A ragged, skinny girl bumped against Julia, and as Lain had taught her, she immediately put her hand on the small coinpurse riding at her belt.

  She barely felt the girl’s featherlight touch as it vanished, and before Julia could even look over her shoulder, the girl had vanished in the crowd around her.

  Next to her, Lain nodded in approval. “You’re getting better,” she commented.

  Julia flushed a little. “If you say so.”

  It was her third morning in Lowrun, and just as she had for the past two days, Lain had led Julia out for a walk in the morning hustle and bustle of one of the nearby neighborhoods. Around them, a tide of people travelled in every direction: laborers heading for the gates, warehouses and docks; tradespeople on their way to the mills and forges; children out searching for whatever work they could find for the day.

  A relative minority ignored the flow. Cutting through the current like fish were pickpockets and cutpurses, out looking for easy, distracted marks. Hawkers and peddlers shouted, like rocks crashing against the surf, for even momentary attention from the preoccupied passers-by. Beggars clung to the corners of roads like barnacles, wherever the flow of traffic caused people to build up, crying out for alms and donatives.

  Overhead, joining the flocking seabirds watching for potential prey, more young thieves looked for chances to jump on anyone separated from the crowd–and in darkened alleys, lurking as crabs, illicit vendors beckoned to those who needed an escape from the daily drudgery.

  Lain insisted that, if she wanted to truly live in Lowrun, Julia had to adjust to the ebbs and flows of the city, learn how to swim the often treacherous currents, and embrace the city’s ever-changing tides.

  Well. Perhaps that wasn’t quite how the blunt woman had described it, but the metaphor had jumped into Julia’s head early on the first day, and it had only become more present in her thoughts as the days had gone by.

  Lain also made Julia wear a coinpurse in a vulnerable place every time they went out, even if it was only filled with copper rings, the lowest denomination of coin.

  “A gifted thief can get your purse from even a secure spot,” Lain explained. “So you need to learn what it feels like when someone is trying to pick your pocket, so that you know how to keep your guard up for it.”

  As such, in the past two days, Julia had seven purses stolen off of her. In fact, she reflected as Lain led her down a tight side street towards the harbor, this was the longest she’d ever gone without losing one.

  She reached down to her purse, just to reassure herself of its presence–only for her fingers to find the thin leather of the corded belt she wore over her dress.

  “Cross it!” Julia cursed, stopping to look around to see if it had fallen off somewhere or if she had really gotten it stolen.

  Whistling cheerfully, Lain walked back to her. She held up one hand and twirling at the end of her pointer finger was… Julia’s purse.

  The thief winked.

  “H-how!” Julia asked. “You never even came within a foot of me!”

  Lain winked again. “You’ve still got plenty to learn. C’mon, I’m buying breakfast.”

  #

  “I don’t think it counts as buying breakfast when you use the money you stole from me to do so!” Julia argued.

  Lain shrugged in that casual, noncommittal way she did so frequently. “I stole it, so it's mine by right. Welcome to Lowrun, Princess.”

  Julia huffed. “I asked you to stop calling me that!”

  “Yep. I decided I wanted to keep doing it anyway.”

  Julia tried to glare at the other woman, but Lain just grinned and took a bite of her muffin.

  A few crumbs dropped down, drawing Julia’s eyes to the lines of Lain’s sleeveless shirt, pulled taut over her lean chest. Julia blushed and looked away hurriedly, burying any further complaints in a mouthful of her own muffin.

  Lain insisted that her outfit was purely functional. She wore her rich brown hair short, and even then often pulled it up under a leather band, further exposing the clean, hard lines of her neck and shoulders. She claimed that the tight shirt made it easier for her to sneak about while leaving her long, powerful arms bare. By comparison, her breeches were loose-fitting and overlarge, tied around her waist with a braided leather cord. Lain claimed both the lack of sleeves and the loose pants were to allow maximum range of motion, and that she only put on a jacket when she knew she’d have to do some hard climbing.

  Despite any claims to strict functionality, though, Julia couldn’t deny a certain appeal to the outfit. On another woman, it might’ve looked lumpish and masculine, but on Lain, it seemed to somehow emphasize the woman’s fit body.

  The morning tide, as Julia thought of it, had finally abated, the majority of people finding their way to their destinations and settling in for another day of hard work. With them went the assorted rogues and outlaws that had gathered to prey on them. While the streets of Lowrun were never truly empty, even in the dead of night, only a few stragglers were moving about anymore, many of them with the same independent air and confidence as Lain. The thief even went so far as to trade the occasional nod with some of them.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Lain tilted her head towards Julia. “I’d sure hope so,” she replied. “It’s gonna be a pain teaching you anything otherwise.”

  Julia flushed a little, the woman’s light teasing, as always, drawing a faint glow of embarrassment to her face. “You talk about being a freehand, right?”

  Lain nodded. “You and me both. Or at least, that’s the plan.”

  “Right,” Julia said, “but… I’m still not really sure what that means?”

  Lain paused, considering that, and took another bite of her muffin. “Alright,” she finally said. “Come on. I’ll explain.”

  #

  Lain guided them to a well square, one Julia hadn’t been to before. It was a surprisingly spacious crossroads in the usual cramped confines of Lowrun, and Julia suspected that, in Highwalk, it would’ve been cultivated as a little park, if not bought and turned into a pavilion by a teahouse.

