One-Stringed Harp
Chapter Five: Thief Rules
Eventually Lucia reached out and grabbed Sothe by the shoulder, putting his victory dance to an abrupt stop. He glared at her without much vindictiveness. There didn't seem to be any way to make the question less forward, and in any case the thief had never cared for polite language anyway. "Uh… Sothe, why are you alive?"
"Oh, Death and I go way back," said Sothe, his humour as ever dry like the midsummer desert. "I have to feed his cats the next time he's out of town, though. …Neither one of you is going to try to hug me out of desperate gratitude, right?"
The women looked at each other. "Not likely, no," said Calill. "Unless you wanted–"
"No, no, I'm good. Besides, I don't feel like putting my ribs through any more crushing today." He nearly fingered a hole in his green vest, but pulled back before he could make contact – the motion of someone instinctively reaching out but remembering from experience that this is a bad idea. The tear looked exactly like past arrow-wounds Lucia had seen on the battlefield, but lacked bloodstains.
"Um… that's where…?" the swordmaster asked.
Sothe nodded. "Everyone always thinks you need really heavy plate mail to survive arrows. Thieves know better – actually, Volke taught me this one, so I really shouldn't tell you about it. Trade secret, so to speak."
"You caught it in your teeth and then faked the wound?" Calill suggested.
Sothe stared at her blankly. "…Yes. That is precisely what I did." The sage nodded, one tradesperson to another, as Sothe rolled his eyes so hard he was in danger of spraining them.
"What's this?" asked Lucia, picking up the pages that the thief had delivered. "Also, have you told Gatrie you're alive? He's been a mess for a couple of days now."
"Didn't see the lunk; guess I'll tell him when I tell him," Sothe replied. "As for those, well, it's all the stuff I was able to smuggle out of House Sagita that looked worthwhile. And having read it, I know it's worthwhile, but I was too busy staying alive to scheme anything up. I'll leave them in the capable hands of you two ladies and get out of your way." He turned and made for the door.
"What? You're a wreck, you're in no condition to–" Lucia began.
"Hey, you had your chance to be maternal when I warned you against the hug," said Sothe, finally cracking a smile. "Too late now. Read up. When I get back, I want to hear your plan." With a flash of his green cape, he was gone.
Lucia sighed and shook her head; there was youthful exuberance, and there was stupid. She was old enough to know the difference, but young enough to know that sometimes the best way to check which you were doing was to do it and pay close attention to what happened next.
"All right," she asked. "What have we got?"
Calill looked up from the sheaf of pages, which she had habitually already started reading. Her eyes contained the pure terror of discovering what you were up against, but her smile was still that of a deer that knows where the wolf sleeps. A deer that could cast Bolganone. "Everything, I think," she said.
First things first, thought Gatrie. You are shackled and tied down, making escape utterly impossible. Come up with a plan to rectify this. In the darkness of his impromptu prison, the general took a deep breath, flexed most every muscle he had conscious control over, and ripped apart his restraints with all the elegance of an elephant falling down a flight of stairs. Okay, step two…
There were only two places in the room where the slightest light was coming in; the edges of the door, and a covered window some feet above his head. With a leap, he grabbed hold of the curtain and let gravity do the work of tearing it down, but that didn't improve matters much. The window was barred, and so small he couldn't imagine anyone but Ilyana through it, or maybe Sothe–
He sighed, but it was a sign of Gatrie's resilience and intent that he quickly got past that thought. The window was not an escape route unless they equipped him with a pickaxe. What it did do was let in faint light; either night had almost fallen, or those distant clouds of the morning had rolled in and blocked the sun. It took him a little while to sort out the dim, irregular shapes scattered through the room, but eventually he realised that they had locked him in an armory. One from which all the weapons had been removed.
"That merc general really is a sadistic snake," he remarked under his breath, "but I can't fault her sense of irony." Locked as he was inside the mercenary guildhall – Gatrie was sure they hadn't moved him elsewhere, it would have been unnecessarily risky – and without his armor, he had no hope whatsoever of defeating every single soldier they could bring against him. The door would be easy enough to break down, but he had no weapons on hand, either.
