“I think,” Ishtal said, “that I should try another solo burglary.”

Lilah nearly choked on her drink. “What?” she spluttered, after a prolonged fit of coughing. “Why?”

“Well, partially because that was your reaction to the very idea,” Ishtal said dryly.

They were in the public room of the Salamander, in the corner where Ishtal usually spent her evenings watching people come and go. Things had been quiet over the past several days since the incident with Captain Alfweard, and there was even a sense of life settling into what passed for normalcy around here. The strange pride and happiness that Ishtal had discovered upon successfully evading arrest had lingered, making her stand a little taller and walk with a slight spring in her step. Most of the time, she couldn’t even put her finger on why, specifically, she was feeling so quietly happy in a given moment—she simply was. The guilt and homesickness would probably come back eventually, but in the meantime, she was determined to enjoy the good days while they lasted.

And now, she wanted to go out and do something about it. It was one thing for the contentment to stretch out while she went through the routine of pickpocketing shifts, meals, and evenings at the Salamander. She wanted to take action, to push the limits of this peace and see if it would hold.

“I want to know that I can go do something on my own, plan and carry it out, without it turning into a disaster,” she told Lilah. “I tried with the burglary before, and ended up…” She lowered her voice “…stealing from Lady Gormlaith, and we still don’t know if it’s all blown over. And then when I went out to just run a quick errand, I still managed to get into trouble, even if it all worked out all right. I just want one unqualified success to break the streak.”

Lilah pursed her lips. “There’s still the small detail of, as you pointed out, us not knowing if the trouble with the Krakens has blown over. Personally, I’m inclined to believe it hasn’t, and I know you think the same, or you wouldn’t still have Kosef walking with you most times you go out and about.”

“That’s partially because he insisted,” Ishtal muttered. “Although that’s a decent point—it’s probably still not a good idea for me to go out alone at night, is it?”

“It’d definitely be tempting fate,” Lilah agreed. “Look, I understand why you want to do this. I’d like to see you do it—your problem the last time was that you thought you had something to prove and didn’t ask for help or resources and made it as hard for yourself as possible…and you still somehow walked away.” She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “Let me think about a couple of things. I think we can find a workaround for the bodyguard issue.”

Planning a burglary in what Lilah called “not a stupid way” was a rather different process than what Ishtal had gone through before. The beginning stages didn’t seem much like planning at all; instead, they consisted of a lot of Ishtal and Lilah walking around the north side of Lozhapad in their best clothes (and in Ishtal’s case, a deep hood), trying to look as though they belonged while Lilah pointed out features of interest about different houses that they passed.

“That one’s got loose shingles,” she muttered under her breath. “See how they’re hanging right there?” Or, “The merchant who lives there’s wife is an idiot, and constantly losing things if the servants’ gossip is accurate. We could rob her blind and she’d never know.” Or, “You’d want to watch out for that one, the garden’s big enough that you can’t just jump from the neighbor’s roof.”

“Probably because they have dogs,” Ishtal mentioned, wrinkling her nose. “I can smell them.”

Lilah looked mildly impressed. “Now, see, that I might not have known. We’ve never done that one before, and it’s not like I can see over the wall. Duly noted.”

They went through several neighborhoods in this fashion, but not the two broad streets of high nobles’ houses. “Those, you want a team for,” Lilah insisted. “And by ‘team’, I mean more than just Kosef lurking nearby keeping watch for stray assassins.”

That was the compromise that had been reached, after significant discussion: Kosef would come along for the trip there and back, and would act as lookout, but Ishtal would enter the target house alone. After all, it was unlikely that Plygiant would be waiting for her in there, unless she had the enormous bad luck to somehow select the place where he lived.

“And I don’t think anybody’s luck is that bad,” Lilah had said reassuringly. Ishtal had chosen to not speculate otherwise, just in case.

Now, they speculated on possible targets and came up with a short list of potentials: places that didn’t have ridiculous levels of security, that would be relatively easy to get in and out of, that were still wealthy enough to have valuables that wouldn’t be missed, and that hadn’t been hit by a Dragon burglary in the last several months at least.

“This is the part where we bring in the gossip network,” Lilah explained, as they wrapped up their list in Ishtal’s room.

“The what now?” Ishtal was mostly familiar with gossip as neighbors trying to slander each other in passive-aggressive revenge for some imagined or petty slight, something that inevitably became a guardian’s job to break up and quell.

As it turned out, here in Lozhapad it was something rather different, and provided jobs for an entire segment of Dragons that Ishtal hadn’t met yet. Their task, apparently, was to gather information by listening to what servants on the north side complained to each other about, and watching for when people were about to go on a journey and leave their houses unguarded, and keeping track of the watch’s patrol schedule, and checking in on what the disorganized criminals of the city were up to, and a dozen other scattered tasks. They then reported this information to Madam Akiba and Mr. Trippingly and any of the other Dragons who needed it for their own work. Given Ishtal’s shortlist of houses, they could find out which would be easiest and most rewarding to hit, and what obstacles might come up.

Their report, when it came a few days later, was impressive in both scope and detail. Ishtal found herself respecting and fearing how many details of strangers’ private lives the network had been able to garner.

“That one, I think,” she said, tapping an address on her list. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“It’s your decision; you’re the one going in,” Lilah said. But she looked anyway, and said, “For what it’s worth, I agree with you.”

The only things left to do, then, were to check with Kosef to see which nights he was free, and to stop by Gerda’s for an equipment check that Lilah insisted on (“if you don’t, something will go wrong, it’s just how these things work”), and to wait.

“Ready?”

“If you are.”

