“That one,” I whispered to the grubby-faced boy beside me. “You see? The one with the beer gut? He's half asleep, an easy mark.”

We stared across the crowd to the cluster of guards following the smartly dressed royal steward as he went door to door through the richest part of Lakehaven—capital city of Teich—delivering invitations to the most eligible women in the kingdom.

“Are you sure now is the best time to be doing this?” my companion asked with a tremor in his voice. “Surely with the Trials about to start, everyone will be on high alert?”

I rolled my eyes and turned to glare at him. “That's exactly why now is the best time. Look at them all, acting like it's Frogs’ Feast or something. Trust me, Flick, they aren't focusing on two unassuming kids who have wandered too far from the Pond.”

My charge, Flick, screwed up his dirty nose as he inspected me. “You're not exactly a kid, Rybet. If those guards caught you, you'd be tried as an adult now that you're eighteen.”

I gave him a bitter smile and chuckled. “So would you, kid. The royals don't give a shit about us dwellers. We've seen loads of Pond kids hung for bullshit crimes, and at well younger than eighteen, too.” He blanched white under his freckles, and I cuffed him around the head. “So, don't get caught, okay? Master Bloodeye and I have invested far too much time and money into you to see you hang now.”

If anything, this only made him look more like he was going to vomit, and I sighed heavily.

“Look,” I offered. “Do you want me to go first and show you how easy it is?”

He nodded frantically, his dirty-blond hair flopping in his eyes and making him need to push it away again so he could see me. “What will you take from him?”

Turning my attention back to the guards following the steward, I considered what they were carrying that might make a target both easy enough to take without being caught and hard enough that Flick could prove he was ready to go out alone.

Our boss, Master Bloodeye, was no amateur. He took in orphans of The Pond, gave us a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and food in their bellies. In exchange, we stole for him and contributed to making him the unofficial ruler of The Pond.

Once upon a time—though really not all that long ago—the area we lived in had been the richest part of Lakehaven, with marble streets, sprawling mansions and technology for the Teichian nobles. That was before our deities had tried to kill us all with the Age of Darkness. Before the years of droughts that took away our water and then storms that plunged us into four years of darkness and rain.

Before the plague that followed.

I shuddered at the memory of bloated corpses lining the streets. Corpses I’d robbed at Master Bloodeye’s orders.

Now, that once-wealthy area of the city was a relic, a painful reminder to us all not to piss off our gods.

Streets that had once been walked by women dripping in gold and jewels, escorted by their wealthy husbands and fathers, now lay under a foot of murky water. Technological advancements that the nobles had been first to access were now doorstops and washing lines. Technically, that area of town was supposed to be off limits. The buildings were too damaged to be safe, and the water seemed impossible to drain.

Technicalities never mattered much when you had nothing and no one.

It had taken no time at all for those abandoned mansions to become the new homes for those of us without one of our own... and so The Pond came to be. Our very own waterlogged slum bordering the palace grounds.

“That,” I announced, spotting my target. We'd been trailing along the street some distance back from the royal emissaries but keeping them within sight. As they approached each house, one of the guards would withdraw a tightly rolled invitation from his jacket and hand it to the steward, who would then present it to the household.

It was a huge to-do. The girls would come rushing out to receive their invitations and gush and cry as though they had no idea they'd be getting one. All within view of the street, of course. What good would it do to be chosen by the palace and not rub their neighbors’ faces in it? It took ages too; in the time we had observed them, only three invitations had been successfully delivered. No wonder Tubby looked half asleep.

“The invitations?” Flick squeaked in surprise.

“Yup,” I nodded. “See how they all keep them in their left, inside breast pocket? Tubby over there at the back hasn't taken any out, but you can see he has some from the way his coat sticks out a little on that side. He's also only bothered to fasten two buttons, so it should be a cinch to slip a little hand like yours in there and snag one.”

Flick chewed at his lip in nervous anticipation. He was usually pretty confident every other time I had taken him out, so his anxiousness was out of character.

“Hey, I'm going first remember? I'll show you exactly how to do it. Follow me and repeat what I do; you can't go wrong. Okay?” I bopped him on the head and tucked a stray piece of my own straw-blonde hair behind my ear.

“Okay,” he nodded. “Let's do this.”

“Remember, watch me closely. I will meet you at the Pig and Ferret when you're done, yes?” I eyed him sternly to make sure he understood. It was protocol to split up once you'd made a snatch-and-run, that way if you got caught you weren't dragging your partner down with you.

Not that I did this sort of work much anymore. Pickpocketing was for the children, like Flick. He was barely twelve but old enough to earn his keep and pay back his debt to Master Bloodeye.

He gave me a nod of encouragement, and I melted into the crowd. It took me less than two minutes to reach my mark, divest him of one scroll, and then slip back into the excited spectators. Then again, I was one of the best. At age eighteen, I'd already gained quite the reputation for myself in Teich. I was the notorious Rybet, protégé and suspected favorite of Master Bloodeye.

It was no mistake my name sounded like the noise a frog made. Technically, it wasn't my name, it was a nickname given to me at age five when Master Bloodeye saw how easily I could slip in and out of buildings and crowds unnoticed... slippery like a frog. I had no idea what my real name was, since he’d found me as a four-year-old, wandering the streets during the Darkness with no memory of my name or my parents. It wasn’t uncommon, though. Years of drought, followed by such severe storms, had an impact on lots of people’s mental health.

The guardsman had barely even blinked when my hand slipped inside his coat, lifted the rolled-up piece of parchment out, and slipped it up my own sleeve. That was the benefit to having so many people around, for sure.

When I had made it farther down the street, I glanced over my shoulder to ensure Flick was doing as instructed, repeating exactly what I'd just done.