They were inviting Gatrie to get himself killed, and if Sagita was the man Gatrie had estimated, he was rather hoping that bravery would overrun common sense. The only way to stay alive was to sit here, in a prison that couldn't hold him, and be an utter coward. If he had ever entertained thoughts of winning Astrid for himself, he had to realise that staying still, knowing her situation, would make him absolutely unworthy. The other option, of course, was being a very worthy corpse.
Okay, Gatrie, they're playing psychology on you, so you throw psychology right back in their faces. The options are to be a coward, or be dead. They expect you to pick coward. He thought about it more, and recalled that Fletcher Sagita was best referred to around the easily-offended as 'a right dastard'. Fletcher probably expects you to pick dead. So he'll be ready for that, even if they aren't. How do you confuse this many people at once? His eyes set on a large cabinet, and started considering the value of insane boldness.
By the time Astrid returned to her room, the sun really was on its way to setting, but only the clock told her as much. The clouds were dark and already giant droplets were splashing on her windows. This was the much-trumped-up 'night before the wedding', since she had somehow never really got around to protesting since Fletcher's arrival. So. Tomorrow her arranged marriage would go through and the course of her life would forevermore be tied to House Ceffylau's needs.
In some ways, it was a relief. She would be accepted. She wouldn't have to worry about her reception at home. Wouldn't have to try every moment of every day to keep her parents happy or at least earn their respect. In exchange, she just had to hand over the vast majority of her freedom… but she knew Fletcher wouldn't abuse that power, even if it was legally his. Amazing. How could you get to know anyone so well in only two days?
The incidents with Calill and Lucia were unfortunate, though. She'd have words with Queen Elincia when she arrived for the wedding. See to it that Crimea kept to business that was actually its own. She wondered if the soldiers she had considered friends would be so easily turned on House Sagita–
"Nice place," said Sothe. "Servants aren't the most helpful, though." Astrid very nearly jumped out of her flesh, but located his voice in time to see the green-wrapped thief slip in through the window, lock it again, and hang his scarf up to dry, as though this were as normal as coming in through the front door. He saw her shock, and smiled. "How ya doing, Lady Astrid?"
"Sothe!" Astrid exclaimed, rushing across the room and hugging him fiercely. He let out a quiet yelp, as though he had brushed up against hot metal, and Astrid quickly withdrew. "Sothe, you're all flushed. Are you okay?"
"What? Ah… um, just a couple of nasty bruises," he said, quickly.
"You look like you were dragged head-first through a clotheswringer made from brambles," said Astrid. "Come on, I'll get you cleaned up."
"Oh, from her I get maternal," Sothe muttered at the world. "I'll be fine. Besides, you never know when I'll have to make a quick getaway." He glanced meaningfully at the door.
"Hah. No one will bother me – at this point, I couldn't be less important to the proceedings," Astrid assured him. She stepped back, as if noticing the thief for the first time. "You've skyrocketed. You're as tall as me now."
"I was never that short," Sothe insisted, still grumbling in a way that Astrid knew not to take seriously. "It was an optical illusion."
"Fine," Astrid relented. She fell back onto a sofa – Sothe wondered how rich you had to be to start furnishing your bedroom – and let out a long sigh. "I can't tell you how good it is to see you. Calill and Lucia actually told me you were dead."
"I set them straight on that. I'd appreciate it if you didn't let it get around, though." Sothe could read the confusion in Astrid's look, edging on suspicion. Either she didn't know what he was implying, or she wasn't going to let herself know. "You still haven't answered my question."
"How am I?" she recalled. "I don't know if I know." Sothe didn't respond to this, except to shift to a slightly more comfortable position on the windowsill, forcing her to keep talking. "I never thought I'd go through with an arranged marriage, not after riding with Lord Ike and fighting off Daein's advance. But it all just seems so…"
"Easy?" Sothe suggested.
