Squirrel’s face was pressed against her pillow, her wrist nestled in the scratchy wool was the only thing before her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered, and for a moment, she was floating, before she felt a hand clamp down on her wrist from above, a suffocating weight settling atop her.

Squirrel silently thrashed in the covers for an instant before she realized that she was alone, panting in the darkness of the room. The events of last week scratched at walls of her mind like caged animals, too fresh to be ignored, and too painful to confront directly. Every time she closed her eyes in weariness, the barriers she had place in her mind would weaken, and at the moment she lost consciousness, the pain and panic of that day would flood into her mind, sending her reeling from sleep to wakefulness.

She must have gotten some sleep though, as the morning sun streamed between the weathered beams of the ramshackle house Toren and his beggars called home. Squirrel blinked her eyes groggily and glared at the sunbeams catching the dust in the house. The sun obviously was playing tricks on her.

Squirrel, being the only woman in the group, had been given what used to be a kitchen to sleep in. Her bed was an old sturdy butcher’s table. If she pressed down through the straw, she could still feel the nail that the cook used to secure the fish’s gills. Beneath the straw mat, the old wood was dyed a deep reddish brown from years of blood and guts spilling over it.

With a weary grunt, Squirrel pushed herself off the table, hopping down to the ground. Squirrel’s worn feet ignored the cold floor as she made her way to the door, unbolting it and walking into the main room. Men in clothes that ranged from dung-covered woolen rags to piecemeal silks lay strewn about the wooden room, piled atop each other in sleep with no particular order. Squirrel picked her way through the snoring heaps and made her way to the toilet, which was a hole knocked through the nearby alley into the sewers below.

On her way back, motion caught her eye, and she spotted Toren sitting beside an iron pot, plucking clean bones out of the swirling brown water. “Where’d you get the meat?” she asked, smelling the rich broth as she approached.

“Turns out, we didn’t need as much of a bribe as I thought,” Toren said, handing another bone to a small boy beside him. Todd, he’d called him. “The Inquisitors are doing a little restructuring, and all I had to do was confuse the poor man until he gave me whatever I wanted, so I treated us to this feast.”

“And what did he say?” Squirrel asked.

“That the Inquisitors don’t have them,” Toren said, passing Todd another bone. “The royal guard swept the fairground, and since then, no one’s seen hide nor hair of the rest of your troupe. If they’re still alive, they’ll be under the palace, not in the Inquisitor’s prison.

“They’re still alive,” Finn said, his crutches clacking softly against the cobblestones as he approached, settling painfully down in front of the boiling pot. Squirrel glanced over her shoulder and saw Thom stretching through the door of the house. The pile of bodies was slowly disentangling themselves to start their day.

“How do you know?” Toren asked with brow raised as he glanced over at Finn, who scooped himself up a bowl of soup.

“Like I said,” Finn said before taking a sip of the broth. “Shortly after Reginald shoved me in the trick box, I heard the king stop them from killing him when Squirrel got away, and he told them to arrest them instead.”

“What I mean is, how do you know they’re still alive after what I can only assume was a month and a half of torture?” Toren asked. “If they knew anything they’ve most likely divulged it. Why wouldn’t the king have just-“

“They’re alive.” Squirrel said, her arms crossed. “They’re my family and they’re alive, and they need to be rescued.”

“From the dungeon beneath the palace?” Toren asked, pointing to Squirrel with a rib bone.

“Yes.” Squirrel said with finality. Toren withdrew the bone with a shrug and handed it to Todd, who cocked his head.

“What’s divulged mean?” Todd chimed in.

“To make known.” Toren said, gnawing on a bone with a bit of meat left on it.

“Damn, I never thought I’d wake up to a smell like that again.” Thom said jovially as he approached the pot. “For a second I thought my wife was still alive before I saw that the tit in my face was hairy.”

“You’re welcome,” Oliver said as he sauntered beside him.

“Thom, could you go with Todd and collect Eighteen and Fifty-three’s earnings?” Toren said as the two approached.

“Aww,” Thom said, his eyes fixed on the pot “Why me?”

“Because Oliver couldn’t hold onto cash longer’n a whore’ wink,” Todd said as he rose to his feet.

Oliver chuckled as he sat beside the stew. “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said, using Finn’s bowl to take another scoop of soup.

“You can buy yourself some breakfast with it,” Toren said.

“C’mon, brat, let’s go wash down some grilled pork with cider.” Thom said, turning away. Thom was the muscle. It was Todd’s job to help Fifty-Three carry the purse off the street, and Thom’s job to make sure it was safe.

“Damn,” Oliver muttered, taking a swig of the soup.

“So how do we get into the Royal Palace?” Squirrel asked.

“What?” Oliver said, the steaming bowl hovering in front of his lips.

“It’s getting out again with a dozen people that you need to worry about, I would think.” Toren said from his seat.”

Finn shrugged. “Palace is hooked to the sewer too. Everyone needs to shit.”

“By tubes about this big.” Toren said, making a circle with his hands. “With grates on them.”

“What?” Oliver asked again, still holding the soup as his eyes darted around the three other people sitting around the pot.

“Enough,” Squirrel said, sitting down and lifting the soup out of Oliver’s hands. “Let’s work through this problem one step at a time, starting with how we get in.” Squirrel took a sip of the soup, her gaze on Toren and Finn.

“I dunno,” Finn said with a shrug, glancing at Toren. “You’re a noble, how would you get in to the palace?”

“Well, if I were still a noble, I could walk right into the visitors area, but that’s a bit of a dead end…” Toren said, thumbing his chin with furrowed brows. After a moment, his brows raised and he glanced at Oliver. “Oliver, do you happen to know which merchants who supply the Royal palace?”

