Chapter 9: Cricket

Rule the ninth: never recruit a thief who steals from you. Recruit the one who gets caught.

A hand slipped into my coat on the third morning after I said yes to Crispin.

The Copper Market was thick with the press of early trade — fish-carts delayed by the storm, merchants shouting over each other, the kind of crowd that parted and closed like water around a stone. The hand was small and quick and found my purse before I felt the weight of it leaving my belt. By the time I turned, the thief was three bodies away and moving like a current through the gaps.

I followed. Not because I needed the purse — Crispin had advanced me operating funds, and the purse held nothing but a few copper pennies and a receipt I had already copied — but because the theft was good. It was very good. In a crowd that thick, most pickpockets worked in pairs, one to distract and one to lift. This one worked alone, using the natural rhythm of the market as cover, timing each step to the sway of the crowd so that no single movement looked out of place. I had been cheating at cards since I was eight, and I knew craft when I saw it.

Three streets later, in an alley behind a chandler's that smelled of rendered tallow, I caught up. The thief had stopped to examine the purse — a mistake, but an instructive one. A professional would have kept moving until the pursuer gave up or the crowd thinned past the point of pursuit. This one was curious. Curiosity was a better quality in a crewmate than professionalism, and easier to shape.

"Empty," she said, without turning around. "Three coppers and a receipt for something you didn't buy. You're as broke as I am."

She turned. She was younger than I had expected — early twenties, wiry, with a face that had been sharpened by too many winters and not enough meals. Her hair was dark and cut short, practical for roof-work, and her hands were still, the purse dangling from two fingers like an offering she was already tired of holding.

"The receipt is for a scut-work fee I paid last week," I said. "The purse is calfskin. You could get three silver for it if you knew the right fence."

"I know the right fence." She tossed the purse back. I caught it. "You followed me three streets. Most marks give up after one. What do you want?"

"To offer you a job."

She laughed. It was not a cruel laugh — it was the laugh of a woman who'd fielded too many alleyway propositions, the kind delivered by men who thought a job meant one thing and one thing only. "I don't do that kind of work."

"Neither do I. I do burglary."

The laugh stopped. Something behind her eyes recalibrated — not trust, not yet, but the suspension of the assumption that I was just another mark with just another offer. She looked at me the way I had looked at Crispin across the card table: weighing the threat, measuring the opportunity, calculating whether the person in front of her was a trap or a door.

"Burglary," she said. "What kind of burglary?"

"The kind that gets you out of Tingis and up."

---

Her name was Agnes, but everyone called her Cricket. She had been called Cricket since she was nine, when a second-storey man named Farro found her sleeping in a crawlspace above a counting-house and said she reminded him of the noise in the walls. Farro was dead now — a fall, three winters ago, ice on the tiles of the harbor guildhall — and Cricket had been working alone ever since.

"I'm done with street theft," she said. We were sitting on the chandler's roof, legs dangling over the edge, the market spread out below us in a chaos of canvas and voices. She had led me up here without asking if I could climb — a test, which I had passed. "Everything shiny goes up the mountain. Every purse I lift, every window I crack, every coin I pry out of a merchant's lockbox — it all ends up in the same place. The tithe takes it. The dragons sleep on it. I'm stealing from people who've already been stolen from, and I'm tired of it."

"So leave."

"Leave and go where? The north is cold and the south is lizardmen and the east is ocean. Tingis is the only city on the peninsula that has work for people like me, and the work is picking pockets until my fingers give out or the watch catches up." She kicked a loose tile with her heel, watched it spin into the alley below. "I want something bigger. Something with scale. A heist worth telling someone about when I'm old and my hands don't work anymore."

"Have you ever done burglary?"

"I've done everything. Roof-work, window-work, lock-work, foot-work. I can climb a wall that doesn't have handholds. I can pick a lock in the dark. I can walk a ledge in a storm and not look down." She turned to face me. "What are we stealing?"

I told her.

I told her about Greywave, the wave-patterned blade on the mountain's middle tier. I told her about the tribute rite and the mountain that emptied of wings. I told her about the sea caves and the flooded passageway, the lizardman watch-post and the sleeping dragon, the hoard that had never been counted and the bone that would pay for a journeyman's test and the fee that would set us both up for the rest of our lives. I told her everything, because a crew that does not know the whole plan cannot improvise when the plan breaks, and plans always break.

When I finished, she let the silence stretch. The market noise rose and fell below us. A gull wheeled overhead and screamed.