Astrid scowled at him without much malice. "Yes, I suppose so. Marrying Fletcher would be – will be – easy. And it would make everything else easy, too."
"Do you love him?"
"Can you love someone in just two days?" Astrid asked, half-rhetorically.
"You can love someone in a second," said Sothe, curling himself until the window frame held him like a rather blocky hammock. "The hard part is figuring out which second."
Astrid smiled. "That's a good line."
"Came up with it myself," said Sothe, smugly. "But how about you tell me about the rest of your life first? I'd start, but with me, you know how it is. Thievery, backstabbing, smuggling – snore. Let's talk manners and protocols." Astrid burst out laughing. She had been missing this for a long time.
Two guards flanked the door to Gatrie's makeshift prison, and they had stopped talking now. In fact, since the mysterious tearing, breaking sound that immediately followed their discussion of whether or not they were allowed to kill him, both soldiers had kept perfectly still and quiet. Most unsettling of all was that the prisoner was remaining equally quiet. Still, neither of them wanted to ask the other what to do, because they might miss the important sound that would warn them something terrible was about to happen.
Possibly just to get break the thickening silence, an armoire smashed through the door and into the far wall, scattering fragments of wood through the hall. Lances already on guard, the soldiers leapt back down the corridor in both directions and waited for the general to emerge. He wasn't armoured, he couldn't be armed, they had the advantage – but he had just hurled furniture at them, so he deserved some caution. Nevertheless, the stillness and silence returned.
They crept back to the door and peered into the darkness. Unspeakably horrible things failed to happen to either of them. In fact, when their eyes had adjusted to the shadows, they spotted Gatrie standing in the middle of the room. The arms of a chair hung from his wrists by shackles, and broken ropes were coiled at his feet. He waved, and the attached chain jingled.
They retreated out of sight again. "Do we attack?"
"We're supposed to leave him alive," said the other, shaking his head. "…He's not actually doing anything."
"He threw an armoire at us! Well, at the door."
"Armoire in an armory," Gatrie called to them. "You've got to admit that's a little funny."
"I'll go check with the general–"
"And leave me to get crushed with crates? Not likely."
"Fine, you go, I'll stay, just get moving." The intimidated soldier dashed away, relieved, while the other one peeked around the corner of the ruined door again. Gatrie was standing perfectly still in the darkness. He was smiling now. This made the effect worse, particularly because the smile was entirely without malice. Gatrie just looked like he was the only one in a crowded room who got the joke. Threats of violence would have been so much more straightforward.
"Ah… are you…?"
"Shhhh," Gatrie whispered, a finger at his lips. He went back to standing perfectly still in the darkness.
A minute later, the other general approached with a contingent of mercenaries behind her, pausing for an instant at the sound of a battle cry, then bursting into a full charge, signalling her orders with one hand. By the time they reached the makeshift prison, it was empty – or so it first seemed. Half of the soldiers remained in the hall; the rest searched the armory, leaping to surround one weapons locker when it mysteriously thumped. Someone axed off the lock and the door swung open, allowing the second guard to flop out of it, senseless. "Ow," he offered.
"Where did he go?" the general demanded.
"No, no… first pain, then talking…" the soldier groaned.
She pointed to a pair of her troops. "You two, get him to the infirmary; everyone else, full headquarters search, laguz protocols."
"You think this knight is a beast-man?" someone yelped.
"No, I just want the lunkish beggar caught. Get going." They filed out at full speed, not letting the crumpled wreck of the armoire hinder their pace in the least. The general waited for them to scatter, poked the now-unconscious guard with her foot, and took up a defensible position in the doorway, trying to watch the entire room at once. "All right. Have some courage. Wherever you're hiding, come on out."
Behind her, the fallen armoire silently rose to its feet and pounced like a predatory battering ram.
"Hey! We've been wondering where you were, Your Purple-Robeliness."
"Boyd? Surely you've got better things to do than pester me–"
"How's it goin', Soren?"
"Mm. You too. Well, Nephenee, I suppose I–"
"That's super. C'mon, we'll explain on the way."
"The way where? Waaugh!"