“What?” Oliver asked for a third time, the color draining from his cheeks.

*****

“We’re going to get caught,” Oliver chanted, rocking back and forth in the wagon full of grain sacks.

“Be quiet,” Squirrel said, glancing over at the hyperventilating man. “You’re not even going in with us, You’ll be fine no matter what happens.”

“Oh,” Oliver said, unwrapping his arms from his knees and sprawling out over the grain. The wagon they rode in bumped over a lump in the cobblestones and jostled them about the dark wagon, causing Squirrel to grab Toren’s arm. Toren held onto a brace for the canopy, and the two of them steadied themselves.

Oliver had the right idea, sitting down, but Squirrel found herself irritated by Toren standing above her, and so the two of them passed the journey standing like captains on the prow of a ship. Eventually the rocking came to a halt with one final lurch, and Squirrel heard the screeching of metal as the driver locked the break.

A moment later, the foreman unlatched the gate and beckoned the three of them out of the back of the wagon. He was a portly man with a thick mustache and a short temper. “Good hustle Ryan,” he said, smiling at Toren as he hopped off the back. His grin quickly soured as he directed his gaze at Squirrel and Oliver. “Get your asses moving, you other two.” Squirrel narrowed her eyes, but otherwise did as she was told. “Stage the grain while I get the delivery signed.”

The foreman trotted off, and the three of them began unloading the grain, clearing out the wagon so that the next one could take its place, giving them a head start when the doors opened.

“Caliva, these bags are heavy,” ‘Ryan’ complained, invoking the name of the god of beggars despite his brief and somewhat leisurely history as one. “People actually do this for a living?”

“Yes,” Squirrel said, tossing him a bag from the wagon, which he passed to Oliver to stack. “Hurry up, you don’t even have the hard part.”

“Oof,” Toren grunted as the bag of flour rocked him backwards.

In an hour, the wagons were unloaded, and the foreman doled out a silver coin to each of them. “Good work, Ryan,” he said, putting two extra copper in Toren’s hand. “You ever need work, you come by the Vanhaus estate and we’ll find you something more permanent.” With that, the foreman trotted up to the front of the wagon, climbing up the bench. He leaned over and hollered back at them “C’mon boys, Guard won’t let you loiter!”

“Right away, Mr. Byran,” Toren said, waving and clapping a hand on Squirrel’s shoulder. As soon as the old man looked away again, two silent illusions of Squirrel and Toren began to climb out of the palace warehouse and take their seats beside Oliver, who shied away from them nervously.

Toren and Squirrel ducked out of sight as the old man glanced over his shoulder, doing a quick head count before he lightly lashed the reigns, putting the wagon into motion. Oliver watched them fade into the distance, waving goodbye at the two of them. One of the palace guards waved back.

“Where do you find these people?” Squirrel said, watching the wagon.

“I like to think we found each other,” Toren said, pulling the sackcloth over his head to reveal the silk beneath it with a sigh. “I thought I was going to die of heatstroke. A full day of work is overrated.”

While Toren was unrolling the sleeves of his second costume, Squirrel changed into her page uniform and found her way to the door leading to the palace kitchens. The page uniform was a simple dark brown tunic with a white sash over the shoulder, and no one would look twice at any young man wearing one, especially if he seemed to be in a hurry, or waiting on someone.

In this case, that happened to be the wizard. When the coast was clear, Squirrel signaled Toren, who puffed out his chest, and strutted into the kitchen. The kitchen of the royal palace never rested, and although mid-day was comparatively slow, there were half a dozen cooks preparing soup base and bread for the evening meal.

Toren sauntered up beside a matronly woman and snatched the ladle from her hand, dipping it in the soup base and tasting it. “Needs more salt,” he said with a scowl before moving on. Toren stopped beside each and every one of the kitchen hands, offering his opinions and demands for the evening meal, keeping the hapless souls too busy scrambling to meet them to wonder why he came in the back way. Squirrel, for her part, kept her head down, and barely managed to restrain herself from dragging the arrogant wizard through the kitchen by the collar.

After they left the kitchen, they found themselves in the network of servant’s halls that spread through the palace like veins, designed to keep the lower class unseen from anyone of importance. Toren’s clothes shifted to those of a common page as they wandered aimlessly through the halls until they ran across a grizzled man in a breastplate sitting on a pile of rope, his eyes unfocused as he chewed Infera root.

“Gods be damned,” Toren said with a sigh, settling down beside the old guard. “I thought being a page would be conspiracies and running life-or-death messages, but it’s just working with and taking care of idiots.”

“Get out of here, brat,” The guard said, thumbing another precisely cut cube of the mushroom into his mouth and chewing.

“Do you know what this asshole did?”Toren said, thumbing at squirrel. “Messed up the room assignments of no less than three visiting barons, leading to a mix-up with their mistresses.I got stuck holding the keys, so naturally, they lumped me in with him, and now I gotta work with this addle-brain every day.”

A spider the size of a man’s palm stared crawling up Squirrel’s pantleg, and she leapt up with a shout, shaking her leg furiously.

“You see what I have to deal with?” Toren said with a sigh.

“He sounds like a girl,” The guard said, his eyes narrowed. “Looks like one too.”

“Born that way,” Toren said, shrugging. “Could the gods have cursed me with a worse person to work with? I think not.”

The grizzled man barked a laugh. “You think you’ve got it bad, Scora? A day in the royal Guard, and you’d be my age. I must be a saint by now.”

“Oh yeah?” Toren said provocatively. “The dumbest man in the royal guard probably pales in comparison to this one.”