“I’m not the one going in,” Kosef pointed out, which was true. Ishtal left off deflecting and took stock of herself briefly. All her equipment was prepped and where it should be, she could see her route clearly, the watch shouldn’t be anywhere near this spot for another hour, and…she was feeling good.

The light, contented, optimistic feeling hadn’t gone away yet, over the course of planning this break-in. She’d been a little afraid that it might, but she’d made herself stay relaxed and had deliberately shoved away any thoughts of Father or Arancha or anyone else from back home. This didn’t have anything to do with them. They didn’t have a say in what she did anymore. She would keep on reminding herself of that until she believed it—she refused to start in on the guilt again now that she’d managed to stop.

“I’m ready,” she concluded, and even offered Kosef a grin. “This is going to be good.”

They were on the ground, tucked into the space between two houses—Kosef was many things, but not light enough on his feet to go over rooftops the way she and Lilah did, so they’d walked “like sane people”, as he’d put it, to their destination. It was after midnight, and the city was as quiet as it ever got, with no one out on the streets to see them slip through the shadows. If there were Krakens about, they hadn’t run into any.

The house Ishtal had chosen was comfortably in the middle of the north side, a sizable but not sprawling edifice of two stories. It had a low wrought-iron fence around it, but no garden or courtyard to speak of, and was built of half-timbered gray stone. The silk merchant who lived there had taken his family on a trip to the Isole di Scampo a month ago, and would not be back for two more months; the security he’d hired in his absence would (according to Lilah) be at the ideal sweet spot of complacency, not even noticing her presence.

“Get going then.” Kosef glanced over his shoulder. “It’s a good set-up, but we don’t want to linger.”

In answer, Ishtal slipped from his side towards the fence, hauling herself up and over it easily, and made for the house. The timbers gave her an easy route up with her claws, although edging along sideways until she could reach the window she had in mind was less pleasant. The tricky part came a moment later: none of the second-story windows had sills, so she had to cling to the frame with one hand for several long seconds while she attached the harness she was wearing around her hips. She’d tested the harness multiple times, but that hadn’t yet eliminated the drop in the pit of her stomach during that first moment of trusting her weight to it entirely.

Once she’d gotten past the split-second panic of going to fall going to fall, though, she could brace herself with her feet and have her hands free to pull on gloves and pick the lock on the window. Unlike the one she’d encountered at Buchanan House, this one was clearly designed to actually keep people out—which was oddly reassuring. At least she could be reasonably sure that there wouldn’t be some kind of trap waiting for her. That there would be no alarm spells, she knew for sure: the merchant who owned the house was famously paranoid about such things, and specifically contracted security who didn’t employ magic.

A final twist, the smooth slide of metal, and—there, she was in. Ishtal eased the window open, then hauled herself inside and disengaged the harness. A glance around told her that she was right where she should be, in the merchant’s youngest daughter’s bedroom. Rumor had it that the girl was incredibly spoiled, demanding new replacements for old possessions even if the old things were still perfectly serviceable. She would never notice anything missing, and if she did, she would probably appreciate it.

Lilah’s advice ran through Ishtal’s head as she crept through the untidy room. Don’t take anything with a name or family crest or any other personalization. Gold’s always good, but don’t load up on too much of it. Mr. Trippingly’s got a good contact for fencing jade, and he mentioned that he had someone reach out to him recently about opals.

Ignoring the vanity, Ishtal crossed to the wardrobe, checking the lower drawers. The second from the bottom turned out to be a treasure trove: rings, necklaces, bracelets, and earrings had been tossed in haphazardly, and were tangled together in a fashion that suggested their owner never wanted to bother with any of them ever again.

Allow me to help you with that, Ishtal thought wryly, and began sifting through. She could only take a few things, or she would lose any hope of camouflage, but there was plenty to choose from. Within a few minutes, she’d extracted a gold filigree bracelet, a necklace of garnets and fine silver chains that was so hopelessly tangled in the bracelet that there was no leaving it behind, and a few assorted rings. There didn’t seem to be any jade, but…

There! She pounced on a pair of earrings shoved into the drawer’s back corner, pendants with tiny opals set into them.

A good haul, and now it was time to go. Ishtal squirreled the chosen items into her pockets, slid the drawer silently shut, and crept back to the window, fastening herself into the harness and easing herself out.

There was still a moment of panic at the drop, but she caught herself and braced her feet and got to work on closing and re-locking the window. Heart hammering, she detached the harness from the house, scrambled down the timbers, and raced towards the fence and over it.

It was only when she skidded to a halt in front of Kosef, a wild grin creeping onto her face, that she realized her pounding pulse wasn’t from fear or nerves, but the high of success. She’d gone in and come out and she had what she came for and nothing terrible had happened at all.

She laughed, surprising herself and, judging by his expression, Kosef as well. “Everything all right?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.

“Yes!” Ishtal made herself keep her voice to a whisper, mindful of their location and the late hour, but that didn’t muffle her delight at all. “Everything’s perfect. Nothing went wrong. I think this might be the first time since I came here that I’ve done something that went right from beginning to end.”

Kosef’s bearded face cracked into an answering smile that reminded her, for some reason, of the roaring fire in the Salamander’s common room on a chilly day. “Good,” he said quietly. “That’s good. And I’m sure it won’t be the last time, either.”

Then he sobered. “Still, we’re not quite at the end. We’d best get home before trouble finds us after all.”

Not even that could put a damper on Ishtal’s mood, but she fell into step beside him anyway. I did it I did it I did it, something inside her sang, and she felt as though her feet might not even touch the ground, and Bosgarren Herria was perhaps the furthest from her thoughts that it had ever been.