Since there are so many mages and mage-adjacent people in Floria, you can get common enchanted items for about half the cost you'd pay in most major cities. And, since there are so many apprentice artificers and alchemists, including Sneaks training in those subjects at the Collegium, you can get flawed items for a lot cheaper. Case in point, the new lock I'd just bought. I bought it from a Collegium Sneak who sold his leftover artificery projects, successful or not, from a little booth near the River's Run market. I bought the thing with the full understanding that it was defective.

"Just to be clear," he said, "once you arm the thing, it'll shock anybody who gets near it, whether or not you've got the key."

"Okay, that's perfect!" I said.

"And whether or not you dispel it-"

"Okay!"

He looked at me uncertainly, clearing his throat - perhaps he thought I didn't actually understand because my Perditalog wasn't quite fluent and I had a Gionian accent. "Unless you discharge it from an arm's length away…" he gestured with arms that were significantly longer than my own… "You're. Going. To. Get. Shocked."

"That's why I want it," I explained. "I have three tollos." I presented my little cache of earnings from the day's messenger work.

"Is that all you have?"

"Yep!" I lied. Even after my afternoon meal, I still had seven more thanks to my shake winnings.

That's how I became the proud owner of a thoroughly defective magical lock. Then I did one last errand job for Jospun the Smith in exchange for a long, smooth wooden stick with a nail in it, which I'd hide in my bunk and use to discharge the lock from a distance. I'd asked Mailyn whether she could discharge the lock, but she wasn't confident that she could take shocks as well as she could (occasionally, accidentally) give them, and she wasn’t especially eager to find out. So I'd be discharging the thing with a nail on a stick and pray the wood was dry enough to insulate me. Sure, the Tetrad of Terror would be able to discharge the lock the exact same way if they wanted to, but the crack of the discharge would make it pretty obvious that that's exactly what they were doing.

That night, I invigorated the lock and went to sleep, taking an extra ten or so minutes to drift off because I was so excited about the lock. To my mild disappointment, there were no attempts during the night - it seems that, even to the Tetrad of Terror, shenanigans after lights-out was a bridge too far. They probably just liked their sleep. But the next day, between classes, Thero and Nima distracted pretty ham-handedly, blocking my path back to the bunkroom and teasing me with names and slurs. During their distraction, a loud crack, followed by a yelp, followed by crying emanated from the bunkroom… followed by an apoplectic Tizzie Drake storming out.

"You!" she shouted, and it took Nate and Zev holding Tizzie back to keep her from charging at me and going to town with her big (for an eight-ish-year-old girl) fists. It turns out that poor Oltzen had made a go at picking my lock while Tizzie played lookout, and he'd learned an important lesson about stealing from Vix Altorelli: don't.

The glowglobe flicked on in the outer corridor, and bunk proctor Solomon's voice roared out: "What in the Avatar's Ashes are you delinquents up to?"

As he wrapped Oltzen's finger up, Solomon gave the boy a good talking to about the consequences of stealing other Scamps' stuff. The Sneak who sold me the lock had perhaps been understating it when he touted its 'fairly intense' electrical discharge. Oltzen had a bandage on his right index finger for most of a week and he constantly whined about how the burn salve itched and made him grow hair from his knuckles. Good!

The next day was Saintsday and the high feast of St. Lethis, for which we got a reprieve from classes… though we had to attend two holiday sermons (we attended both the Avatar and New Circle homilies)… plus an extra meal in the evening, courtesy of the Bannered Temple. We ate out along the big pavilion next to the temple, an early supper of coarse bread, watered-down wine, and a stringy hare stew in memory of the simple last meal of Lethis, Princess of the Mardites, after the Church of the New Circle sermon.

"Hey, why bother having two sermons if they're gonna say the same thing?" Nate quipped.

"It's not the same," Nima grumbled from further down the bunk.

"It's mostly the same," I said, feeling that I, as an internecine outsider, was uniquely equipped to weigh in.

"I don't listen to ignorant heathens," she stated.

In point of fact, I was increasingly far from ignorant. I was in the same Religion class as Nima and gradually outpacing her as I soaked up knowledge.

St. Lethis is an important martyr of the early church. She was a princess in the savage lands south of Old Turia in the declining days of the empire. She was beautiful and dangerous, said to be a sorceress-warrior responsible for the ascent of her father's clan until, one night, in a fever dream, she had a vision of the angel, Pheravale, who told her to travel to Gesh, else her people would be wiped from the face of the world. Lethis begged her father leave to travel to Gesh, but instead he ordered her married to his rival to unite the outer clans. Lethis fled for Gesh anyway, whereupon she met St. Albacore, whose own vision advised him of her coming.

