#negates this

Felicity Krie had slipped her father’s signet ring off of his finger when she found him, when she was still covered in his killer’s blood. Before it had occurred to her to scream for help, or to do anything but get shakily to her knees beside him. That was all she did, when he was dead and the man who killed him was also dead, the look of shock (she did not hear her father’s last words; his killer’s white-faced gasp, “they didn’t tell me he had—” will live in her head forever) still frozen on his face, only halfway slack. She had knelt; she had reached out a shaky hand and slid her father’s eyes shut; she had slid the ring off of his finger. It didn’t fit around her fingers, of course; even on her thumb it would have been too lose. She’d strung it on a silver chain around her neck ever since.

A chain which was broken, now. Had broken somewhere in Limani, the port town, the biggest town she’d ever been to.

She’d been trying, for the week walking here, not to think of what her father would have said, about the job she’d taken, and how few questions she’d asked before taking it. The company she was currently keeping.

It was suddenly much easier not to think of that, because her mind was immediately blank with panic, now that she’d lost him all over again.

On her knees in the dust in the middle of the street, Felicity pressed her hands over her eyes and sat very still for a moment, because if she thought about the number of people who must have passed this way since she’d noticed its absence, and the odds that none of them would have seen a thick ring of real gold lying unattended in the dirt—if she thought about that, or of how his hand had felt when she’d taken it, already cold and getting colder in her grip, or of the look on her mother’s face when she’d glimpsed it under the collar of Felicity’s shirt before she left—if she thought about any of those things she was going to cry, right here, in the middle of the street, in front of a hundred big-city strangers.

Her eyes were still squeezed shut under her hands when a boy’s voice with just a whisper of an accent said gently, “Excuse me, Miss—is this yours?”

Felicity lowered her hands.

The first thing she saw was her father’s signet ring, sitting in the center of an outstretched pink palm, looking dusty but not otherwise the worse for wear. Then she looked up and felt her mouth drop open of its own accord.

Holding her father’s ring with careful pale fingers was a pretty-faced Crythian boy with high, sharp cheekbones and very blue eyes, and yellow hair cut untidily around his ears, and a long thin scar that ran down his cheek from eyebrow to chin, and—

And it was him. Felicity had been staring at his face in Cetus Emani’s crystal ball for what seemed like hours every day, and knew it practically as well as her own, although seeing it in person was something else entirely.

The Crythian boy’s mouth quirked up a little at one corner, and he said in that same pretty soft voice, “Miss? Are you alright?” and Felicity realized that she was staring and shot to her feet too fast, almost keeling right back over.

This boy—soft pink outstretched hands or no—was a criminal. Cetus Emani had told her as much, and they wouldn’t be paying her to help find him if he weren’t, besides. And he was armed, too; there was a hand-and-a-half sword belted around his waist, though it looked a bit more decorative than practical.

“Yes—y-yes, that’s mine,” Felicity said, brushing dirt from her trousers and trying to surreptitiously wipe tears from her eyes as well. She felt—unaccountably embarrassed at the idea that this boy might have seen her crying; in person it was more obvious that they were of similar age, and he was really very—criminal, she reminded herself sternly. “I thought for sure I’d lost it.”

Felicity opened her hand, and the boy dropped her father’s ring into her palm, lowering the broken chain carefully, so that it wouldn’t knot. She stared at the ring for a moment, bright against her dark palm. Her brain kept snagging on it—it was expensive; anyone would have asked for something in exchange for its return. Let alone a criminal, on the run from Cetus Emani and his mysterious employer. But the boy had simply—given it back to her.

The boy’s smile widened a fraction, as though in good-natured awkwardness; Felicity realized she’d been quiet for too long. Then he put his hand over his heart and bowed, in a way that was—strange, a little too formal. The boy was wearing a green wool tunic that seemed made for a much larger man, and rough spun trousers underneath that were frayed at the hems. It wasn’t a bow for someone wearing clothes that didn’t fit.

“Well,” the boy said, “I am happy to have helped.” And started to turn away.

“Wait!” Felicity nearly shouted, and reached out without thinking to grab hold of his arm.

----

She was a pretty Galdrean girl, perhaps two years younger and two inches shorter. She was wearing no visible weapons, and the hand with which she was now gripping his arm below the shoulder was really very small.

There was no reason her touch should pull all his muscles tight-to-breaking and send ice in ripples down his spine. There was no reason. There was no reason at all.

“I—need your help,” the girl said, but she faltered on the last few syllables. Like she could hear that he wasn’t breathing.

The boy called Will concentrated very hard, and arranged his features into a look of mild concern.

“Why,” he said, very calmly. “What’s the matter, Miss?”

The girl withdrew her hand; Will forced himself to breath in slowly, so she would not hear him gasp. (The effort made him tremble, but not so much that it was visible.) She pressed her hands together, more in nervousness than supplication, and bit her lip.

Will did not take a step back, though she was standing really quite close. It was too soon after she had seen him go tense. He would stay here—and would breathe normally—and would not rub at his arm, which was hot and tingled unpleasantly where her small hand had touched it.

