Page 3 of Zel (The GriMM Tales #2)

One

Twenty Winters & Nine Months Later

ZEL

“ R apunzel!” Gregor yelled, while fending off one of the unsanctioned thieves they had been contracted to stop. His sword glinted in the moonlight and meager candlelight from the windows of nearby homes. “One of the targets is getting away!”

Rapunzel . How silly to have been named after lettuce, but Zel had been born with eyes the same verdant green as its leaves, unlike either parent, and with hair as splendid as finely spun gold in the same golden hue as the plant’s stems.

“Rapunzel! Did you hear me? The target!”

He had also been born a boy.

Jolting to attention, dagger still buried in his current target’s side—avoiding vital areas, but enough to hurt and incapacitate—Zel looked to his father and finally realized that the last of their quarries had dashed past him and was running down the alley.

That man was their true target, the leader.

The rest could stand as reminders to others if they survived their wounds, but the leader had to die.

So said the Queen, who did not tolerate thieves she did not own.

These men had also killed guards when escaping capture after their thefts, like common bandits beyond the city.

They deserved to be put down. They deserved to die.

There would be chaos in the streets if the Queen’s orders weren’t heeded.

There would be curses upon anyone who stood against her, and a crossbow bolt between the eyes for anyone who defied Lothar, master of the guild that carried out her work.

“Rapunzel!” Gregor shouted again, just as he skewered his target’s shoulder, practically pinning the bandit to the wall.

While many citizens, especially in these streets, knew who served the Thieves Guild, it was still best to keep the names of any assassins from being spoken aloud.

Tonight, Gregor was clearly as anxious as Zel to have spouted his name so brazenly multiple times.

A mask covered Gregor’s face of all but his blue eyes, and he wore a hood like all members of the Thieves Guild.

If it hadn’t been up, it would have revealed flaxen hair, though more wheat colored than a match to Zel’s gold.

He was a handsome man, slight of build and naturally smooth-faced, which was lucky, for the same had been passed down to Zel.

Maybe that was its own luck, even magically so, because it meant Zel never needed to shave to keep up the lie.

No one outside of their family knew he had been born a boy. No one could ever know, not until the pact was complete, unless Zel wanted to die when he was given to the sorcerer if their ruse was discovered too soon.

The sorcerer expected a bride, and a bride he would receive.

Zel had heard the stories since he was young.

Lothar had been as furious as expected when Zel’s parents returned from the sorcerer’s tower and explained what had transpired.

Sophie, Zel’s mother, had a cut on her cheek to prove the lettuce had not been what they thought, but Lothar had still sliced her other cheek to confirm for himself that eating the lettuce had not made her immortal.

Immortality not having been stolen from him was what quelled Lothar’s rage.

He had bidden Zel’s parents to prepare for a different outcome to the sorcerer’s pact, one that would benefit them all.

They would raise their daughter to be the sorcerer’s assassin and take all the tower’s secrets and treasures for the guild.

Zel being born a boy had not changed that goal.

He needed to seduce the sorcerer enough to be kept for the entire month until he discovered a vulnerability in the sorcerer’s immortality and where it originated from, but he could not seduce the sorcerer so much that he attempted to bed Zel before their wedding night.

For many winters, Zel had been taught the ways of both seduction and the blade.

He was talented at both.

“The thief is mine!” Zel affirmed, flying past his father with a leap and crouching into a faster sprint, using speed only someone as delicately built and nimble as he could achieve.

Quickly hitting a cross-section at the end of the alleyway, Zel looked left, right, then forward again toward the main streets.

The shadows were too dark for him to discern which direction the bandit had gone, but after another scan with his sharp eyes, Zel spotted a figure escaping into a building to his left and gave chase.

Tonight’s mission was Zel’s most important.

With this kill, he would ascend to a full member of the Thieves Guild.

The guild had always been an assassins guild when the Queen demanded it—or when Lothar did.

They remained the Thieves Guild in name, but every member was trained to fight and kill, even if not everyone ended up having to.

