Finn and her brother turned and walked out of the armory without a word. It wasn’t until they had returned to the barracks that they broke the silence that their father so preferred.

“Have I said that I was sorry?” Finn asked hesitantly, pausing at the door to the small room they shared. Ruven was stripping off his clothing and using his dirty shirt to mop the sweat from under his arms and the small of his back.

“No need,” Ruven said shortly. “I told you, it was my fault.”

Finn fidgeted and eventually forced herself to cross the threshold and step into their room. She swung the door shut behind her and began to follow suit, stripping her own shirt off. Her chest was bound tightly, but she wouldn’t remove the linen strips until it was time to sleep. The bindings restricted her breathing, but this was another length she went to in order to avoid her father’s wrath. Her being a woman was a constant disappointment to him, but so long as she hid most of the signs of her sex, he ignored it for the most part.

“I guess by ‘serving the Queen directly’ he means that I’m going to get solo missions now?” Finn asked slowly, staring down at her leggings and trying to decide if they were dirty enough to need washing. She slapped her leg and dislodged much of the dust from the training ring. She could still feel the sweat between her thighs and behind her knees, but thought it would probably be a waste to replace them when there were so few hours left in the day.

“Hm,” Ruven grunted. Finn was learned enough in Ruven’s different grunts and hums to understand that this was one of agreement.

“How long have you been doing missions on your own?” Finn asked, yanking a loose sleeveless shirt on. It was loose enough that you could clearly see the bindings on her chest, but she was unlikely to see her father again that day and the other guards already knew she wore bindings and why.

Ruven looked up from where he had been redoing the laces on his boots and seemed to think about it. Eventually he said, “Five years, I think?”

Finn gave him a disgusted look, and Ruven shrugged in apology. Ruven was perfect in almost every way, at least in regard to what their father demanded of them. He was a genius when it came to martial arts and martial magic, he never showed any emotion and approached everything coolly and logically. In comparison, Finn was emotional, she was talkative, and she didn’t even really like fighting. She knew that her own dislike for learning the sword probably held her back to some extent, but it was still frustrating to hear how far ahead of her, Ruven always was. He was barely a year older than her.

Ruven should have been the apple of their father’s eye, but something about him always rubbed their father the wrong way. They could barely stand to spend more than a few minutes in the same room together outside of work.

Blowing out a breath and trying to let her frustration go with it, Finn plopped down on her narrow cot across from Ruven.

“What are they like?” she asked. “The missions?”

Ruven shrugged again. He had finished fixing his laces and leaned back on his bed, bracing his hands behind him. Ruven was handsome, with a long aquiline nose, a nicely shaped mouth, and high cheekbones. It was too bad that his expression was constantly stuck on ‘bland’ otherwise he might have been popular with the young fae of the court.

“They are what they are,” Ruven said eventually. “Most of them are easy, though sometimes you’ll get a ridiculous one. I suspect those are Father’s doing, though,” he added wryly.

Finn wrinkled her nose sympathetically.

“Why don’t you open the envelope and see what you got?” Ruven suggested.

Finn pulled the wrinkled envelope from her back pocket and stared at it for a moment. The paper was thick and fine, nothing like the thin transparent paper that she sometimes used to jot notes down for other guards or the uneven rough paper of the requisition forms that the armory workers used. There was a wax seal, dark red, pressed over the fold of one side, the Queen’s seal standing out in all its intimidating glory there. Reluctantly, Finn broke the seal and slid the milky white paper out from inside.

If the envelope was fine paper, the note inside was nicer. It had a marbled color, white and gray mixing delicately on the glossy fine surface. Deep red ink and flourished handwriting flowed across the single page.

Queen Titania requests that one Grirk Bloodhammer, chief of the Canary Mine Kobolds, be dispatched at once. He is charged as a traitor and found guilty by this court. His sentence is death, to be carried out as soon as possible by the Queen’s royal guard.

The note was then signed with someone else’s name. If the Queen had actually requested this man’s death, the only indication of it was her seal on the envelope. As if the Queen would seal the envelope himself. A court clerk had probably done so.

Finn held the note out to Ruven, and he reached across the small space between their beds to take the letter between two fingers. It took him only seconds to read over, and then he was passing the note back to Finn.

“Kobolds are nothing,” he said as she tucked the expensive paper back into its nice envelope and then stored it in the small locker at the foot of her bed which held all her personal belongings. “You won’t have any problem killing their chief.”

“Why are they rebelling?” Finn asked, skirting around the idea of killing a total stranger. “What do they think is going to happen? The Queen isn’t exactly benevolent,” Finn mumbled.

Ruven shrugged with his one good shoulder. “The scrimmage line between the Seelie Court and Poseidon is constantly moving back and forth. Their mine was probably one of the ones lost to the Sea Fae,” Ruven explained.

Finn was aware of the unending war that the Seelie Court was involved with against Poseidon and his kingdom. They had been at war with them almost as long as they had been at war with the Unseelie Court, and that war had been ongoing since the beginning of time, if the history books could be believed. Her father had always been quick to remind them that war was good for a kingdom. It kept people like them employed and well paid, kept the nobility busy and the peasants terrified. So long as they were at war, everyone was too preoccupied to complain about whatever the Queen did with her time and their money. Or, so their father said, anyway.

Still, she hadn’t thought about the fae living in the war zones. She would have thought that they would have had the good sense to leave by now, but she knew it probably wasn’t that easy. Regardless, she couldn’t imagine what the kobolds thought rebelling would do for them. Queen Titania had already violently put down three rebellions in the past decade.

“It seems shitty. Like, kicking someone when they’re down,” Finn mumbled, staring at her knobby knees in her washed out dirty brown leggings.

She could see Ruven tilting his head at her from her peripheral vision. She hated when he did that, like he was an owl who was trying to puzzle out exactly how to attack a mouse in the underbrush.

“It is shitty,” he said after a long pause. “But, it would be much shittier for you if you didn’t do it.”

“I know!” Finn snapped. “I didn’t say I wasn't going to do it, I just said it sucks.”

Ruven’s mouth pulled up in one corner, the closest he ever got to a smile. “Agreed. If you ever find a solution, clue me in,” he teased.

Finn rolled her eyes and stood up with a put upon sigh. “Whatever, asshole. I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.”

With that, the two of them climbed to their feet and made their way to the mess hall where they could rely on filling food, even if the flavor left something to be desired. Finn would have to get to sleep early so that she could set out that morning before the sun was up. She would stop at a store house and pick up some provisions, but otherwise she would travel light. The coast was a ways away, but Ruven was right. Even a whole clan of kobolds would be no match for her. It should be an easy job, in and out, and she could be back at the court before the week was out.