“It’s—my brother,” the girl said, and she did sound distressed, now, though she seemed unable to hold his gaze. “I, um.” She cleared her throat. “He—you see. My brother twisted his ankle, on the way to the shops. I can’t carry him to the healer’s district by myself.” Then she did look up at him, brown eyes very wide. “Will you—help me? Please?”

Will blinked at her.

That, he thought, was a lie. That was—a very bad lie.

“It isn’t far,” the girl went on, and now she was looking at—the center of his chest, transparently to avoid meeting his eyes again. “It’s just, um—I helped him to one of the store fronts, a few streets over. I was—I was hoping I could find someone to help me here, since it’s busier, that’s when I dropped my—”

She couldn’t be robbing him, surely, he thought. The magician’s clothes were far too large, but it was surely obvious he was carrying nothing of value, except perhaps the sword itself. And—she was so bad at this; her voice was wavering, now, but in a way that sounded less like worry for an imaginary injured sibling, and more like miserable embarrassment. It was as though she had never told a lie before in her life, and wasn’t enjoying doing so now.

“Alright,” Will said, over the rest of her babbling explanation.

The girl pulled up short, in apparent astonishment. Will smiled at her.

“Alright,” he said again. “Which way?”

----

“How old is your brother?” the boy asked, a few steps further toward the inn Emani had rented as their base of operations. It didn’t sound like a test, exactly. But it was hard to tell.

“He’s seen ten summers,” she answered, trying very hard to keep her voice light. “You know boys his age. Always climbing things they shouldn’t be.” Teron wasn’t much of a climber, actually Felicity herself had always been the one more likely to get herself into that kind of trouble. He was also half a kingdom away, of course, and thinking of him was not helping now, and she should have told a different lie, should have found some magic first lie that didn’t multiply into a thousand other lies like a pair of rabbits.

“Where are your parents?” the boy asked, light and gentle, like a man would use on a frightened horse, and Felicity tripped over a loose stone in the road, thinking for once not of her dead father but of her mother, left behind, her mother’s shadowed eyes and brave smile, what her mother would think—

“They’re gone,” Felicity said, and it came out too hard; the boy blinked his pale eyes at her, his sunburnt mouth and brow still soft but his gaze suddenly so piercing that felt it as a prickle on her skin.

“I’m sorry,” the boy said, and his voice had not changed at all; it mismatched his eyes in a way that was nearly alien, too gentle for his cut-gem eyes. “You are very young to be on your own.”

He could be no more than a year Felicity’s senior, if that—perhaps eighteen summers, surely no older. She opened her mouth to tell him that, and at that moment he crossed the threshold of the inn and Cetus Emani raised from a crouch beside the door, all seven feet of him; the boy had a moment to register the incomprehensible shape in the doorway, and then Emani brought his fist down on the boy’s head and the boy fell like a stone.

That, after everything, was far too much.

“What is wrong with you?” Felicity shrilled. Every second since she’d reached for her father’s ring and found it missing had wound her neck and shoulders tighter, and it all came out now in her voice, twisting it into a shriek.

Emani, busy with hauling the boy properly into the inn, ignored her. Harrow, now visible in the dim light beyond, skirted Emani and the boy’s limp body with averted eyes to yank Felicity into the inn after them, and had the actual nerve to raise his other hand to his mouth in a panicked shushing gesture. Felicity shook him off, harder than she needed to.

“I had him!” she yelled. The inn was nearly empty, as if Emani’s limitless budget had extended to the exclusive use of the whole building. The real bounty hunter—Criel—was seated at the untended bar, watching Felicity with bright-eyed interest. None of that mattered; she could not have lowered her voice even if the inn had been bustling with old ladies. “I had him, he was coming, you had no call to—to—”

“You have done a small part of your job,” Emani said in his deep, unmoving voice, not looking up at her. “Let me do mine.”

“You had no call—” Emani bent to fiddle with the boy’s belt and Felicity nearly slapped his hands away. “Now what are you doing?”

“Rest assured, he will wake,” Emani said, tossing the boy’s sword belt aside, where clattered across the dirt floor to stop at Felicity’s feet. Then Emani lifted the boy by the armpits and plopped him into one of the inn’s wood-and-grass chairs. The boy’s head lolled back like a doll’s. Emani bent to secure the boy’s hands to the back of the chair with a length of rope. “No doubt he does wake he will have questions for you, girl,” Emani said, without looking up at Felicity.

Emani said it in his usual flat, disinterested tone, but it sank in Felicity’s stomach like lead. Blood dripped in a thin line from the boy’s hairline towards his eyes, which were moving visibly under the lids, as though he were dreaming.

“You didn’t have to hit him,” Felicity said again; it seemed like someone ought to. “He was coming in peacefully. We could have talked to him.”

Emani did look up at her then, raising an eyebrow at her over the boy’s head. “Could we,” he said, sounding halfway amused. “You must have told him an excellent lie, that he would have remained peaceful upon seeing all of us here, and the exits barred.”

Felicity felt a shamed flush heat her face—shamed to be so poor at this job; shamed to have taken it in the first place. Emani was right, of course, except that all of it was wrong.