  In the center was a simple stone fountain, water emerging in a lazy trickle from four separate spigots. At the cardinal directions around the fountain were four wells, each with a couple buckets tied to them. Despite the early hour and how many of Lowrun’s people were working, the wells still had a line of a dozen people each.

  Lain gestured to a small stone bench at one side of the square, and the two took a seat there.

  “Can you give me a parchment and pen?” Lain asked.

  “Oh! Yeah, of course!”

  [Scribe’s Tools] - Active, Conjuration, Utility - Conjure a limited variety of supplies, including parchment, ink, charcoal, and pens. One hour cooldown between uses.

  The magic of Julia’s gift jumped easily and instinctively to her command, and after a brief moment, Julia passed her guide a hardback board with a few pieces of parchment bound to it, as well as a fresh-dipped pen.

  “Thanks,” Lain said, putting the pen to parchment. For a moment, Julia thought the thief was about to write a note or letter of some kind, but no, Lain simply drew a series of three circles, arranged in a triangle, a small amount of space between each of them.

  “A lot of people like to think of Emeston like this,” Lain explained. She pointed at the bottom left circle. “There’s three distinct groups of people–the civilians, the straights just trying to get by and make a living,” she slid the pen to the topmost circle, “the merchants uphill that make the whole city work,” she pointed to the last circle, “and the criminal element that feeds on both of them.

  “But it’s not that simple, and there’s more overlap than anyone really wants to admit.” Lain drew another circle, this one overlapping with the two on the bottom of her little diagram. “There’s the people I call revellers–laborers and commonfolk who don’t use their money for their family, or improving their life, or any of that. They do their work, then spend their wages on drinking or whoring or gambling or whatever their vice is. They’re not quite outlaws or criminals, but without them, half the entertainment districts in Lowrun would collapse.”

  Julia frowned, but nodded along with the explanation, her mind going back to the man who had accosted her on that first night in Lowrun, to loud crowds cheering and shouting in the bars.

  Lain added another circle, the one connecting the civilian circle to the merchants. “Then there’s the artisans and craftspeople–trade-gifted who, by themselves, are not quite a member of the Highwalk elite, but whose goods are then sold to the merchant syndicates.” Another circle, this time between the merchants and the criminals. “And the fences and smugglers and such–the middlemen that move contraband for the goldshits.”

  “We’ve gotten a little far afield from my original question,” Julia said.

  “We have and we haven’t,” Lain explained. One last circle filled in the middle of the diagram, overlapping between the other six circles all at once. “Freehands are the ones who don’t quite fit into any of the other categories. Some of us are thieves, like me, or mercenaries, assassins, seablades, other battle-gifted for hire. Others are trade-gifted, skilled independent scholars and craftspeople who practice their trades outside of the normal systems. Burnt-out wardens, self-righteous adventurers, quiet loners… Everyone that doesn’t fit into the criminal factions of Lowrun’s underworld, but is part of the system anyway.”

  “Freehands…” Julia repeated. “And that’s your plan for me. To be a freehand scribe.”

  “Exactly,” Lain confirmed with a nod. “There’s plenty of businesses down here that I’m sure could use the services of a Highwalk-trained coin-counter.”

  Julia blushed a little. “I… I don't know about all that,” she said. “My father never thought very highly of my talent with numbers.”

  Lain shrugged easily. “Good thing we’re not going to him for work then, yeah?” The thief grinned, and she shifted, putting some of her weight against Julia’s side. “We’ll figure it out. If this doesn’t work, we’ll find you something else.”

  #

  That afternoon found the two women aimlessly wandering the streets of Lowrun once again, immersed in the lunchtime crowds. But rather than the cresting wave of people around her, Julia found her attention fixated on the enigma that was her guide.

  Lain was… different than she expected. Her books always portrayed rogues as charming, rakish figures, as quick with their tongues as their hands. That wasn’t Lain, though. She was a cynical, blunt woman, even her teasing jokes relatively straight-forward, particularly in comparison to the subtle sniping of Highwalk socialites.

  Yet at the same time, she was stunningly intelligent. Though uneducated, the woman showed all the signs of a powerful, thoughtful mind, perpetually considering the things around her in a way that seemed foreign to most of her peers. While she never expressed it directly, her words showed that she held a quiet disdain for the systems of Lowrun–yet she showed a profound understanding of those same systems, a mind for economics and connections and relationships that beggared many of Julia’s tutors.

  And then there were her gifts. Those remained a mystery, one the woman had dodged answering at every opportunity. Julia was sure that Lain’s brands–the physical marks left by a gift–were visible, but they were obscured by the assortment of tattoos inked into her arms. There was an open hand on her right bicep, drawn in the thick black lines of a brand, that could be the brand of a thief–but the same could be said of the cloak wrapped around crossed daggers shrouded in the bend of her elbow, or the scarred eye on her left shoulder.

  The winding black vines and leaves that stretched down her right forearm could be a brand of thorns, or blooms, or wood, but then, the rippling patterns along her left bicep could be a gift of water or one from the Sailor.

  They were all so beautiful, so intricate, moving with a life of their own as the muscles underneath them slid with liquid grace. They may have all been inked in the same matte black, but together they formed a work of art that made Julia’s fingertips itch with the desire to trace them.

  Lain was a mystery, perhaps, but Julia still found herself trusting the stoic thief–to say nothing of the other feelings swirling in her chest, crackling with a heat that dwarfed that marring her left leg.

  At the end of the day, she had to admit that her own feelings were a mystery greater than any surrounding her guide.