For the first few weeks after that initial burglary, life settled into a routine that, if not uncomplicatedly enjoyable, was at least pleasant. Ishtal was placed on the same scheduled rotation as the rest of the Dragon thieves, and duly took her shifts of pickpocketing along her assigned streets at various times of the day or night. Although she still occasionally would get stuck in a crowd or become overwhelmed, for the most part she did well and contributed her fair share. In the absence of anything else that would do much good, Ishtal opted to be glad of this achievement, and to not think about any other potential ways to feel about it.

Accordingly, even though Lilah had probably meant it as a joke, she ended up bringing the silver coins she’d pinched to Gerda, and having her hang one of them on a necklace chain, as an odd kind of trophy. It matched the earrings from Berezi that she wore now—she’d gotten Kleev to help with the piercing—and she could fiddle with it when she had to pass through crowds that she wasn’t working. It was proving, surprisingly, to be a more effective deterrent from other people’s property than simply stuffing her hands in her pockets.

Her new schedule, once her training tapered off, left her with a significant amount of free time, which she was still figuring out how to use. In Bosgarren Herria, there had always been something that needed doing, every waking moment of the day. Here, her job only required certain specific hours of her time, there was no need to plan or prepare meals, and her smaller, unshared living space had fewer chores associated with it. It seemed like a very strange way to live, for all that her new acquaintances seemed to regard it as normal.

Lilah, perhaps in an effort to broaden her social horizons, had introduced her to some of the other Dragon thieves early on, and they seemed pleasant enough. But Ishtal quickly found that it was difficult for her to spend much time with them; the things that people would whisper about her back home would echo in her mind when she tried to socialize with them, and the scorn and dismissal juxtaposed harshly against their laughter and easy shop talk. She began making excuses whenever one or more of them approached her, and soon enough they got the idea that she wasn’t fond of company and left her alone.

This wasn’t exactly true—that she didn’t like people. It was just that she didn’t know how to be around these particular people, and it didn’t seem like the kind of problem you could ask for help with.

It ended up becoming a pastime of hers to sit off to one side in the common area of the Salamander, watching the different kinds of patrons come and go and engage in business and leisure. It seemed to her that representatives of every People came there at one time or another, as well as some individuals whom she couldn’t immediately identify—a man built like a dwarf, but with a stronger than usual flush to his skin and the faint suggestion of horn nubs, or a woman, who passed through once and never appeared again, with graceful movements that could only be elvish, but a complexion and stature to match Kleev’s.

There were, of course, no other Onena besides Ishtal herself. She still hadn’t figured out how Kleev, Tem, and Lilah seemed to know as much as they did about her kind, and didn’t know how to ask without being rude, but it didn’t seem like it was due to their having a steady stream of exiles coming through.

Marcienette joined her apparently for no reason on one such evening, perching casually on the bar stool next to her. “Anything interesting happening around here?” she inquired.

Ishtal shrugged, then asked, “Not to be rude, but…did you want something?” She hadn’t seen the woman since their initial meeting, and couldn’t remember if there was supposed to be some regular payment of dues or something for her services.

“Just some company.” Marcienette flagged down Tem, ordering a glass of ale, then turned back to Ishtal. “You looked like you could use some yourself.”

This seemed slightly suspicious, not least because Ishtal remembered both Kleev and Lilah making subtle inquiries lately about whether she’d been getting lonely, but she decided to let it be. “I don’t mind one way or another.”

“Great!” Marcienette settled more comfortably onto her stool, leaning against the bar as she surveyed the room, and after a moment gestured at a far table where two men appeared to be arguing over something. “Say, what do you think are the odds someone’ll have to break that up?”

Ishtal frowned. “I…couldn’t say. I wasn’t thinking about it.”

“Well, I’d guess that Grûl will be along to separate them within a couple of minutes.” Marcienette tilted her head. “Have you met Grûl?”

That, at least, had a definite answer, given that she’d never heard the name before. “No.”

“He does tend to keep to himself quite a bit, especially when there’s a new Dragon around—no offense.” Then, as she evidently noticed something, “Oh, yep, here he comes.”

Ishtal didn’t have to check where she was indicating—it was difficult to miss the eight-foot-tall troll, slightly hunched to not hit his head on the ceiling. He was only wearing a plain white shirt and black trousers, with no armor or weapons to indicate that he meant to be a threat, but the wooden floor still creaked alarmingly under his sandaled feet, making the two arguing men look up sharply and freeze.

