“Like I’ve said, I think we should go,” Delryd said in annoyance for what must have been the twentieth time tonight. Her scuffed hands were interlaced together around a cheap stein of even cheaper cherryswill, her fingers shaking slightly from the strain. She hadn’t had a drop tonight and for good reason, glancing at her nervous companion from underneath her hood.

“Now,” she added with emphasis, perhaps a bit more sternly than she would’ve liked.

“But what if he shows up not soon after we’re gone? He’ll have to travel the woods alone,” Érad replied, his voice tinged with concern. His own fingers tapped arhythmically against the side of the emptied mug in front of him. He had had a lot to drink tonight and for good reason.

“Then I suppose he’ll have to ride hard to catch up,” said Delryd, “if that stupid little garron of his doesn’t croak under the weight of his fat rear.”

Érad laughed at that, how could he not? They had known each other since they were youths working the Comedhi hills, she the sheep, he the goats, and not a hard day together went by when Delryd didn’t know just the right thing to say to lift his spirits. Tonight was no different, even when things hadn’t looked quite as dreary as they ever had these last few days of travel.

They had been waiting for their third friend, hoping he would show up in this tavern, but things had soured for them quickly since their arrival. Not that anyone in the village seemed to have noticed their dire straits yet.

“I bet it’s grown twice the size since last we saw him,” Érad said absentmindedly as he looked back over his shoulder at something the bard said, “filling his fat face with all these sweetmeats and wines, not to mention all of the honey pies.”

The bard behind them had the locals hanging on his lips, paying the pair of them over in the corner little heed. He seemed to be ending the tale of one his latest stories, but hopefully it wouldn’t be the last of the night.

“I wonder why Marn’s on his lips so far south.” Érad whispered to his friend.

“Taletellers always run their mouths. And it’s a good thing he has such a loud one, too,” whispered Delryd back as she followed her friend’s gaze over her own shoulder, “keeping them from bothering with us.”

Érad nodded, agreeing silently. His finger ran along the rim of his empty stein as he considered their situation. The more people that were distracted tonight, the better.

For a moment the bard’s eyes met his own, startling him - was he looking at them directly?

Maybe, wait - no, he was looking to flag the ferne for another drink. Good.

“I think you’re right,” said Érad at length.

“Of course I am,” said Delryd curtly in reply. “And that took you long enough to say.” She slid the cherryswill away from her and brought her hands together, before cocking her head to listen. Érad’s deft hands slipped into his coin pouch, nestling a handful of shavings in his palm.

“Horses?” asked Érad.

“Riverside, clearing on the opposite bank, downstream the watermill.”

“South?”

“South-west.”

There were a few moments of tense silence as the both of them huddled into their woolen traveling cloaks and waited.

Waited.

Behind them came the sudden sound of raised voices and laughter as the bard finished his tale. In immediate response the pair softly rose from their seats. With a controlled hurry they made their way across the tavern floor, keeping their shoulders slouched, faces hooded, and their longknives hidden beneath their cloaks. Érad slid the correct coins in passing across the counter when the ferne’s back was turned, who heard nothing out of the ordinary because the pair of strangers timed their footsteps to the tune of the woodsmen’s clapping.

Stepping into the warm dark outside, nobody seemed to have paid any thought to their departure. Their eyes met for a brief moment.

“Be careful,” said Delryd.

“Says you,” Érad replied, but he knew she could hear the shakiness in his voice.

Delryd’s lips parted. For a moment, she lingered as if she wanted to say something weighing on her mind. Instead she pursed them tightly shut and gave her friend an encouraging nod.

Delryd turned on her heel and headed down the gravel path, left towards the direction of the orchards beyond the village’s edge. Érad watched her go, wishing he’d said something, anything, just in case. He let out a sigh, then headed right down the main cobbled road towards the heart of the small village of Träelent.

He had a mistake to fix.

Érad’s pace was quick but soft, careful how he went, making sure he stepped on the green that grew between the cobble and not just flat on the stone directly. Long years tending easily frightened goats and keeping a watchful eye on the wildlands for the presence of wolves had taught him a quiet tread.

When he came to the edge of the center of the village he stopped near a corner, a shapeless silhouette cast near the shadowed structure of one of the many wooden hovels that surrounded the main square.

Delryd and he had passed through here earlier in the afternoon looking for their friend, so he recognized some of the shapes of the buildings even in the dark. The square was quiet. It was dark, yes, but even then there should have been lights lit to mark the presence of men at watch. It seemed wholly deserted now.