One thing that was incredibly easy to do in Astrid's room was to loll, which Sothe wasn't sure he had ever tried before. There was relaxing and stretching out and collapsing and lounging and sprawling, but lolling required a certain class – the ridiculously expensive class – of furniture, and then a look on one's face that guaranteed they had no idea how expensive it might be, or why it still wasn't comfortable.
"You don't have lessons on this sort of thing?" asked Sothe, after explaining the definition.
"No," Astrid insisted, shaking with loosely controlled laughter.
"Amazing that so many people can get it by instinct, then. It's always the same expression, like a concussed duck." He demonstrated. Astrid crumpled in laughter. "Or maybe more like…" Sothe tried again, making his air of bland, ego-fired superiority all the more outrageous and letting his eyes unfocus.
"Sothe… seriously, stop…" she choked out between giggling outbursts, "someone's going to hear one of us."
"I don't have to. Thief rules. Now, it's even worse for the big, important lords," he went on. "Because they've all got that look like they're worried there's going to be a surprise quiz soon and everyone will find out they haven't had a clue what's been happening for the last twenty-six years." The thief puffed out his cheeks and went bug-eyed to a deranged degree; it was very deer-in-the-lamplights.
"Oh, be fair," said Astrid, despite her amusement. "They're not all like that."
"Name one."
"Lord Sagita."
"Back to him again, are we?"
"I'm just saying."
"Mm-hmm."
"All right," Astrid admitted. "I'm glad to see you. I was more than a little shaken up when Lucia and Calill said you were dead, and that Fletcher had somehow done it – well, I didn't believe them, but the possibility… And now that you're here, I know it's not true. So I suppose I'm not so worried about him. Maybe even warming up a little more–"
"Look, I never said it was for lack of trying."
Silence reigned as Astrid puzzled through the thief's interjection. Eventually, she came up with: "…What?"
"I'm not dead, but I don't think Fletcher knows it, and I intend to drag that out as long as possible. He shot me. And he's got bloody good aim, too." Sothe's eyes went hard, daring Astrid to protest. She dared.
"Has everyone but me gone utterly insane?" Astrid demanded. "I'm surprised at you, Sothe; Gatrie is a, a bit of a spastically passionate man, and Lucia might care more about protecting Crimea from phantoms than what happens to my life, but you – look like a corpse!" Whatever the young noble might have intended to say, her exclamation was rewritten as Sothe opened his tunic.
He was lightly scarred, as expected of a professional amateur thief, but over his heart was a hideously abraded bruise, focused on an epicentre of pain that had thankfully, by now, stopped bleeding. There had been no cut; just a terribly pointy impact. Astrid knew arrows inside and out – she greatly preferred 'out' – and had to admit that it was almost definitely an arrow wound.
"I think I liked it better when you were talking about my height," Sothe muttered.
"But why didn't it puncture?" she asked. The thief sighed and opened the layers of his tunic – his usual green, folds of silk, a thin set of chain mail, more silk. It was the best armor you would wear against arrows without strapping on a wall. The silk fibres were strong and tangled the arrow, while the tight-looped twists of chain mail bunched up on impact, catching the arrowhead and gripping it more firmly the harder it hit.
"I just took the hit and played dead," said Sothe. "Fletcher's lackeys had a little more emotion in the things they use instead of hearts than Sagita did, so they just left me there instead of doing disposal duty. Waited for nightfall to move. Spent a day crawling back into the city without being seen by anyone. You know the drill."
Astrid stared, forgetting to blink. "Took the hit," she muttered. She was standing in front of a boy who had held his ground in front of an archer, had trusted in woven silk and steel to keep him alive so he could bring down an evil– "No. No, I don't, I can't…"
"Fine."
"What?"
"Fine," Sothe repeated. "If you're not going to believe me now, you won't later, so I'm not going to argue. Tell me more about huge frilly dresses that look like wedding cakes and cakes that look like turrets based on dresses." Astrid didn't say anything; just sat in one of her chairs and stared at the floor. Sothe gave her a moment before pressing on. "…You're not the same either. I should have hung around Begnion more since the war. I can't imagine what's happened."
