Thief's Cunning

  Dedication

  To my mom and dad.

  I know you always thought I’d make a good lawyer,

  but I hope this is okay instead.

  Contents

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Sarah Ahiers

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  one

  I DIDN’T FIT.

  The night moon glowed overhead, cool and soft and bright. I’d slipped off the dark roof and into the darker room through the window, but my hips had gotten wedged, and try as I might, I couldn’t pull my way through. I was stuck, half in and half out of the bedroom before me.

  I stifled a sigh and instead held my breath, waiting, listening for any movement, any sign I’d been found. Nothing. The house was silent and still.

  At least no one was around to see me in my amateur predicament.

  I twisted, using my hips to push the window up a little more. I tumbled the rest of the way into the bedroom, catching myself on my hands. I lowered my body carefully to the floor. Even the slightest bit of noise on my part would attract attention, and that would be the end of it.

  I adjusted my bone mask, decorated with raindrops, over my face. A deep breath calmed the twitching in my muscles, my fingers, the blood rushing through my veins as it begged me to spring into action.

  But this was not a time for action. This was a time of stealth.

  I slipped out of the dark bedroom and into the darker hallway, closing the door so quietly it barely clicked as it latched. My ears strained for any noise. There was nothing.

  I slid my feet across the hall floor, then gently stepped down the stairs, one after another, tiptoeing along the wall so the floorboards wouldn’t squeak beneath me.

  The common room spread before me, empty and quiet in the night. Moonlight from a single window cast beams across the dining table, motes of dust sparkling for an instant before passing from sight. Scents from the remains of dinner brushed over me—lamb, spiced with fresh herbs, and ripe summer fruit.

  My mouth watered.

  Down another flight of stairs, pausing every few moments to listen, to let my eyes unfocus, to catch any slight movements hidden in the shadows. My leathers creaked, keeping me snug in their tight embrace.

  The shop on the ground floor stood empty and still like the rest of the house. Bottles filled with perfumes and concoctions lined the shelves, and though the shop had been scrubbed clean, the faint scent of goldencones and tullie blossoms reached me.

  To anyone else, it would appear there was nowhere further to go, that I had reached the end of my travels. But I wasn’t anyone else. I was a clipper. My world was a world of secrets.

  In the back room of the shop, past the flowers and herbs hanging from the ceiling and the jarred liquids waiting to be combined for later sale, I depressed a small, concealed latch. A hidden door slid silently open.

  I crept through and closed the door tightly. Behind the hidden door of the shop was a hatch in the floor. I squatted and pulled a key from a pocket on my hip. The key fit perfectly into the lock. I twisted slowly until the lock turned over.

  The hinges of the hatch were whisper quiet. They’d been well oiled. Beneath the hatch stood a ladder, leading deeper into darkness.

  I exhaled, then stepped onto the rungs. I descended.

  My eyes had adjusted to the night, but the room at the bottom of the ladder was so dark that blindness weighed me down like the heavy stones of the building above. It would be easy to panic, to let the crushing darkness and fear overtake me. I could scramble up the ladder to the shop and the fresh air and freedom that awaited me there.

  But for once it wasn’t freedom I sought, but answers.

  And panic was for amateurs.

  A breeze of fresh air brushed across my neck. I followed it. My senses stretched and pushed into the darkness for any signal or sign.

  The room opened into a larger one. A small glow of orange light emerged from a hearth and the dying embers nestled in the embrace of the ashes. Hardly any light at all, really, but it seemed a noonday sun after the darkness at the bottom of the ladder.

  The room was rectangular, with the hearth in the middle. Before the hearth rested chairs and a short table for reading or conversing. At one end of the rectangle stood the kitchen, with a dining table. At the other end of the room weapons leaned in racks, glinting quietly in the dying firelight, their edges well honed.

  The room appeared empty.

  It lied.

  I inched forward.

  I listened.

  I watched.

  My fingers twitched at my belt, the knives waiting for me to need them.

  A blade pressed tightly against the skin of my throat. Then a breath, quiet, yet filled with arrogance and triumph all the same.

  A voice whispered in my ear, “You lose.”

  two

  I CLOSED MY EYES AND SIGHED, LIFTING MY HANDS INTO the air.

  “I thought this year would be the year.” My voice sounded loud in the dark.

  The knife vanished and my throat seemed to ache for the blade’s presence. I fought against the urge to rub my skin.

  Behind me, a lamp flared, filling the room with its muted, yellow glow.

  I turned. My uncle Les stared at me with a grin. “You’ll never be able to best me.”

  I pushed my mask to the top of my head. “One day you’ll be old, and I’ll still be young. Or younger than you, anyway, and I’ll find you before you find me.”

  He held out his arms and I sank into his hug, feeling his long arms wrapped around me.

  “That day will never come,” he teased.

  I snorted and pushed free of him.

  From the back hallway the rest of my Family appeared, carrying more lamps until the basement was filled with their merry glow.

