities. Each city was overseen by an official appointed by the king. But the fiefs were passed down through a noble family from father to son. Nobles could do whatever they wanted with their land-- rent it, farm it, mine it, sell it to other nobles, completely ignore it and go into the trade.

Nobles, we were taught, simply had the right to own their land, same as the royals had their right to rule.

Although Caer's lessons had begun to suggest that perhaps the royals's right to rule actually came from the Guardians-- but that was besides the point just then. The point was that there were thirty-eight noble families, and I had to decide which one to steal from.

First, I did a little research. I wasn't traveling out to the manor home of a noble family in their fief, so I was limited to the ones that kept suites in the palace or townhouses in the city. That didn't narrow it down much, as nearly all of them did. So the next step was to figure out which noble families were the richest. After all, if I was going to steal from someone, might as well make it a rich bastard, right?

The tax records of the nobles could probably tell me which ones had the highest income, but I didn't have access to those. I could try to steal them, of course, but they were sure to be under lock and key. Since the only one inside the castle walls capable of picking such a lock without a key, there was no telling how much trouble I'd get into when they were found missing. For the same reason, I also didn't want to hit a suite in the castle. It would just be too obvious who had done it. I needed an address in the city.

Reasoning that since the oldest noble families were the most powerful, and power almost always relied on money, I looked up the records of the oldest noble houses, checked them against the records of nobles who had suites in the castle, and came up with a list of options. The one I chose was the house of Laycreek, recognizable by its crest of a tree on a circular green shield with a blue band around it. I'd seen it carved into the stone lintel of a particularly large townhouse in the Golden Quarter.

So now, pacing on the battlements, I was just waiting for the faint blur of twilight on the horizon to yawn open and deepen into night. I was still staring at the slowly darkening bruise on the sky when I heard Sam's footsteps behind me.

"Hey."

"What are you doing up here?"

"I could ask you the same question," he reminded me, "But we both know you come up here when you're restless."

"I'm not--" I started, then thought better of it. It was Sam. Lying to him just didn't work. "Well."

He laughed softly and leaned against the stone wall beside me. "Are you going to tell me why?"

"No. Not even if you ask nicely."

"Damn. Not even if I promise to tell you something funny?"

"Depends how funny it is."

He grinned, eyes gleaming in the slowly fading light. "Well, yesterday evening Father hosted a private diner for Lord Iso-- the ambassador from Englescroft, remember him? For Lord Iso and his daughter and us. So I got to the dining room and sat down and ten minutes after we've started my dear sister--" He rolled his eyes. Magali was only ever his dear sister, laden with sarcasm. I had been his sister since I came to the castle, far more thn his royal half-sister. "My dear sister Magali came running in, tripped on the carpet, and hit her head on the back of his daughter's chair. So of course when she stood up she was red as a tomato and stammering idiotically, apologizing that she tripped on the floor. And then Galatea goes, 'At least in Englescroft, we have the decency to blame our clumsiness on things that can actually move!'"