Most villages around here were on account of the crusade.

A crusade Érad and his friends intended to join.

The two of them had kept to themselves as best they could coming down the northern mountains, steering clear of the main road to avoid patrols and curious merchants, and were supposed to have met up with their friend Adhern some four taverns ago.

But he hadn’t shown up, even with days of waiting, and with accents that would have clearly marked their foreign heritage in these lands they hadn’t had the courage to ask anyone directly if they had seen him. They had tried searching for Adhern in most of the smaller village taverns along the path they had intended to take further south, knowing well his fondness of drink, but their supplies for the journey had started to run out quicker than they had thought and much of their attire had been ruined by the weeks of long riding in rough terrain.

Not to mention the sudden rainfall the other day that had completely ruined the boots Érad had left out to dry. All he had wanted since then was a new pair to replace them.

Why could nothing south of the Crown ever be simple?

Érad waited, perhaps more careful than he had any real reason to be at this point, but less than he would prefer. He liked to take his time with things and if Delryd were with him he wouldn’t have felt as exposed as he did now. Back home, herders always went out in pairs or more, because in the hills there were often more than just wild animals to contend with. There were bandits and brokemen, too.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

But Delryd had her own task to do this night before they moved on, to prepare the horses and cover their escape should it come down to it. A shudder ran across Érad’s spine. Despite feeling uneasy about the task he had set out to do tonight, he wouldn’t have traded spots with Delryd, not for anything. He was not a man to avoid the weight of his own failures.

After a few moments of seeing no movement around the edges of the square, Érad put his hands to his lips and cupped them. Then he hooted, sharp and pitch-perfect, indistinguishable from any real owl. In the ensuing dangerous moments he crouched down to his knees and made himself as small as he could, listening for any nearby stirring.

His caution was rewarded with silence.

Satisfied, he came to his feet; his left leg lurched and his right snapped forward to follow a heartbeat later. He broke out in a sudden swift run, keeping himself low to the ground, straight across the length of the square. His feet flit from one cobblestone to the other, making sure to step only on the moss-covered ones to mask his approach. His new supple leather boots were quiet indeed.

The Dame’s light fell for but a glimpse, light like a feather, on the young man’s face beneath his hood and came to press on a pair of heavy, broad shoulders just barely strong enough to bear the weight of tonight’s coming crime.

Érad’s face was youthful but rough, belonging to a man of no older than twenty summers if that, with a strong Comedhi jaw framed by a wild blonde beard and framed by unkempt long locks of similar hair color on either side of his face. In any other setting that wasn’t as surreptitious as this his large blue eyes could have been thought of as innocently mischievous, but scrunched together in determination as they were now they could only be described as angry. Angry at himself.

Érad reached the other end of the square in short order, coming up to a small wooden house with a poorly kept thatched roof. The smell coming from the place was unmistakable.

Here is where the leatherworker and his wife lived.

Érad tightened himself against the side of the house as he came up to a window. His head swiveled one more time to take in the breadth of the square to see if anyone had noticed him.

No one.

Peeking inside he saw the dark interior of a small one-room working home; he saw a cooking hearth that had recently run cold at the back wall and distinct shapes of furniture before it. Some small distance away in the far corner he spotted a bed and the shape of a woman at rest.

Erád thought for a moment on what best to do, then tapped the pane of glass, twice softly at first, then twice more urgently again to try and get her attention.

No response.

Érad’s hand reached for the door, giving it a gentle push. Unbarred.

Foolish, foolish ferne, and with your husband gone?, Érad thought to himself as the door creaked open. He winced at the sound before kneeling in front of the door to lift it up by its corner, exerting a slight pressure as he did to stop the door from emitting any more noise. Then he carefully inched it open wider. His body almost parallel to the ground, Érad slipped inside the small abode, holding his breath against the tanning smell.

The threat of discovery tightened his throat with every passing moment and the quiet of the night seemed louden in his ears.

Crouched and with his gaze glued on the bed nearby, Érad snuck further past the threshold, heading for the table set in the center of the room. He stopped by one of the chairs and raised himself up, tearing his eyes away from the figure in the bed to look over the contents on the table. An iron cooking pot and earthen tableware, staling bread and something that looked to be old cheese swaddled in cloth.

Érad cast another look around the room, eyes searching further.

It wasn’t on the table, unlikely to be by the door, and with what little he could see by the Dame’s light leaking in through the nearby window, he noticed the dust still coating the floor in the leftmost corner. It looked undisturbed.

