When the witch finished her ministrations for the day, she went to the window and flew off as a flock of blackbirds again. No one knew where she went, and there was no way to follow her. Even Cythera could only shrug when asked. “Perhaps she goes to fetch medicinal herbs. Or maybe to spy on the city, and learn how it has changed in her absence. She has never kept counsel with me, even before Hazoth imprisoned her.”

“Milady,” Malden said, “you’ll forgive me if I say you have a strange family.”

Cythera smiled knowingly. “We can’t all come from noble lineages full of great heroes and comely ladies,” she said, glancing at Croy.

The knight was too busy to notice what she said. He was scrawling something on a parchment with a quill pen. “Here, Malden. Your prize. As promised.”

The thief took the paper he offered and studied it. When Croy had first come to him, looking for his help in freeing Cythera and Coruth, Malden’s first instinct had been to sweat the knight for gold. Then it occurred to him that Croy had something else in his possession, something of infinitely more use to him. The scrap of paper in his hand was what he had asked for in lieu of money. It was a grant of land, in the amount of one eighth part of an acre, in the northern part of the kingdom near the fortress of Helstrow. A very small piece of Croy’s ancestral lands. It named Malden as its new owner.

“Is it a pleasant spot?” Malden asked now.

“A rocky field, completely useless for cultivation. It overlooks a dismal bog, and in the summer it is swarmed with flies. May you find much happiness there.”

Malden laughed out loud, long and heartily. “Maybe I’ll never see it. It matters not. Croy, for this—for everything. I thank you.”

Cythera looked confused. “What would a thief want with a desolate patch of ground, not even large enough to put a house on?”

“Freedom,” Malden said. “With this parchment, I am a man of property. It makes me a landowner—with the full rights thereunto pertaining. I can go anywhere now. I can leave the city walls and not be enslaved. Here in Ness I can go to the moothall whenever I choose, and stand before the masters of all the guilds, and demand my right to speak. I could even go to Helstrow and request an audience with the king.”

“Do you want to do any of those things?”

“No!” Malden laughed. “None of them. But the power to do them—the right to do them—means I am no more a prisoner in the place where I was born. It means I’m free! I imagine you can appreciate that.”

“Oh, yes,” Cythera said, her eyes far away.

Malden kissed the paper. “My heart’s desire. One of them, anyway.”