  “Happy birthday, Allegra.” Les kissed me on the top of the head.

  “How far did I make it before you caught me?” I asked.

  “The ladder.” My aunt, Lea, set her lamp on the kitchen table near the presents that awaited me. She pulled out a chair and sat. “The rungs were sandy and your boots scraped across the metal as you came down.”

  I grimaced.

  Les waved his hand at me. “Don’t punish yourself. We only noticed because we were expecting you.”

  “Still,” I said.

  My cousin Emile took a seat across from our aunt. He’d made it all the way to the table and his presents on his birthday two years ago. Granted, he was older than me, but it still stung.

  Emile yawned and ran his fingers through his curly hair. “Let’s get this started so we can go back to bed.”

 
; I sat beside him, shoving him with my shoulder. “Only some of us had the luck not to work tonight.”

  I’d been at the same job for over a week now. The mark was holed up inside his house and I was getting tired of watching and waiting, only for nothing to happen.

  Five wrapped parcels and boxes, varying in size, rested on the table. I considered holding them, testing their weight, shaking them, maybe.

  Behind me, Les placed his hands on my shoulders. “It doesn’t matter how long you stare at them—they won’t give up their secrets, kuch nov.” Darling child, in Mornian. It was what he always called me.

  Excitement made my finger twitch. Not so much at the presents, though they certainly held an appeal. But because it was my birthday and I was officially an adult. Which meant it was finally time for some answers.

  My great-uncle Marcello took a chair across from me. “Another birthday,” he grumbled. “Don’t even see the point.”

  “You say that, Uncle,” I said. “But there are five presents on this table, which means one is from you.”

  He scowled.

  Beatricia waddled past me, belly stretched before her as she carried a tray of birthday tarts.

  “That looks heavy,” I said.

  She snorted. “I’m not so pregnant that I can’t carry a tray of tarts. Besides, look!” She balanced the tray on her stomach and I laughed.

  Faraday, our Family priest, grabbed the tray and kissed her quickly on the cheek.

  My aunt Lea hid a small yawn behind her hand. “Come, it’s time for presents and tarts.”

  I grabbed my birthday tart and bit into its flaky crust. The berries popped in my mouth with bright flavors and the sugars they’d been boiled in.

  “You’ve outdone yourself this year, Beatricia.” Emile brushed the crumbs off his shirt.

  “If there’s one thing I know, it’s food.” She patted her stomach and sank into a chair. Faraday sat on the arm beside her and clasped her hand in his. Neither Faraday nor Beatricia were clippers, but they were part of the Family and their baby would be the first born to the Saldanas in over twenty years. It was evidence that not only had the Saldanas survived the attempt to destroy them, but that they—we—were starting to thrive once more.

  Eighteen years ago, a rival Family, the Da Vias, had set fire to the Saldanas’ home. Lea had fled here, to the country of Rennes and the city of Yvain, looking for her uncle, Marcello, to help seek revenge.

  Emile wiped his mouth with his napkin and then tossed me a box. I caught it and popped the lid open. Inside was a new push dagger. I slid it into my palm and closed my fist. The blade slipped easily between my knuckles.

  “You’ve been complaining your old one is too big for your tiny hands.”

  I rolled my eyes, but not without a smile. “This one fits much better,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He nodded and leaned back in the chair.

  Marcello gave me a new pouch, the leather hand-stitched in a pattern of raindrops, like my mask.

  Faraday and Beatricia gave me a journal, the cover made of thin calfskin, and with paper pressed so fine I could barely feel the grain. Faraday’s favorite pastime was making paper, and he particularly liked to experiment with crafting it out of the myriad flowers found throughout Yvain. Those pages were splashed with color, and sometimes one could even catch a hint of fragrance from them.

  The first few pages of the journal were filled with Faraday’s neat script and a family tree for each of the nine Families.

  From my aunt Lea I expected to get another weapon. A sword, maybe, or a new stiletto. It wouldn’t be poisons, because she’d long ago accepted I would never have her skill with them. But instead she handed me a small bundle that, when opened, contained a delicate silk scarf. I held it before me and the lamplight caused the gold thread embroidery to sparkle.

  My face must have registered my surprise because she immediately offered an explanation. “Just because we’re clippers doesn’t mean we can’t own beautiful things.”

  Lea had once owned dresses and jewelry. But when the Da Vias attacked, Lea had lost everything, and everyone.

  Only Lea had escaped their knives. Well, Lea and Emile and I, but Emile had been four, and I had been a tiny infant. We grew up knowing the Da Vias had killed our parents, leaving Emile and me as orphans. Or so we were told. I had no memory of it. Of my parents. Of the things I’d lost.

  Sometimes, when Lea and I were in the market together, I would catch her staring wistfully at a particularly exquisite dress or necklace. And I knew she was remembering her home and the fashions of Lovero. I hoped one day to see them.

