Gifted

I snuck down to the common room to find Griselda still sitting in front of the fire despite it being well past midnight — just like we had planned. Trying to get the half-orc to sneak down the stairs in the dark just sounded like a losing proposition. Stairs that wouldn’t move under my weight might groan under her considerable muscle. So, we had agreed she would just pretend to stay up — remaining by the fireplace till I joined her.

In one hand, I held my simple drawing of a map to where Kole’s silver was hidden. The ‘evidence’ to tie that location and theft to Lady Yalindra rested in the inside pocket of my fur jacket. Getting a torn piece of one of the House Firthholm tabards had been less challenging but more painful than I had expected.

Marcus, the soldier constantly bothering Mum, had a tendency to sit in the same seat when he came to the outpost. Unsurprisingly, the creep chose the spot because it had the best view into the kitchen. So, getting a hammer and adding a new nail to the side of the chair had been easy enough. Then, it had just been a matter of playing in the common room, which included running by Marcus and hooking his tabard onto the exposed nail. Still, I didn’t think that alone would be enough to tear a piece off.

That was where Griselda came in. She had kindly offered to help deliver plates of food in the evening — the reason she gave for the assistance was to help Mum avoid Marcus. An easy sell if there ever was one. Griselda’s mere presence was enough to rile up a couple of the guards. While it never came to blows, an accidental fumble of a plate led to Marcus and his compatriots standing up suddenly. Coincidentally I happened to be running past them at the same time and ‘accidentally’ bumped into Marcus’s chair, hurting myself in the process.

The bruise was still fresh and painful but Marcus going one way and the chair going the other with me tumbling over it was enough to rip off a piece of the white tabard. It certainly helped that a crying kid also gave Griselda the perfect excuse to carry me off to the kitchen to be comforted by my Mum. Exit stage left for the dynamic duo!

All that was left to do was plant the evidence, grab the letters incriminating Yalindra for stealing from her cousin, and then somehow sneak into the House Landrin tent camp to the west. Easy peasy. My stomach was already doing flips at the thought of me biting off more than I could chew.

As Griselda and I left, we used the kitchen door, as there was no hope in hell of Griselda fitting through the window. Outside, in the cool night air, with clouds covering the moon above, I turned toward her hulking form.

“We should get the papers first,” I suggested. “No point planting the evidence if we don’t have those.”

I expected Griselda to push back, but she simply nodded, falling in next to me as we quietly walked past Mum’s garden and towards the House Firthholm fort. At the very edge of the outpost, she crouched down to wait, and I was surprised how easily she blended in next to the building.

Taking a deep breath, I prepared to risk life and limb for the second time in two nights. I had told Griselda I had a Skill to help me hide. Seeing was believing though, and for one of the first times, I saw a look of surprise on her pale green face as shadows coalesced around my body until I was a little more than an ink blot in the darkness.

Activating Muffled Steps, I dashed in almost complete silence towards the palisade in the distance, scrambling over the wall. Controlled Grip would have made it easier but I still couldn’t manage to use all three Skills at the same time and expected it would be months before I could.

Just like the night before, I paused at the lip, checking for the guard patrol. Seeing none, I lowered myself inside and dashed across the intervening space towards Yalindra’s home.

I paused at the door, crouching down and waiting with my ear pressed to the thin gap in the wood.

No sound of chairs shifting or quill scratching filled the silence, but that didn’t mean anything and I patiently waited for a rough count of three hundred before I carefully tried to pull the door open. It didn’t budge.

Just my luck, I griped internally.

I had chosen to come later to make sure Yalindra was asleep because I didn’t trust my chances of finding her entertaining herself with a ‘guest’ again. Seems that she did in fact lock the door behind her when she was alone. No surprise there. After all, she had at least one chest filled with silver bars to protect — even if it clearly wasn’t the entire taxed allotment from the silver mine. I guessed the rest of the silver was in the storage shed, which had a metal chain and padlock wrapped around the entrance.

