When lessons were over and the bell rang, he got ready to shoot out the door with the rest, but before he could, he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, holding him in his seat.

Beel. He must have noticed something was different. Skif’s stomach knotted, and his heart sank. He was in trouble, he must be—and for once, he didn’t know why, or for what reason. And that made it worse.

“You can all go—” said Beel, whose hand, indeed, it was—but Beel’s hand kept Skif pinned where he was.

Only when the room had emptied did Beel remove his hand from Skif’s shoulder, and the young priest came around in front of him to stand looking down at him soberly.

“Skif—do you do work at the tavern in the afternoons?” Beel asked, a peculiarly strained expression on his face.

What?

Skif hesitated. If he told the truth, surely Beel would tell his father that Skif was a regular at playing truant from the Hollybush, and he would be in trouble. But if he didn’t—Beel was a priest, and might be able to tell, and he would be in worse trouble.

But Beel didn’t wait for him to make up his mind about his answer. “I want you to do something for me, Skif,” he said urgently, his eyes full of some emotion Skif couldn’t recognize. “I want you to promise me that today you won’t go near the tavern from the time lessons let out until the time darkness falls.”

The look Skif wore on his face must have been funny, since Beel smiled thinly. “I can’t tell you why, Skif, but I hope that you can at least trust the priest if you can’t trust your cousin. My father . . . is not as clever as he thinks he is. Someone is angry, angry at him, and angry at Kalchan. I think, unless he can be persuaded to curb his anger, that he is going to act this afternoon. You have nothing to do with all this, and you do not deserve to be caught in the middle.”

And with those astonishing words, Beel turned and left, as he always did, as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever transpired between them.

After a moment, Skif shook off his astonishment and slowly left the building. Once out in the sunlight, he decided that whatever Beel was hinting at didn’t really matter, because he had no notion of going back to the tavern during the day anyway. He was going to meet Deek, and get his first lessons in the fine art of thievery!

Deek wasn’t lurking anywhere on the way to the building where Bazie’s “laundry” was, but Skif remembered the way back to Bazie’s, including the secret passages, perfectly. He suspected that this was his first test, and when he rapped on the door in an approximation of Deek’s knock, it was Deek himself who opened it with a grin.

“I tol’ ye ‘e’d ’member!” Deek crowed, drawing Skif inside.