The troll evidently named Grûl loomed over them for a moment, before greeting them with a low, rumbling “Evenin’.”

“Good evening,” said the bolder of the two men. “We were just, er, having a little disagreement…”

“Is you going to be nice, or is you going to go disagree somewheres else?” Grûl asked. “Or will Grûl be having to break the rules?”

The second man grabbed his companion’s arm before the other could say anything. “We’ll just be going,” he said quickly. “No need for trouble.”

“Don’t forget to pay your bill,” Grûl reminded.

The man in favor of retreating nodded rapidly, dropped a handful of coins onto the table, and scurried out, hauling his friend with him. Grûl nodded, evidently satisfied, scooped up the coins, and retreated into the back room from whence he had come.

Ishtal pondered for a moment, then hesitatingly nudged Marcienette. “What were the rules he was talking about?” she inquired.

“Oh, trolls aren’t allowed to have jobs involving violence in Lozhapad,” Marcienette explained easily. “And they face higher penalties for violent crimes as well. Supposedly it’s because their size and strength gives them an unfair advantage, but not many people will hire them for ordinary jobs, so they end up caught in the middle. Grûl needed a leg up, so Tem gave him a job as a bouncer, and if anyone tried to report him to the watch, we’d all swear up and down that he’s just here to help lift heavy things.”

“Ah.” Ishtal took a moment to fit the different bits of information—on trolls, on Grûl, on Tem, and on the rules of both the city and the Dragons—into her ever-shifting puzzle that was her understanding of how life worked here. 

“Grûl’s a sweetheart, really,” Marcienette continued, possibly misunderstanding Ishtal’s reaction. “He might have a crush on you for a while, once he meets you properly, so be nice about it if he does. He tends to like ladies who’ve had some weapons training and could probably take him in a fight, but he’s polite when we don’t reciprocate.”

Ishtal had innumerable questions about that declaration, from how someone like Marcienette was supposed to take on a troll in a fight to why in the world would a troll find both her and a human attractive, but in the end settled on, “Why are you telling me all this?”

Marcienette looked puzzled. “Because it seemed like you might need to know, and I’m trying to be friendly?”

“Yes, but why?”

The puzzlement shifted to a slight frown. “I’m friendly. It’s what I do—when I’m not lying through my teeth, but I only do that with bounty hunters and watchmen and irritating cousins. Is that a problem?”

It probably wasn’t. It just didn’t make a lot of sense. But Ishtal had the feeling she wouldn’t get very far if she tried to explain that to Marcienette, so she shrugged, and they ended up chatting in more or less companionable fashion for the rest of the evening.

She might have thought it was a one-time thing, but over the next fortnight, Marcienette joined her in the evenings more often than not, and sometimes she had Lilah with her, and once or twice Lilah brought one of the other thieves (who turned out to be easier to handle with a buffer), and Ishtal decided that she might as well accept that she was being befriended.

“I think,” Lilah said unexpectedly over breakfast one morning, “that you should try out planning your own burglary.”

Ishtal nearly choked on her water. “What? Why?”

“Any number of reasons.” Lilah gestured expansively. “I might get sick or incapacitated some time, and then someone would need to take over planning and management for a bit, so we ought to know whether you’d be any good before that happens. Plus, we can always stand to have more strategists on hand. And, not least, you might turn out to be good at it and enjoy it, and in that case, it’d be a shame if you never got the chance to find that out.”

Those were all reasonable points, Ishtal supposed. It was just that, unlike everything else she’d done so far in her brief tenure with the Dragons, this wasn’t really something she’d done before, even tangentially. She’d never been the one to plan anything or assign tasks, even when her guardian training was pronounced complete; that had always been Father.

But didn’t that mean that she ought to try even harder to do this thing Lilah was asking of her, to prove that she could?

“All right,” she nodded after a moment. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Lilah grinned approvingly and reached to clap her on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit. Now, don’t be afraid to ask me or anybody else for help if you feel like you need it. You’re good, but you’re still new around here, and there’s no shame in asking around if you need advice or information.”

“I will.”

Privately, though, Ishtal resolved that she would do no such thing. This was a test, regardless of whether Lilah had framed it as something fun to try, and she would pass with flying colors if it was the last thing she did.