Zel had dealt the finishing blows for seven assassinations.

Tonight would be his eighth, leaving the sorcerer as his ninth, a number of good fortune to ensure his success.

And he would succeed. He had to, or the lie he had been forced to live for twenty winters would amount to nothing but more misfortune.

The building the bandit had run into was a home, and he had locked it tight behind him.

No matter. There was a second story, and the awning over the front door gave Zel the perfect platform to climb and reach the ledge of an open window.

He ascended with ease and barely a sound on the awning when he landed or when he leapt from it for the window a moment later.

Inside there was a candle flickering, offering enough light that Zel saw when the bandit ran past the room.

Zel recognized him by the bright blue hood he wore, foolishly visible, when Zel’s outfit for such midnight prowling was all dark colors, mostly black, as was standard in the Thieves Guild, but with some deep greens, browns, and a violet cloak, adding dimension to what would otherwise be too flat a black against true shadows.

His idea, which Lothar had commended when it proved to work.

He kept his hood low to hide the golden brilliance of his hair, the winding length of it tucked beneath his cloak.

It had grown so long that it needed to be braided and further twisted around itself to avoid it dragging on the ground.

The weight alone should have caused a permanent ache in Zel’s neck, but perhaps because of his magical diet of self-named salads, he never ached at all, not there nor anywhere.

Zel never got sick. He never got injured.

No one was certain if the immortality his mother hadn’t received had somehow been bestowed upon him, but he had never suffered so much as a scratch or scuffed knee.

Whenever Sophie had attempted to cut his hair as a child, the shears had suffered for it and became blunt as they failed to give him even a trim.

But while another could not cut Zel’s hair, by the time he was six, he had learned that if the shears were in his hands, he could.

At the time, Zel had threatened to slice it all off, for it was a constant reminder, one of many, of his lot in life, but his parents had pleaded with him not to.

Not only did it aid in their subterfuge that Zel was a girl, but if anyone had learned that his hair could be cut by him, they might assume the same was true of any method of harming him.

It could have been used against them, when they had needed every advantage on their side to ensure Zel reached adulthood unscathed.

If others wondered how Zel’s face-framing fringe remained short while the rest of his hair grew exponentially, they never asked, probably assuming it was some strange part of his magic—and not that Zel occasionally gave his fringe a snip.

Silent as a slinking cat, Zel once again gave chase.

He had to stop the bandit before he harmed the owner of this home or slipped away to another.

How brazen of anyone to have left their door unlatched in this kingdom for a thief to slip in, when the fight for resources had become one of life and death.

The troubling harvests since before Zel was born had grown worse over the decades until recent seasons when it had been declared a true famine—the Great Famine.

Most people barely had one meal with fresh greens, and Zel was gifted magical lettuce daily.

It arrived like clockwork on their back stoop every afternoon, and Zel ate it as a salad with dinner.

He could hardly complain when the leaves were delicious.

What he hated was the envious looks he received from neighbors whenever they saw the lettuce arrive.

Zel remembered vividly the day a childhood bully had attempted to steal some, saying that all the warnings about instant death being the reward for anyone who ate the lettuce other than Zel were lies.

But as soon as one of the leaves touched the bully’s tongue, he’d melted into a pile of rotting flesh.

Zel would never forget that smell, but it had well prepared him to not be fazed by the sight nor scent of death.

The same had happened to one of Lothar’s guards, Zel was told, for Lothar had not believed the warnings either. He had been sensible enough to bid another to test it, and Zel’s parents had been there to witness the melting of the first flesh pile.

Slicing a throat or piecing a heart or temple with his dagger hardly affected Zel at all anymore.

And he could defend as well as sneak. His dagger-wielding hand was covered in a leather gauntlet that extended up his forearm, with several metal plates layered along the backside.

With it, he could fend off a blade aimed at him as easily as if he wielded a shield.

Creeping along the wall of the hallway, Zel heard rustling as if the bandit was rummaging through something in the next room. Stealing from some random innocents when he had already been caught in the midst of theft?