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Dully, Wren scanned the lane and realized both Leif and Bram had fled, though she knew they wouldn’t have gone far. The little girl remained, sitting on the cobblestones and watching Wren fight as if she were an angel.

Or a dragon, Wren mused, grinning at the girl before sliding out a blade from her cloak. She punched the guard in the gut with the pommel of her dagger, cut off his coin pouch, collected her own, and then grabbed the girl by the hand.

“We need to leave,” she urged the child, praying the little one would follow.

The girl nodded and started running alongside Wren.

“Get back here!” the guard wheezed as they rounded the first corner.

A second later, a whistle informed Wren that he’d called for backup. Her jaw clenched. The order of the Kingdom of Myths had told her a million times of the whistles that the guards kept on themselves, and yet she always forgot they carried them. Because of her oversight, they had only moments to get away.

“Where do you live, little one?” she asked the girl between heavy breaths, stumbling on slick cobblestones when they gave way to dirt as she took an educated guess and headed into the poorer district of town.

The child stared up at her with huge blue eyes, mouth slightly open as she tried to keep up with Wren’s strides. “Your hair is coming off!”

“Don’t worry about that,” Wren reassured her. “It’s a disguise.” Hopefully, it would stay put. There were enough pins in it to lock-pick a hundred doors.

“Are you a hero?”

“I savedyou, didn’t I?” Wren said, slowing to glance around the corner of an old stone building. She peered back down at the child.

The girl nodded sagely.

“Then tell me where you live so I can take you there. I can’t be a hero if I don’t return you home!”

With a trembling hand, the wee one pointed to Wren’s right. “Down there for a bit, th-then to the left. Mama isn’t doing well. She can’t work right now, which is why…” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m not a thief, I swear!”

“I understand,” she murmured, pulling the girl behind the corner of a thatched, whitewashed building. She bent low to avoid a guard she spied coming from the left, taking the moment to hug the girl against her chest. She was so skinny.Tooskinny.

“Stealing because you’re starving doesn’t make you a thief,” Wren reassured the girl, speaking the words into her filthy, straw-colored hair. “Or, at least, it wouldn’t if the world were fair. Unfortunately, our world is not fair and there are consequences to our actions.”

Wren snatched a glance to her left and right, then bolted down the next alleyway, then the next, and only just avoided running down a merchant crossing the next street with a donkey. The man fired a string of curses, but Wren merely ignored him to wind through the crowd on the busier street to find the next alleyway.

A flash of mahogany caught Wren’s attention. Abruptly she stopped running, scanning the people in front of her to better focus on who she had seen. Lean and tall, built for swimming. Close-cropped, curly hair. An easy smile prone to laughter spread across his face.

Rowen.

Her breath seized and she blinked.

But then the man Wren thought she saw—for surely she had onlythoughtshe saw him, because Britta and everyone else she’d lost were currently weighing heavily on her mind—disappeared as quickly as he had appeared, leaving only a poor imitation of her best friend haggling in the street.

It’s not him. Just another elf. Rowen is dead.

Wren shook herself when the little girl squeezed her hand. She peered down at the child.

“This is where I live,” the girl announced quietly, tugging on Wren’s wig when she didn’t respond. In reality, Wren had no idea when and how she’d left the busy street to find the cramped, filthy back alley she now stood in. Numbly, she released the girl, who lifted a sheet of dirt-creased canvas to reveal the dark entrance of a hovel.

“Mama!” the girl cried, when a woman crashed into her and held her tight.

“Lillia!” the woman exclaimed, stroking her daughter’s hair like her life depended on it. “Lillia, oh, Lillia, where did you run off to? I was so scared! You didn’t go to the market, did you? I told you not to!”

“It’s all right,” Wren said, bending to her knees so that she was level with Lillia and her mother. The woman let go of her child to stare wide-eyed at her. She had big blue eyes, like her daughter, but with dark circles beneath them. Wren held out the bag of her coins and kept the guard’s. No one would believe the family if they spent the gold, but Wren’s mixed coins would be hard to trace back to any origin.

“Take this,” she insisted. “Please use that money to feed the both of you until you’re well enough to work again.”

The woman gulped as she flitted her gaze from the heavy bag to Wren’s face and back again. Eventually, the telling growl of hunger from Lillia’s stomach made her decision for her, and she took the money.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “How can I ever repay you?” Just then, a lock of Wren’s real hair—washed clean of the brown clay used to dye it by virtue of the sweat on her scalp—tumbled free from beneath her wig. The woman’s gaze rounded. She gave Wren a thoughtful look that told Wren the woman definitely recognized her.