“Serves you right, you thieving imp of a girl,” Lady Brenner scolded, marching past her and snatching the stick where it lay, cradling it as one might a baby, running a soothing finger along its length. Her eyes were a molten brown now, a far cry from the green and blue hues they’d boasted the last two times she’d looked upon the woman’s face.

“What happened?” said Jereb, arriving on the scene, eyes switching every few seconds between Lady Brenner, her stick, and Perfidy, who withered under his accusatory stare.

“Isn’t it obvious, Master Jereb?” Lady Brenner said. “This whip of an urchin broke into my house—”

“The door was unlocked, ma’am,” Perfidy interjected.

“—invaded the privacy of my humble home—”

“I did see her underclothes hangin’ in her wardrobe,” Perfidy admitted.

“—and stole Erma while I slept.”

“That part is true,” Perfidy conceded. “Though I didn’t know she called the stick ‘Erma’. Whut sort o’ name is that anyway?”

“Why under Lostwood’s green canopy would you do such a thing?” Jereb asked, looking more tired than she’d ever seen him look, and she suspected it wasn’t because she’d roused him from sleep in the middle of the night. At least not only because of that.

Her eyes flicked past Jereb to Gruff, who’d stopped his mirthful laughter, his eyes locked on hers. It was so obvious now that it had all been a prank. While the stick had, in fact, turned out to be magic, it wasn’t the sort of magic where if you stole it, the thief would be granted more power. Nope, in her desperation to learn how to master her Ability, she’d fallen for his silver-tongued words hook, line and sinker. Which, in her opinion, was nobody’s fault but her own. And she wasn’t raised to be a snitch, nor to shirk responsibility for her actions, regardless of who else had encouraged her to take them.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I only wanted to see if that stick o’ yers—” She looked at Lady Brenner as she said this, the woman’s eyes narrowing in response. “—was really magic. It is, in case anyone else is wonderin’.” She forced a sheepish smile onto her face, tasting the blood from her nose on her lips.

“You could’ve just asked,” Lady Brenner said. “Now I’m going back to bed. We’ll discuss the consequences for your actions in the morning.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Perfidy said, hanging her head and inspecting her feet for something she couldn’t quite define. She only looked up again after she heard the door slam shut.