Briar hadn't felt this frustrated since he'd first started teaching Evvy. It seemed that everywhere he applied, he'd get a once over coupled with a disdainful sniff at the flowers tattooed on his hands and then a door shut in his face.
"We don't need any of the Rogue's kind here! This is a respectable establishment!" One old biddy snapped before shooing him out the door of her apothecary with her broom.
"Who the hell is this Rogue?" Briar complained one night at supper. It was a delicious, if thin, stew that didn't quite sooth his battered pride or his growling belly. "I've been kicked out of every halfway decent apothecary or herbalist with the name on their lips—it's enough to get my feelings tweaked. Usually when a lady calls me a rogue it's for-"
"Children." Daja said, cutting her eyes to Glaki, whom Briar saw was very interested in the conversation.
"-other things." He finished lamely.
"I told you not to get those tattoos." Sandry sing-songed from the armchair in the corner where she was happily embroidering a veil for her next commission.
Briar made a rude hand gesture, and yelped when Daja rapped his knuckles hard with a spoon. "What part of children don't you understand?" She asked sternly, before turning to Glaki. "I'd better not see or hear of you repeating Briar here. The last thing anyone wants is a visit from the school teacher about your behavior at school."
"Yes Daja." Glaki said meekly, but giggled when Briar winked at her behind the smith's back.
"I saw that." Tris said airily as she entered their small apartment.
"Tris!" Glaki cried, leaping up and hugging her around the middle tightly. "I missed you!"
"I haven't even left yet." Tris said, amused. She rested her hand on Glaki's dark head and looped her arm around Glaki's shoulders in a loose, awkward hug.
"I know that." Glaki said, her cheeks pinking. "But I'm really going to miss you when you leave tomorrow."
And she would. She really would. Glaki was terrified at the thought of Tris leaving to go to work and never coming back again—just like the hazy memories of her real mother and aunt back in Tharios. She wouldn't be alone (she'd had Kethlun back then, too) but it wouldn't be the same without Tris around. Who would meditate early in the morning with her before she had to go off to school? Who would help her with her arithmetic when the homework questions the teacher set aside were completely foreign to her? Who would- who would-
"It'll be alright." Tris whispered in her ear, hugging her a little closer. Glaki could feel the red-heads naturally stiff posture relaxing just a little to curl around her smaller frame. "You can talk to me everyday, remember? All you have to do is ask Briar, Daja, or Sandry and you know they'll help you."
"Okay." Glaki murmured, breaking away from Tris's hug and going back to the table. She wiped her eyes quickly, and hope Tris didn't see them. She didn't like crying in front of Tris, who never cried and had no patience for those who did.
"You were saying something about a Rogue?" Sandry asked, breaking the growing silence.
Briar immediately scowled. "Whoever he is, he's making it very difficult to get a job. The only place I have left is the Lower City and I don't particularly want to work down there. It reminds me too much of the Mire, you know?" He unconsciously rubbed the double X's on the webs on his thumbs, and grimaced when he looked down and noticed himself doing it.
"Any idea who he, or she, is?"
"Or what?"
Briar shrugged. "The way the people talk about him, I'd say he's a mob type of some sort. Like the Thief Lord back in Hatar. He's got a title an' everything."
"I know we don't want to get too involved here, but do you think…" Sandry hesitated, as if trying to find the most tactful way of putting it. "…having an ear on the ground, so to speak, would be such a bad idea?"
"Are you suggested I go back to my criminal ways, Lady fa Toren?" Briar laughed.
Sandry shrugged, looking sheepish.
"No, it's a good idea." Daja said. She carefully set down her spoon and sat back in her wooden chair. "Right now, we're pretty comfortably situated. I have my work at the blacksmith, which often does commissions for the palace armory and gives me access to the palace gossip. Sandry has a way to hear what the nobles are saying—we all know how much noble ladies like to talk about new arrivals at court to anyone they can condescend to— and Tris is with the Kings Own, gallivanting all over the land, she might hear something before any of us."
"Your point?" Briar said.
"We don't have anyone in the Lower City."
"Well, I don't particularly want to be stabbed in some alleyway or taken by the City Watch neither." Briar retorted. "I guarantee they'll ask lots of uncomfortable questions if I'm arrested. Probably with branding irons."
"Really?" Glaki asked, her eyes huge. "That wouldn't really happen to you, would it?" she turned to look at Tris. "I don't want Briar to go to jail!"
"None of us do, dear." Sandry said, her eyes softening at Glaki's distraught expression.
"Speak for yourself." Daja snorted. She got up and began to stack the dishes in the sink and Tris quickly got up to assist in the drying.
"Ha ha." Briar snarked back. "What if I don't want to be someones lackey, bowin' and scraping to feed an inflated ego? Might as well become the Rogue myself."
"You do that." Tris said absently, peering over her spectacles at her foster-brother.
"I could, you know."
"Of that I have no doubt."