"This place is a prison," said Astrid. "As much as anywhere Daein tried to lock us up or lure and ambush us, only the jailors are my family. I can't fight them, so there's no way out."
"Oh," said Sothe. He thought Oh too, but a rather more meaningful and richly nuanced version.
"And I don't know if I can trust anyone any more, so I don't see why you're trustworthy, either."
"Because I am," the thief replied. "And you know it. You've told me everything that you can't say to anyone else. I don't work like other people and you know that, too."
"…I wish everything were the way it used to be. At least in the war we were allowed to fire at the bad guys and then go back to camp and just talk. None of this nonsense with nobles and alliances and betrothal contracts. Horses, arrows, and warm tents with hot chocolate."
"Would I have to be short again?" asked Sothe, deadpan. Astrid stared at him askew, then laughed again.
"Nah," said Astrid. "It suits you."
Soren stormed into Calill's home without any preamble and without any satisfaction, either. His robes swirled with mystic style appropriate to a sage, only making him look slightly supremely evil. "Oh, good. Sane people. Well. Sane person," he amended, nodding to Lucia. "Boyd and Nephenee have been utterly unhelpful so far. They're making it sound like we have to stop a wedding because the groom is secretly an antique-thief or an assassin or something. Have I really stumbled into that kind of romantic schlock? It sounds like one of those awful novels Marcia is constantly devouring."
Lucia and Calill looked at each other.
"I like him," Calill remarked.
"Definitely," the swordmaster agreed.
Soren took a stance that conjured images of peasants and minions supplicating themselves at his feet, which was actually meant to show that he was listening carefully. Calill explained, having to back up more than once, and frequently interrupted by Lucia, describing the last two days. Then she handed over the papers Sothe had delivered, which Soren blitzed through gratefully.
"Shouldn't Boyd and Nephenee be here to tell him about finding and losing the pendant thing?" asked Lucia. "I wouldn't want to skip important details."
"Don't know," said Calill, picking up pages as Soren cast them aside and reading through again. "Wandered off. Boyd probably needs a roast chicken or the like to snack on."
She was about right; he was raiding her kitchen, though baked goods were the casualties of the day. No cinnamon-raisin loaf was safe. Nephenee, rather than watch the grim spectacle, was picking candles out of the cupboards in preparation for a night that she felt sure was going to be full of planning. Plotting. Even scheming, if necessary.
"Ya'd think a pyro like Calill'd keep her matches close at hand," Nephenee mused. "Then again, guess she prob'ly doesn' need 'em often."
"Neat freak, too," Boyd observed, inexplicably pausing mid-feast. "Nice stone floors, yes, but look how polished they are." Without much effort, he pushed off one counter and slid across to the other pantry, spinning as he went. Nephenee grinned and skated past him, catching herself on the preserves pantry.
"Slick," she confirmed, and launched again, noticing too late that Boyd was doing the same. They crashed quite gracefully, managing to grab hold of each other's arms and twirl to steadiness.
Their eyes met in silence. "Fhall we danf?" Boyd suggested around a particularly cinnamony slice.
In the other room, the soldiers had been quickly forgotten again. "All right. I think I'm caught up," said Soren. "This noble, Fletcher Ceffylau, is looking to get married and ascend to Lord of his House. He's also got an obsession with archery, and somewhere he read a legend about an ancient bow of devastating might, so like any slightly unhinged power-wonk, he tried to build another one."
"That'd explain the workshop and all the books," Lucia agreed. "Sothe was a lot better at investigating this stuff than we were."
"At least you didn't have to fake your death to do it," Soren remarked. "Now, that didn't work out, making a new one, but then he determined that the original Bow of Falling Stars hadn't been destroyed so much as disassembled, and that Begnion was hiding it. He hired mercenaries to do the actual stealing, and we know they got the string off that medallion–"
"–Which we're sure is actually the bowstring," Lucia added. "But they never saw them get a bow or anything out of the building. I suppose they could have done some sneaking we didn't find out about."