Lethis learned at the master's feet for three years before returning to her people to spread the news of the Avatar. She returned to her people and managed to convert her father, Mardarik, now a barbarian king, who demanded to speak with Albacore himself. Desperate to secure her peoples' salvation, Mardarik and Lethis returned to Old Turia - but were stopped near the border and persecuted as heathens and outsiders and killed by defenestration after a simple last meal. To this day, Lethis is revered as the saint of outsiders and heathens converted to the faith… which would include me, I suppose, if I ever converted (unlikely). I've certainly been an outsider, though, and I like to think Lethis smiles upon me if she's capable of doing so (the Selenite faith is a bit divided on whether Avatarine saints are ever Elevated by Asuna - most scholars would say not).

"Think they could've got us something better than hare stew with all that tithe money," Aldo complained.

"The whole point is that it's a simple meal," Mailyn said. "We're lucky to get the stew at all."

This was one of those rare occasions that I sided with Aldo. "I wouldn't pay a pico for this." I slid my remaining stew - most of the bowl - over to Nate, who happily dug in.

Oltzen sneered at me from a few Scamps down the bench. "Princess Manure's too good for an actual princess's stew?"

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"I'm shocked that you even care," I said with a smirk, and I wiggled my index finger just in case he hadn't made the connection.

"Seelie snake," he spat back, and Mailyn's hand on my shoulder is all that stopped me from causing a ruckus right there on the temple pavilion.

It wouldn't have been the only brawl on St. Lethis's Feast - the city of Floria has a decidedly ambivalent relationship with religious holidays. The three high feasts (St. Sygmund's, St. Albacore's, and St. Lethis's) are treated as reverent holy days of service, reflection, and prayer. For a day, Floria manages to be the place of contemplative harmony the Saltfriar dreamt of. The day after is inevitably a city-wide extravaganza of excess and indulgence. And nobody takes the low feasts seriously at all, though church attendance is still encouraged.

It was two days after St. Lethis's feast, as the city gradually shuddered into motion after the hangover crash, that I returned to my regular messenger business. I ran the usual parcels, letters, and invoices between petty merchants and, of course, relayed citadel moves (as well as dessert recipes and bits of gossip) between Mrs. Choso and Mrs. Roost, the bookseller and stationery merchant.

"Cavalry takes catapult at F-5, capture in three moves!" I announced.

"Capture in three?!" Mrs. Choso gasped. She hurried over to her board and moved the pieces, leaving only the strategic general in her own citadel. "Oh bollocks, she's right! How did I walk into that?"

"She always wins when you do Hombare's Charge," I observed. I only knew a bit about citadel, but Mrs. Roost had observed this arrangement when formulating her last move and repeating it sounded very smart, so I did exactly that.

"Is that so?" Mrs. Choso chuckled. "You tell that old bat well-played. Oh… let me jot down my sweet corn fritter recipe, too… you aren't to look at it, do you understand?"

"I would never, Mrs. Choso!" I said, nodding dutifully. What I would even do with a sweet corn fritter recipe, I had no idea. "Um…" I twirled my fingers and pivoted on my feet. "Can I come back after?"

Mrs. Choso shot me a suspicious look before shrugging. "If you must," she sighed. I hesitated, noting the suddenly cool turn in her demeanor - I thought she liked me. More than once, she'd muttered that having me around was like having another niece. And yet now, she seemed reticent to let me sit in her shop to study from her books… which had very recently become a lot more pertinent to me…

The Tetrad of Terror had embargoed my access to the bunkhouse books. In addition to stealing all of my hard-earned books, all three of them filched right out of my locker, they'd noticed that Mailyn and I made liberal use of the bunk room's library nook, and they'd confiscated the books, all eleven of them. Others had complained, and Oltzen had stated that they were only keeping the books safe and insisted that he'd let anybody access them… well, except for five perennial troublemakers. Nate, Zev, Aldo, Mailyn, and most importantly, me. And if I couldn't study, how could I progress faster than anybody else in my classes? I suppose that was the whole point - petty retribution for bumping Tizzie Drake back to tier two in Religion. But Mrs. Choso had books on every subject I needed to study and she didn't mind me reading there…

Or so I thought. The bookseller watched me over her spectacles as I made my way out of her shop and out into the long, bustling procession of the River's Run market.

Then I was off, my little feet tapping against the sandstone tiles, the wind whipping my dress, the blue seashell beads in my braids clacking as I sprinted. My concerns melted in the glorious freedom of those few moments, racing through Floria, racing parallel to the Largotto and just enjoying the day. The Tetrad of Terror couldn't touch me.