So not there either.

His roaming eyes fell again on the bed, to the sleeping shape in it, and then finally to what was next to it: a small night table, lovingly crafted.

He took in the two man’s lengths of distance and noticed a pair of warped floorboards. Those he would avoid.

Slowly the youth lowered himself back down to a crouch and carefully made his way on over.

Coming to the side of the bed Erád paused. The ferne’s face was turned away from him facing the wall and the rise and fall of her chest seemed slow and uniform. His trembling hand steadied somewhat at the realization that she was indeed still asleep. He reached for the draw, delicately pulling it open and his fingers slipped inside. After a few moments they closed around what he’d been looking for, a small leather pouch, weighted with coins, so similar in make and quality to his own that it could be its twin.

Which it may well have been.

Érad had thought himself smart earlier in the day when alongside his newly bought boots he had purchased, on a whim, a new coin pouch to keep in it the local Sureli currency, because he was tired of having the small strange coins loose in his riding pack. They had made an annoying jangling sound while he rode.

It wasn’t until they were halfway out the village when he realized he had two of his original twenty zilverpieces missing which he’d mistakenly paid part of the ferne’s price with. He could still feel the welt on the back of his head where Delryd had smacked him twice for his stupidity.

Delryd and he had thereafter kept a close watch on the leatherworker’s wife for the rest of the day, ready to run at the first sign of trouble if they heard even a squeak of alarm coming from her. Because how could a simple villager in the middle of the Sureli heartlands suddenly come into the possession of a pair of coins from a nation they were at war with?

Luckily, she didn’t seem to have taken note of it during the day.

Now it was time to fix his mistake.

Érad loosened the purse strings and felt inside on touch, his fingers gliding across smooth surfaces and against round edges of a slew of golden shavings and what felt like a handful of slivers. No large slices or even larger pieces.

Then his fingers felt something different than the rest - the uneven, almost jagged, edge of a zilvercoin.

His heart skipped a beat and he filched out the first then soon after the second, his hand closing around the both of them in an iron grip, tight enough to hurt.

Another look at the woman - yes, still asleep.

He returned the purse back in the drawer, sparing no thought of taking anything else, and then quickly turned on his heels, slyly making his way out whence he came.

There was a creak beneath his foot halfway back out the door.

The warped wood.

He stopped dead in his tracks, motionless. The creaking echoed in his ears, supplanting the silence. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned his head back around to face the bed. Had the speed of her chest changed in any way?

Érad watched for signs of strange movement. With only the Dame as his witness, he had been ready to leave things as they were, but if the ferne woke up…

With one hand still tightly gripping the zilverpieces, the other was now similarly white-knuckled, clutching the hilt of his longknife. The quiet of the night faded, replaced by the din of his heartbeat in his ears.

Please.

Please don’t wake up.

The ferne moved somewhat, causing Érad’s hackles to rise. Her sleeping form shifted slightly. Had she stirred?

Érad lingered, careful now when he wasn’t before, and waited to make sure. To make sure that if she did get up, she wouldn’t.

The fear in his heart pumped in his throat, loud enough to fill his ears. He was surprised it hadn't already woken up the sleeping ferne.

But she remained still.

After a minute of further stillness the young goat herder slinked his way back out towards the door, the prayer to the Powers that had trembled on his lips just now left unuttered. Instead he let out a breath he didn’t even realize he was holding on his path out of the house

The door was shut slowly by a pair of shaking hands, taken care not to creak.

Back outside, Érad was but one of many shadows again, one that first headed west to the windmill on the edge of the village before running his way south way down the riverbank. Half a company out past the village’s ending he spotted a crossing in the river which was shallow enough for him to wade through.

It didn’t take Erád long on the other side to find the clearing Delryd had mentioned where she had left the horses on a hill, which he saw grazing calmly nearby in the soft light of the Dame.

Delryd was waiting for him, sitting on a small boulder with her arms crossed and her hood lowered. Her short flaxen hair was dirty and disheveled, and her face looked a lot grimier than he remembered it being.

“Ha,” began Érad jokingly, “you couldn’t have found the time to give that dirty mop of yours a wash?”

“I would have,” replied Delryd in a surly tone, before pointing to a spot just behind her friend, “if he had let me.”

Before Érad had a chance to turn, his mind exploded with light and he crumpled to his knees from a blow to the back of his head. The zilverpieces he had still been clutching fell at his feet.

“Ah,” said Haran from behind him, as he picked one up.

“I was waiting for my tip.”