"Or they could have slipped it out right in front of you," said Soren. "I recall something about a breaking window attracting Boyd and Nephenee's attention? From the way you described the battle, Gatrie was too far away to have thrown the urn through it, and holding his lance in any case. Also, why risk attracting attention, which they did? Simple answer is that big urns hold things."
Lucia slapped her forehead. "Stash the bow in the urn, throw it out the window, pick it up later when things have quieted down and no one's paying attention. Blast."
"It's only a guess," said Soren. "But it would mean that they've got the whole weapon, and I suspect Fletcher has the skill to properly reconstruct it, even if there's a trick to the job. Considering the power it's supposed to have – if Sothe's found real information, and not some overblown delusion – I think we can feel lucky that everything in the city is still standing, but Sagita's supposed to be planning to rule Begnion. I think the Apostle, for one, wouldn't approve."
"He'll have a fine time trying to get to her inside the palace, superweapon or not," Lucia scoffed.
"Oh, blast…" said Soren, rereading one of the last cryptic notes Sothe had scribbled down. Re: dead Apostle – every good trap needs bait that doesn't look like bait. "How obvious could it get?"
Sanaki looked up from her meditation lantern and waited politely for the servant to speak. This always unnerved them, which she had to privately admit tended to be hilarious. The quiet could stretch on for quite some time before they gathered the courage to speak and discovered that they wouldn't be instantly executed. "Ah… Your Holiness? The tailor-master would like to know if you have decided what you would like to wear to the ceremony."
The Apostle mused for a moment. "Something simple and red; make sure it is not meant to show off." The servant bowed deeply and slipped away so fast there was a quiet sonic boom. I'd rather not attract too much attention, and certainly have no interest in distracting from the bride. She shook her head and laughed. A marriage between House Sagita and House Ceffylau after all these generations of tension. Could anything else in Begnion so surely demand I make an appearance outside the palace? Unlike Soren, the thought immediately drifted out of her head as she returned to marvelling at the radiance of the flame.
"I'm glad we got to talk like this one last time," said Astrid. Sothe was back on the windowsill, curled in hammock-mode again. He looked somewhat more distant now, as though his mind were puzzling through an especially mighty riddle on another continent. "And I'm glad you came back."
"Yeah," the thief agreed. "I shouldn't have left for so long."
"…Will you be there tomorrow?"
Sothe fixed her with his usual amused stare. "Astrid, what do you really think the chances are that you'd ever see me in a room full of upper-class Begnion lunatics?" She nearly laughed, but couldn't quite find the enthusiasm.
"If everything you said was true, why did you stop arguing?" she asked. "Why not press the point and prove it?"
"Because I'd rather shut up and be in here than sit out in the rain and be right," Sothe replied, sliding out of place and standing again. "And because I think tonight you needed to talk more than listen."
"I've been talking for hours," Astrid muttered, rolling her eyes.
"Yeah," Sothe agreed. "And now I've got to get going."
"It's still raining out there."
"I persevere. Compared to getting shot, really, how bad can it be?" he asked, spreading his arms.
"Sothe…"
"Sorry. It's true."
"Sothe!"
"I'm going already, you won't have to put up with any more arguments. Just one other thing I'd like you to know." Utterly calm, as always, he stepped forward and his outstretched arms wrapped around Astrid, sliding across her back to hold her close, and kissed her, soft as an avalanche of pillows. Astrid didn't spend any time shocked, nor did she resist, but rather enjoyed it for all it was, all he meant. The scent of the rain had slipped in through the window, folding around them.
He parted from her, stepped back. Astrid still said nothing, just waited for the desperate argument she knew was going to follow. It wasn't honestly all that unexpected, but to think she was going to have to turn him away again, now, in the middle of such a wracking ordeal–
"Good night, Lady Astrid," he said, and escaped through the window. The lock clicked; Astrid didn't bother wondering how he had managed to lock it again from the outside. Thief rules. They made the world an incredible hassle, sometimes.