The next day, I got a curious request near the start of the day. One of the merchants near Mrs. Roost's, apropos of nothing, asked if I could deliver a small package for him, about the size of a cigarillo box and wrapped in plain brown paper. He said he'd pay me two whole tollos, and all I had to do was deliver the package at exactly four o'clock, two hours from then. Those were pretty straightforward requirements, so I agreed, slipping the package into the back pocket of my trousers since I hadn't yet invested in a satchel. Then I was off to earn a few more tollos running more messages before the three o'clock citadel game.

When the game started, I was off to Mrs. Roost's - the stationery seller had the first move today. She opted to sally an archer out of the left flank of her citadel, the so-called Stratego's Opening of the game. I sprinted across the market, unease growing in the pit of my stomach as I approached Mrs. Choso's. I sensed that I'd done something wrong in the merchant's eyes, but I had no idea what it was…

She examined me over her spectacles for a moment, brow furrowed, before sighing pointedly and responding with a phalanx front and center (a 'Testudo Response'). She said nothing beyond the moves to convey, delivering them with flat affect despite my usual peppy politeness. Fifteen minutes later, when I returned with Mrs. Roost's response, Mrs. Choso was visibly agitated.

She wiped her spectacles on her shirt and fixed her dark eyes on me. Her dark leather shoes went tap-tap-tap on the floor. "I like to think I've treated you amiably, Vix, haven't I?"

"Yes, Mrs. Choso. Very well," I said in a small voice, retreating half a step toward the door.

"If I may ask, what did you do with the three books I gave you?"

"Um…" I said. The truth was I'd read two and a half of them - the third, a volume on the history of Perdita about a decade out of date, had been stolen by one of the Tetrad (I never found out which one it had been) before I'd had a chance to finish it. "They got stolen. But I read them mostly before that…"

"They got stolen?" She seemed to find the prospect unlikely - this, despite often remarking that thieves often go for old-looking books, hoping they'll be valuable. Mostly, like mine had been, old books are just old. "You didn't sell them?" she asked.

I gasped - perish the thought! "I wouldn't!" I said.

"Hmm…" she tapped her foot some more before advancing on me. "What's in your pocket, Vix? I can see that you've got something."

"This?" I lifted my shirt to access the package in my back pocket. I turned it over in my hands - the size of a cigarillo box and the weight of… hmm… the weight of a book. "I'm supposed to deliver this right after-"

Mrs. Choso yanked the package from my hands and tore it open with a fingernail. Yes, it was a book inside - a book on Wext-to-Gionian translation with the little green flower label from Chosen Letters, which was what Mrs. Choso called her shop. It was a book from her shop, and it had been…

"You stole from me, you scampy little beggar?" There were tears in her eyes. At least she'd called me the self-identifying epithet for young Collegium students rather than stooping to 'Seelie' like some might have. "I'm… I'm so disappointed…"

"I… I didn't," I said. "A man gave me that to deliver…"

She barked a bitter laugh. "'A man' gave you a stolen five-tollo book from my store to deliver… and you just happened to waltz into my store with it? I didn't want to believe that boy, but it seems he was right - you're the little thief who's been making off with my books…"

"No! Mrs…" Now I was tearing up, too. "I wouldn't… Mrs. Choso, I'm not a thief!"

"This is the book from right where you're always looking," she said, jabbing her finger in the direction of the bookshelf housing her several Silvia Valia adventure novels.

"Mrs. Choso, wait… it… it was the Silvia Valia…" I whined miserably.

"You can explain it to the market guards," she snapped, and she strutted to the front door to call for them - there were usually one or two within shouting distance at any given time.

Panic seized my chest, and I did the only thing I could think of in that moment: I ran. Tears still streaming down my cheeks, I dashed out of Chosen Letters with Mrs. Choso shouting after me.

"Thief! Thief!"

"Hey, you! Stop!" a guard shouted, but I was off.

If he didn't get a good look at me, I'm sure Mrs. Choso told him what I looked like: a slim seven-year-old girl with straight-ish black hair, golden brown skin, and the greenest eyes you've ever seen. There aren't a whole lot of folks like that in Floria. I was effectively exiled from the River's Run marketplace for the foreseeable future - if the guards nicked me, they'd likely rough me up and then haul me over to the Collegium to report my transgression to Mr. Vernik or Mr. Vernik. For all I knew at the time, the Collegium might have me expelled over it. What in the world had just happened?

I didn't want to believe that boy, Mrs. Choso had said. Somehow, I'd been set up, and it didn't take a genius to figure out by whom… though it sure didn't hurt.

The carrot didn't work. The switch didn't work. It was time to bloody some noses.

Metaphorically...

and possibly literally.