Shadowdance 01 - A Dance of Cloaks

a face, and she doubted she’d have ever forgotten his, but so far she had come up empty.
    With the sun finally beginning to creep above the city walls, Kayla nudged him awake. He snapped his eyes open and stared at her without a word. It was as if he had grown inward and shy now the danger was past. She thought to ask him of his father, then decided against it. No matter who he was, she’d been careful to foster no enemies among the thief guilds.
    “Should we head west?” she asked. He nodded. “I thought so, but we have a slight problem. How do we get over the gate?”
    He didn’t know. It seemed that when the hounds were at his heel, he was a fountain of ideas, but when things quieted down, the fountain ran dry. She almost smacked him upside the head and threatened to cut his throat if he didn’t produce an idea, but the thought was so absurd she laughed.
    “I guess we wait,” Kayla said. Her stomach was rumbling, and she badly wanted someone to look at Haern’s knee. When she glanced about, she had little faith in the tree’s cover once the sun reached its fullest. If discovered, she would probably wish for the comfort of the noose. Inside Laurie Keenan’s compound, he ruled, not the king.
    “What if someone else opens the gate?” Haern whispered. “Maybe we can run through.”
    “Maybe,” she said absently. But even
maybe
was pushing their luck. They needed someone to open the gate without noticing them hiding first, and then they’d have to escape the guards on their frantic dash to the street, all while hoping no archers in the windows feathered them dead. But if they were to do something, they needed to do it before the rest of the estate began its daily routines. Even though Laurie and his family lived in a second home south in Angelport, Kayla knew they still kept guards and a skeleton crew of servants to keep the place safe and clean. If any one of them spotted the two, they didn’t have a beggar’s chance of convincing anyone they weren’t pawns of the thief guilds, sent to kill yet another lackey of the Trifect.
    Kayla looked to Haern and held in a smile. Maybe if they were found, the boy might reveal another amazing skill. The kid could pull out nails with a thin knife and vault over fences like a mummer’s monkey. What could he do when cornered behind a locked gate?
    Locked?
    “Haern, look at me,” she said. “Can you pick a lock? Not some apprentice’s crap, I mean a true smith’s lock. I’ve never had the fingers for it, but do you?”
    He looked away from her, angling his head so the rising sun no longer reached through the leaves to light his face. In the shade, he seemed to grow more confident.
    “Your daggers are thin, and I could try. I’d need something else, though, something even thinner.”
    She handed him a dagger, then reached into her belt and pulled out a small spyglass. She used it when she needed to be absolutely certain who a person was, when guesswork and reliance on body structure and clothing were not enough … or when naming the wrong name could get her killed by all parties involved. The spyglass wasn’t what she wanted, though. What she wanted was the length of wire wrapped around the middle to reinforce the fragile creation. Haern saw and nodded happily. He snatched the spyglass from her hands, unwound the wire, and handed the spyglass back.
    “How long?” she asked.
    “Master Jyr was my teacher,” he said. “When he left, he said I was his fastest student ever.”
    Kayla shook her head.
    “Not good enough. Tell me, how fast?”
    Haern shrugged.
    “A minute? Two if it’s expertly made.”
    “Expect three minutes,” she said. Her blue-green eyes darted about. It wouldn’t be long before a servant or two headed out for the market to fetch fresh eggs and warm bread for breakfast. The sun was low … perhaps they could go unnoticed. She had seen no guards, but that meant nothing. After five years of warfare, there were always guards.
    “Pick the lock as fast as you can,” she told him. “If anyone tries to stop us, I’ll kill them.”
    Haern nodded.
    “I’ll do my best.”
    The ground wasn’t far, but Kayla worried about Haern’s leg. Once they made it to the streets, they could lose themselves in the sea of merchants, tradesmen, and common folk that always swelled in the morning hours. Until then, they’d be horribly vulnerable.
    “I’ll help you down,” she said. “Hurry, but don’t injure your knee any further. An open