"You're insane," she said.

"Probably."

"How many people have you told about this?"

"One. A fixer who works for the client. He's providing the boat and the navigation."

"And the rest of the crew?"

"I'm recruiting them now. You're the first."

She grinned. The grin transformed her face — took it from sharp and wary to something younger, brighter, the look of a spirit whose entire life had been a vigil for a chance this large, now spoken aloud.

"I'm in," she said. "I'm so in. When do we start?"

---

We started with reconnaissance.

The pawnshop on Copper Street was our first target. Not because we intended to rob it — not yet — but because it was the kind of place where a crew learned to work together. Inconsequential enough that failure cost nothing. Difficult enough that success meant something.

"You see that window?" Cricket pointed to a second-storey casement above the sign with the three cracked scales. "The lock is a pin-tumbler, probably dwarven. I can have it open in forty seconds. Faster if you give me a distraction."

"What kind of distraction?"

"A dropped crate. A loose horse. Someone shouting 'watch' on the next street over. Anything that pulls eyes toward the street and away from the window."

"And once you're inside?"

"I case the shop. Identify the strongbox, the alarm wires, the exits. If there's something worth lifting, I lift it. If there's not, I leave everything where I found it and climb back out. The owner inventories in the morning and doesn't notice anything missing."

I nodded. Her methodology was clean — cleaner than mine, in some ways. I had learned theft as a card trick, misdirection and timing and the manipulation of where eyes naturally fell. She had learned it as architecture — a structure was a lock, a street was a sight-line, a city was a series of rooftops and ledges. Her world was vertical in a way mine had never been.

We were passing beneath a windowsill on the way back when her hand moved.

It was barely a movement — a flicker of fingers, a twitch toward a copper coin that sat on the sill next to a pot of dead herbs. The coin was nothing. A half-penny, tarnished, forgotten. Cricket's hand reached for it the way a dog's ear flicks at a sound — automatic, unthinking, the reflex of a lifetime of taking anything that wasn't nailed down.

"We're not here for that," I said.

Her hand stopped. She looked at the coin, at her fingers, at me. The grin flickered back.

"Habit," she said.

"Break it. When we're on the mountain, there's nothing in that hoard we can afford to touch except the sword. One pocket of loose coin, one ring off a dead man's finger, and the whole job goes up. Understood?"

"Understood." She pulled her hand back and tucked it into her belt. "No loose coin. No dead men's rings. Nothing but the sword."

She meant it. I believed her. But I had seen the twitch, and I had been cheating at cards long enough to know that a reflex was not a decision. You could mean something with your whole mind and your hands would still do what they had been trained to do, and Cricket had been training her hands since she was nine.

I filed the observation alongside the tide-charts and the tithe schedule and the ledger entry for that tier. The crew was forming. The plan was taking shape. And the small dangerous things — the twitches, the habits, the reflexes that would not be reasoned with — were already beginning to surface.

---

We spent the next three days on the rooftops.

Cricket taught me to read a structure the way she read it — not as masonry but as a route. A drainpipe was a ladder. A cornice was a ledge. A gap between two roofs was either a jump or a fall, and the difference depended on the wind and the surface and whether you committed before your brain had time to calculate the distance. I was not as good at it as she was. I was not supposed to be. But I learned enough to understand what she could do, and understanding what your crew can do is the first principle of planning.

She asked me about the Palace. I told her about the three colleges and the bought seat and the grandfather whose name had died with him. She asked me about the card games, and I showed her the second deal and the cold deck and the pinch, and she picked up the pinch in an hour and the cold deck by the end of the day.

"You've been wasting your talent on students," she said, shuffling the marked deck with hands that were already faster than mine. "We're going to rob a dragon. That's a better use of your skills."

"Is that why you said yes? The dragon?"

She turned it over. Below us, the harbor was grey and flat, the strait invisible beyond the headlands. The mountain rose behind the city like a wall at the end of the world.

"I said yes because you're the first person who's ever offered me something I couldn't steal on my own." She passed the deck back. "A street thief can't rob a dragon. A crew can. I want to be part of a crew. I want to be part of something that lasts longer than the next purse."

"It will," I said. "One way or another."

She grinned again — that same bright, transforming expression, like a soul who, at long last, had stumbled on an opening cut to her measure. And somewhere behind us, in the mountain's deeper chambers, the Old Red breathed his slow centuries and did not know that the crew assembling in the city below had already begun to count his treasure.