Thankfully, I had come prepared for dealing with simple locks. Reaching into my coat, I pulled out a long, thin knife I had swiped from our kitchen. The door to the house was recently built and seemed to be using a drop bar inside just like the doors to the outpost. Thankfully, it was thin enough that I could slowly muscle it up with my limited leverage. Unfortunately the process was not a quick one. Though the risk pained me, I was forced to drop my Cloak of Shadows while I worked.

After five minutes of slowly and carefully straining against the drop bar, sweat beading on my head, I finally managed to lever it out of the way. As I opened the door though, the drop bar toppled out of the holder. Time seemed to slow down as the wood fell toward the floor. I reached out, activating my Skills on instinct. Shadows veiled me. My feet moved in silence. The fingers of my empty hand shot forward, snatching the wood out of the air and closing like a vice grip around it.

I bit my tongue as I stifled a scream as lava roared through my aether channels. Releasing Controlled Grip I hurriedly placed the drop bar down as quietly as I could.

I’m not doing that again, I thought, cool air brushing against the sweat on my brow as I tried not to pant from the pain. The iron taste of blood in my mouth remained alongside a throbbing that mirrored the beat of my heart. I did my best to ignore both.

With no time to waste and no way to effectively lock the door after I left, I quietly slipped over to the desk. I paused, waiting to hear if there was any reaction from the bedroom. A minute passed and I decided I hadn’t woken the lesser noble.

Without the lantern, it took me a moment to find the two sheets since they were tucked away at the bottom of the stack of papers. Evidence in hand, I checked for a guard patrol — learning from my previous mistake — before slipping back outside.

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The moment I was over the wooden palisade, a notification flashed in the corner of my vision. I ignored it till I arrived back safely next to Griselda. Dropping my Cloak of Shadows, I checked what the Myriad Paths wanted to tell me.

Path Unlocked! Path of Thievery (0/10)

It was bound to happen, Mum, I thought, even though I knew she would still be unhappy when she found out — and she would. She would no doubt realise what I had done when this whole fiasco blew up the following morning. Unfortunately I had no similar movement on my Path of Infiltration. Gramps had warned me that breaking into the same place twice wouldn’t do anything for me. Considering the difficulty it made me a little annoyed, but I guessed an Elite Path was not so easily gamed.

After folding the stolen papers up with my hand-drawn map, I looked at Griselda. “Ready?”

The half-orc nodded, and together, we moved west to the opposite side of the outpost. A short ways up the road, among the trees, sat the tents of House Landrin surrounded by wooden spikes like a bristling porcupine. My childish observation was that Ser Joss ran a tight outfit, with two patrols making circuits of the camp, each one made up of two guards. Griselda and I waited till the current patrol had its backs to us then quickly ran across the road.

Slipping behind the Kellins’, we veered into the forest to avoid being noticed. Griselda could clearly see better in the dark than I could so I fell into step behind her, occasionally patting her on the back to point her in the right direction. My assistance was barely needed, and we arrived at the large stone hiding place a few minutes later.

The rock covering the cache of silver had taken the two miners to move it. I expected Griselda to have to work quite hard at it to match the pair. So when she rolled it away with only a slight grunt of effort, I was forced to reassess just how strong she might be. During the battle with the Necromancer, I had seen her cleave the undead wolves heads off. At the time, I had attributed the feat to some strength coupled with the exceptionally sharp metal of her hatchet blades. Now, I was wondering if maybe her axes weren’t that sharp, and she was just that strong. She had escaped from the Chittering Dark after all.

Behind the stone lay stacks of silver bars, each one the length of an adult’s palm and maybe half again as wide as a finger. By my count, Kole and his compatriot had added another two every day for the past couple of weeks. On top of what they had already stolen, there had to be almost fifty bars of silver sitting inside the hollowed out hiding spot.

“You could take some, if you wanted,” I whispered.