Our meeting point, the Pig and Ferret, was only a few hundred yards away, but I needed to keep an eye on him to make sure he wasn't cocking it all up. I tracked him with my gaze as he made his way through the crowd and approached the same tubby guardsman, who was yawning heavily.

Flick's back blocked his hand from sight, but I knew he'd be making the transfer from the guard’s pocket to his own sleeve, and then... I released the nervous breath I had been holding as Flick moved away. The guard was none the wiser.

Good boy!

Letting the tension drop from my shoulders, I turned my back on him to hurry my ass along to the Pig and Ferret, so he wouldn't know I’d stayed to watch. I wanted the kid to think I trusted him to do it all on his own.

Just as I laid my hand on the heavy wooden door of the inn, a commotion broke out in the street behind me. Dread pooled in my belly, and I turned to see what was causing such a fuss.

“Aana's tits,” I cursed, ignoring the gasp of shock from a passerby as I rushed back into the crowd. As if I was the only one to curse using the names of our deities.

I still needed to get closer to see what was going on, but when I did, my heart lurched.

Flick... his wrist was held firm by that same overweight palace guard and the stolen invitation brandished in his panic-stricken face. Shit! How?

It didn't matter how, though. I needed to get him free of those guards or he stood no chance. The palace didn't care if he was only a kid. He was a Pond dweller, and they saw it as their civic duty to cull our numbers any way they could.

“Flick!” I yelled, pushing forward faster, only to be grabbed from behind by an arm like steel and dragged into a dark alleyway between two ostentatious mansions.

The fight-or-flight instinct was a powerful thing, and I had both. Thrashing hard, I threw elbows and heels into my captor to try and release his hold on me, but he didn't for a moment waiver. His arms held me firm against a strong body, and a large hand clamped down over my mouth before I could scream.

“Stop it!” he hissed in my ear. “Stop fighting, boy! Does your life mean so little to you that you'd throw it away to save a Pond orphan?”

Of course not, you idiot!

I wanted to scream the words at him, but it would be too hard to explain that I had no intention of being caught... simply of giving Flick time to get away. He’d called me boy, though, which was good.

“You caught a live one,” another man chuckled, as if I wasn't already far outweighed by the first one. I didn't stand a chance against two grown men in hand-to-hand combat. The last thing I needed was to fight off a rape at a time like this.

There weren't many girls in my line of work. When you grew up in the slums, there was really only one career choice for a pretty girl. Whoring. That had never sat well with me, and thankfully Bloodeye had seen talents beyond the income I might earn on my back with my legs in the air.

I pretty much lived in “boys” clothes—a loose shirt and leather breeches with an oversized tunic to hide my womanly curves. It had clearly been too much to ask of Aana, our Goddess of Fortune, to bless me with a boyish frame. Thankfully, this guy seemed too distracted to notice as he restrained me.

“It's too late for him,” the man snapped in my ear, and I got the distinct feeling he thought he was saving me. “They've caught him red-handed. There's nothing you can do now.”

Sure enough, the palace guardsmen were already binding Flick's wrists and throwing him over the front of a horse to be taken to the royal dungeons. It was a crime to steal in Lakehaven. Hell, it was a crime to steal anywhere in the Kingdom of Teich, but it was a whole other thing to steal from the royals themselves.

As the smug guard rode away with my little friend, the man's grip loosened on my face, but not from around my waist.

“You can thank me now, kid,” he muttered sarcastically. “I just saved your life.”

“You can let me go now, letch,” I sneered back at him, pitching my voice a little lower than a girl’s and peering down at the hand still clamped firm across my abdomen. Any higher and he would have felt the evidence that I was most assuredly not a boy.

A gold ring on his pinky finger gave me pause, and I leaned a little closer to make out the crest. Then gasped in horror.

“Your Highness,” I breathed with dread and revulsion. I'd just tried to kick one of the royal princes in the balls with my heel...

“Shit,” the man—prince—holding me cursed, and the other man groaned.

“Seriously? You forgot to take off your ring? I'm never letting you sneak out with me again, big brother.” The second man sounded exasperated, but also a touch amused.

I just wanted to get the hell away from them. Big brother meant that this was another of the crown princes!

“Please, Your Highness,” I whispered, “Let me go; I swear I won't tell a soul that you're here in the city.”

The one holding me released his grip abruptly, and I stumbled forward a few steps, letting my hood fall further over my face to hide my features.

“Go, then,” he snapped. “But we were never here.”

Nodding as frantically as I could without displacing my hood, I kept my gaze firmly on the ground to avoid any further insult as I sketched a shaking bow and backed out of the alleyway. As I reached the crowd, I couldn't help myself... I glanced back into the shadows to get a look at the princes.

Could anyone blame me? No commoner had ever laid eyes on our princes in over ten years. Not since they'd ended the plague by summoning hundreds of drachen—a magical creature that was a small variety of dragon but looked a lot like a frog. The drachen had swept through the land, devouring the insects that carried and spread the plague, and within a year, it was extinct. The princes had barely been teenagers at the time but had just come into their magic and found a way to help the people where their parents had failed.

Typical of my luck, though, all I could see in the shadows were three sets of men's boots, and a ripple of fear ran through me. Three. All three princes were just within breathing distance of me... and I'd walked away with my life.

The notorious Rybet Waise didn't rise to such heights of crime in such a short time on luck alone, though. No, I had a natural instinct toward danger. Premonition, Bloodeye liked to call it, but I preferred “instinct.” After all, none but the royals had possessed any magic since the last queen was murdered.

My instincts, the ones I’d trusted all my life to keep me alive, told me that this wouldn't be the last time I'd encounter the three mysterious princes of Teich.