Dance of Thieves (Dance of Thieves 1)

I picked several, making silent wishes with each one. Jase looked at my handful of stalks like they were weeds. “What do they do besides grant wishes?” It was obvious that he had never skipped a meal in his life, much less a week of meals.

“You’ll see,” I answered. We sat down on the bank cooling our ankles in the creek, and I told him to chew. “Don’t eat the stalk, just swallow the juice.” I explained that the juice was not unlike nectar and just as nourishing.

“But the real magic is this,” I said and took the pulpy stalk I had chewed and split it open so it lay flat. “Give me your ankle,” I said, pointing to the chained one. He pulled it from the creek, and I slipped the flattened stalk beneath the shackle where his skin was cut. “You’ll start to feel the difference soon,” I said. “It has—” I glanced up at him and found his eyes were focused on me, not his ankle. I froze, thinking there was something he was about to say. Our gazes remained locked, and there were questions in his eyes, but not the kind I could answer. My breath stopped up in my chest.

“It’s awkward, isn’t it?” he said.

“What’s that?” I replied, my voice far too breathy.

“These moments when we’re not hating each other.”

I swallowed and looked away. But it seemed there was nothing to look at and the moment only grew more uncomfortable and my jaw ached from clenching it. He was right, it was awkward. This was not something I was good at. I was good at running away, distance, disappearing. Not this. Not at being confronted with him over and over again, never having more than three feet of space between us, and I hated that I actually found him … likable. I shouldn’t have liked him at all. And I hated the other things I noticed about him too, little things that caught my attention, like the way his hair fell over his eyes when he stooped to build a fire, the interesting quirk of his right brow when he was angry, the four small freckles on his arm that would make a J if a line connected them, the way the light caught the stubble on his chin. I was a connoisseur of detail, but I didn’t like the details I saw. I hated that I found him—appealing. Not just his appearance, but the confidence of his strides, the calculations in his gaze, his cockiness, his damned voice. I hated the ridiculous flip-flop my stomach did just now when I caught him looking at me. I was not Synové!

Maybe most of all, I hated that I found any kindness in him at all. I hated that I’d had to swallow a knot in my throat that first night when I realized he was trying to help me sleep, as he had every night since then. Those I had tricked and stolen from in the past had never been kind. It made it easy to turn them into fools and steal from them.

“You were saying? It has…?” he asked. I knew he was trying to give me some coherent thought to occupy myself.

“Healing qualities. It has healing qualities.”

“Here, let me put this one on your ankle.”

“I can do it myself,” I said and took the chewed stalk from him, fussing over it again and again as I pressed it onto my ankle.

“I think you have it in the right position,” he said, and I finally left it alone.

We sat there for silent minutes, chewing more stalks and breaking several more in half to stuff in our pockets. He leaned over, looking at his ankle. “The sting is gone. Thank you.” His voice. There was no mistaking the kindness I heard.

I nodded and finally felt composed enough to look at him. “Thank you, too.”

“For?”

“Keeping me still when the Candok came upon us,” I answered. “I might have ended up as his breakfast.”

His mouth pulled in a frown. “Nah. One bite and he’d have spit you out. You’re not even close to being sweet enough.”

I suppressed a smile. I was much more at ease with his disparaging remarks.

He stood and put his hand out to help me up. “We should get going, Kazi of Brightmist.”

I took it and stood. “You seem to like calling me that. Why?”

“Because I’m not sure that’s your real name. You appear to have a lot of hidden sides to you—juggling, telling riddles, taking down boys and threatening to cut their pretty necks.”

I grimaced and shook my head, sizing up his neck. “It’s not so pretty.”

He rubbed his neck as if offended. “Anything else up your sleeve I should know about?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be fun, would it?”

“Should I be concerned?”

“Probably.”

They tricked us. Their voices were soft. Their heads bowed. They did not look dangerous. They looked like us, afraid.

Until we opened the gate.

They stabbed Razim and laughed. They left him for dead, and we couldn’t open the door to get him until they were gone.