Griselda shook her head, her curly, black hair invisible in the dark. “Not worth the trouble if I was found with it.”

She’s probably right, I thought, retracting my own hand which had been considering taking a donation for my training fund.

I dropped the ripped piece of fabric from Marcus’s tabard down in the indent where the stone normally sat, then let Griselda roll the large rock back into place. With the incriminating paperwork stolen and evidence planted, there was only one thing left to do — get it into Ser Joss’s hands without alerting him as to the source.

Of course, I griped in my mind. The hardest part has to come last.

Griselda and I picked our way back through the forest towards the House Landrin tent camp. When we could make out their fires in the distance through the trees, we stopped and crouched down.

“I’ll meet you back in the outpost,” I whispered.

Griselda gently placed her hand on my shoulder. “No. I will create a distraction for you.”

“What? No,” I shook my head in fear. “What if they find you?!”

Griselda smiled, showing her sharper than human canines. “Warriors work together. You came up with a good plan. A smart plan. They will not find me. Wait for my signal. I will see you in the morning.”

Then she was gone, moving away from me almost completely silent as she vanished deeper into the forest.

I grit my teeth in worry before swallowing the bile that had risen into my throat at the thought of someone harming my friend. Then, since I didn’t have a choice in the matter now, I drew the shadows around me until I was invisible in the darkness before stalking toward the tents.

I crouched down among the trees once I was within roughly twenty metres of the House Landrin tents. Thankfully, it wouldn’t be hard to find Ser Joss’s. One tent in the middle of the encampment that was bigger than the rest? Unless he was being wily and sleeping elsewhere — which I acknowledged was possible — then that was where he would be.

In the cold darkness I suppressed a shiver. Even rugged up against the night air the chill was seeping into my bones. Despite my discomfort I waited patiently. When the signal came, it was undeniable. There was the sound of wood snapping as a tree began to fall followed by a loud and horrendous screech. I was guessing, but I had a feeling Griselda had just knocked down a tree that a rather large avian had been nesting in.

House Landrin’s camp reacted like a kicked ants’ nest. Ser Joss himself appeared outside the tent I had suspected was his, the light blue fabric flapping outwards from his sudden arrival. He was dressed in a simple, blue nightgown that reached his ankles. In his hand was his sword. I heard him bark a few orders before spinning and reentering his tent. When he emerged five minutes later, he was fully armoured and a group of ten soldiers — fully half his forces — was gathered around him. I was surprised at the speed but then, who knew how high the man’s stats were. Ser Joss himself led his men off into the darkness to investigate the noise.

The guards that remained had, instead of patrolling, taken up positions around the camp. I could see a path through the net they created though. It was going to be risky. That was when a second tree came down, this one further west, on the other side of their camp. With heads turned and soldiers shifting in that direction out of concern, I sprinted forward with Muffled Steps hiding the sound of my footfalls. After that, getting to Ser Joss’s tent was easy, and I dumped the papers and map just inside the entrance before making my escape.

It wasn’t until I was back at the outpost, panting with aether channels burning that I finally calmed down. Not fully though. Griselda was still out there with an eleven soldier contingent hunting for her. I just hoped she knew what she was doing.

With nothing else to do, and Griselda not returning that night, I barred the back door of the outpost once more then quietly crept back to my room. Lying in bed I brought up my Path of Infiltration to see if there had been any movement for slipping into the House Landrin encampment. I relaxed into my furs with a satisfied smile.

Path of Infiltration II (375/500)

One-hundred-and-fifty steps. Even more than the Count Firthholm fort.

Is it because there were more soldiers? Or because they were better trained? Is my age and capability a factor as well? I wondered.

No answers came to me and I was still over a hundred steps away from completing the Path.

My mind drifted back to what I had accomplished this night. Everything was done and out of my hands now. In the morning, we would find out whether my plan was a grand success or an utter failure. Just thinking about it left a heavy pit in my stomach.