Accustomed to downcast eyes and nervous nods, Siles struggled to maintain a neutral expression as he found himself confronted by an onslaught of servants' smiles and magicians' glares. Every emotion that usually dimmed in his presence abruptly brightened without the mask, and the glare was giving him a headache.

The servant girl he had spoken to only hours before smiled and waved when she saw him, blissfully unaware of his true identity. Most of the castle's inhabitants recognized Siles' maskless face as that of the royal bookbinder, and they weren't wrong. Using the book mending skills he had learned from his mother years ago, Siles had carefully crafted a maskless identity that allowed him to both wander the castle without being recognized and among the commonfolk without being scorned.

The only detail that risked exposing him was that the 'royal bookbinder' was only active in and around the castle while the Queen's Guard was absent, but the castle's magicians didn't care to observe a lowly bookbinder's travel habits and the servants were too busy to notice.

It felt nice to be lowly – and it made more sense than masquerading as a half-magician with an undefined status. All of the magicians feared him, to an extent, but their fear stemmed more from his connection to the Queen than anything else. As the bookbinder, on the other hand, Siles' status was clear; just above the servants and far below the magicians.

Fortunately, even a status just a hair's breadth above that of the servants was enough to get him out the castle gates without any holdups. The castle guards sneered at him as he passed, one of them even tossing a pebble at him, but they couldn't do anything to him unless he gave them reason to. He wasn't about to - Siles kept his head bowed as he stepped through the marble arch, and then he was free.

Even the air outside the castle walls felt free; it was unconstrained by walls, unfiltered by the wind-magic that battled the bad smells and left the air clear and bland. Siles strolled along the streets, breathing in the smell of the bakery's rising dough, the smoke from the blacksmith's shop, the hay from the stalls where the soldiers not powerful enough to live within the castle walls kept their horses. It was one of those horses that he planned on 'borrowing,' but he would have to do so carefully.

"Bart, how are you?" Siles flashed a wide smile at the man standing guard over the horses.

Bart didn't return the smile, his caterpillar eyebrows coming together in one long bush. "What do you want?"

"Oh, that's no way to talk to an old friend. I did help you, after all." Siles maintained the smile but flicked his eyes over the stalls and the stores beside them for hidden listeners.

Bart responded with a grunt and a sigh. Siles wasn't technically blackmailing him, at least not in his opinion, but he had done the man a favor which he could easily take back. Years ago, the Queen had set her mind upon squishing one of the many flies buzzing around her head. That fly had been Bart's rebellious daughter, a girl with too much spunk and too little common sense. She had incited a riot following the Queen's decision to shut down her school and refused to publicly apologize when the soldiers broke it up.

After the Queen had inevitably demanded the girl's head, Siles as the bookbinder had convinced the soldiers that the girl staying in Bart's household was his other daughter, not the one they were looking for. This put Siles in a very fortunate position to acquire transportation, as he could easily go back on his word and allow the Queen to fulfill her wrath.

Siles continued, taking Bart's sigh as a sign of resignation, "I'll need to borrow a horse, just for a few days."

"Take mine, then. Last time I let you take one of the soldiers' horses I got in trouble."

If horses matched their masters' appearance, Bart's horse probably had droopy eyes and a grey ungroomed mane. Siles frowned. "Is yours any good?"

"Bonnie's good enough for a few days," Bart replied, the glare in his eyes daring Siles to go back on his previous estimate.

Siles didn't feel like arguing, not when the sun was shining and the air was free and the day had so much potential. So he shook on it, and Bart brought out the horse. She wasn't as well bred as the other horses in the stall, but her mane was free of grey tangles and her eyes were wide and aware. She would do.

"Thanks again, Bart. Just a few days, I promise." Siles' promises only kept themselves fifty percent of the time, but those that he didn't keep he still met halfway. A few days could become a week, but no longer.

Bonnie and Bart – their names fit together like puzzle pieces. Bonnie and Siles didn't sound so great, but the horse didn't seem to mind as she took him down the cobblestone streets. The neatly packed cobblestones quickly gave way to broken ones followed by packed dirt then a path only defined by carriage wheels, the grass sprouting freely between the two narrow rivets. The Queen didn't care to maintain anything beyond her tower view. Siles didn't mind; every one of nature's imperfections reminded him of the freedom beyond the castle walls.

The first day would be all travel, if the castle maps were accurate. So Siles tried to get as comfortable as he could on Bonnie's saddle and thought through his attack plan. With most rebellions – or potential rebellions – there was a leader and a set of lackeys who each thought of themselves as a potential runner-up if their leader were to disappear. Siles' best bet if he wanted to suppress the rebels in the long-term was to convince one of the lackeys to kill the leader in order to take his or her place. Then all he had to do was convince the others to suspect each other of killing the leader, and trick the townspeople into turning the lackeys over to the soldiers. The process would make the townspeople suspicious of anyone else who tried to present themselves as a leader, for a while at least.

Manipulation always brought a smile to his face. It was what he was good at – what had caught the Queen's attention and saved him from the bloody slaughter that always followed her soldiers' movements into territory not yet under her reign. To be fair, Siles would have preferred to decide for himself who to manipulate. The townspeople hadn't done anything that he considered particularly bad; in fact, by plotting a revolution they were doing a lot more thinking than any magician in the castle. But Siles wanted to fight the winning battle, so it was the townspeople who would face his wrath.