  “Is it all right?” Lea asked.

  I’d been staring at the scarf wordlessly. I clutched it to my chest. “I love it. Thank you.”

  “Last one.” Les handed me a box, the smallest yet. He gestured for me to open it.

  I slid off the lid, and inside rested a stone, a disc of agate with shades of blue radiating from the center, its three rings polished to a high sheen. Les’s mother’s necklace.

  His mother had been murdered when he was a small boy, and his grandfather had abandoned him on the streets of Yvain. Before that, though, Les had taken his mother’s necklace from her body. It was the only thing he had to remember his traveler life and family from before Marcello had taken him in.

  I studied him and saw what I had overlooked before: the pendant was missing from around his neck.

  I lifted the stone from the box and felt the heavy weight of it in my hands. “This was your mother’s.” My voice sounded quiet, even in the quiet room.

  “And now it’s yours. It’s meant to be worn by a woman, and I want you to have it, kuch nov. The travelers say it has old magic, though it’s certainly never done anything for me. But maybe it will bring you better luck.” He smiled.

  He wasn’t my father. Les. He wasn’t even related to me by blood, something I used to cry about as a child, especially on the days where I didn’t seem to fit in with my Family, days that multiplied the older I grew. I was too rambunctious. Too rash. Too . . . everything. It wasn’t fair to have parents who weren’t really your parents. To have people who loved you who weren’t even a part of you.

  Lea would tell me it didn’t matter. That Family comes before family in the world of clippers, but I knew she didn’t really believe that.

  But here Les had given me the only thing he had to remember his mother by, the only tie he had to the traveler child he’d once been, to remind me that maybe he wasn’t my blood, but that it didn’t matter. Anyone could be family. Anyone could fit, as long as you loved them.

  I slipped the chain over my head, and the pendant came to rest on my breastbone. It felt warm against my skin. “It’s perfect. Thank you.” My voice broke, and I couldn’t help the blush that crept up my neck.

  Emile snorted, enjoying not being the blusher for a change.

  Marcello grunted. “Did you get everything you wanted, then? Are the celebrations over so you can leave me in peace?”

  Marcello was the only one who lived in the basement safe home. Lea and Les had tried to convince him they were in a new home and he was safe if he wanted to go outside again, but he refused. He said he’d spent the last few decades living underground and he wasn’t about to change now that he was an old man.

  The rest of us lived in the actual house, above the shop where we sold herbal remedies and perfumes, something Lea excelled at because of her expertise with poisons.

  “It lends us an air of respectability,” Lea had told me when I was younger. “It’s harder for the common, and lawmen especially, to be suspicious of people who ply a trade in public view. As long as we have the shop, it will keep the lawmen’s eyes turned away from our true work.”

  Murder, our true work. We were the mortal hands of Safraella, god of death, murder, and resurrection.

  Sometimes Lea felt ashamed of the shop. She’d come from Lovero, where the common had treated her like royalty. And as the patron of Lovero, Safraella ke
pt its cities free of the angry ghosts at night, and the people rewarded the clippers by practically placing them on pedestals. No clipper in Lovero had to work outside of their holy duties.

  But the Saldana Family no longer lived in Lovero, and the rules and gods in the country of Rennes were much different. Secrecy was the only way to survive here.

  “Almost everything, Uncle,” I replied to Marcello.

  Lea leaned back in her chair. “Out with it, then. What did we miss?”

  I glanced around the table. Then I took a deep breath. “I want to know about my parents.”

  Emile groaned beside me and got up from the table to fetch a drink from the kitchen. “This again.”

  “Yes, this again,” I snapped. It was easy for him. He remembered his father, though his mother had died when he was a baby.

  But remembering a father was better than the nothing I had. All I knew was what I had been told, that my mother, a commoner, had died in childbirth. And my father, Matteo Saldana, Lea’s brother, had been killed with the rest of the Saldanas when the Da Vias had carried out their plans to destroy the first Family.

  “We’ve been over this before, Allegra,” Lea said. The exasperation practically coated her voice.

  “You never tell me anything specific,” I said. “You know more about them, you just keep it secret from me.”

  “That’s because I don’t like to talk about it,” Lea said.

  It was always the same excuse. It was painful for her to talk about the Family she’d lost, her brothers and parents and cousin who had been murdered in their home, the house that had burned to the ground, leaving Lea alone and destitute, fleeing to Yvain to search for Marcello in her quest for vengeance.

  But it wasn’t true, her excuse. Lea spoke about Emile’s father, Rafeo, all the time. If it was too painful for her to at least talk to me about my own father, Matteo, then why was she able to talk about Rafeo? They’d both been her brothers.

  “I’m an adult now,” I said. “I’m eighteen. I think it’s fair I know everything.”

  Marcello snorted at this. “No one knows everything. No one except that one, anyway”—he pointed to Lea, who ignored him—“being favored of Safraella.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean,” I said.