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reason I’m doing this is if I’m paid. And paid well.”
    He narrowed his gaze. “Twenty shillings.”
    “Ten. A day.”
    “That’s robbery,” he said coldly.
    “It’ll be my neck in a noose if I’m caught,” she said while nodding at the paper she’d dropped on his desk. “That work permit only covers the fisheries, and I doubt your collection is housed there.”
    He smiled. “So it isn’t. Eight a day, Ezekiel will pay you, and you’ll get out of my office now.”
    “With pleasure.”
    She followed Ezekiel into the morning sun.

Chapter IV

    S ARA FOLLOWED BEHIND E ZEKIEL , WHO didn’t say a word as he raced down the gangway as fast as his long legs would carry him. Which was pretty fast. Sara had to run to catch up. When he hit the ground at a dead run and looked like he had no intention of stopping, she got frustrated.
    “Hey, wait up!” she yelled.
    He only picked up speed as he ducked around a corner so fast that she almost lost track of him.
    She didn’t want to hurt him, but she had a job to do. Losing the only person who could tell her how to do that job wasn’t on her list of things to get done today.  
    Well, this is the perfect time to try this out, then , Sara thought.
    Sara was a proponent of always being prepared. No matter where she was, she knew she had a weapon on her of some kind. If she didn’t have her knives or baton at her waist, or her sword on her back, then a last resort could be the hair ties binding her long curls. It wasn’t the best weapon in the world or the most useful. But in this situation or the capture of runaway thieves, it was perfect.  
    So Sara grabbed the hair tie with weighted stones that she used on her bouncy black curls and loosened the stones that kept it from unraveling. Pulling the whole thing from her hair with the long string she’d double-wrapped to keep it from slipping, she whirled it overhead like a slingshot. Then she sent it flying at his legs. The weight stones whirled around and around until they wrapped around his legs and sent him tumbling face-first into the ground with a grunt.
    She walked up to him as he rolled onto his back, and, with some wiggling, sat up.
    Dazed, Ezekiel looked down at his legs and then back up at her. “You could have killed me.”
    “I didn’t,” she said brusquely as she cut the ties from his legs. It would be easy enough to make a new one.
    “You fighters, nothing but muscle, the lot of you,” Ezekiel said as he glared up at her from the ground.
    Sara raised an eyebrow. “Did you just call me stupid?”
    “Maybe?”  
    She set her teeth in a line, sorely tempted to punch the spindly little scholar in the mouth. But she eased up. Realizing that was just what he would expect.
    Then Sara spoke. “What if I told you I speak three languages, know more about ballistics than you, and…”
    She paused. He didn’t look impressed.
    “…and can name all Sahalian rulers from first to last?” she continued defiantly. She was hoping to impress him with her knowledge, though she hadn’t the slightest clue why she cared at the moment.
    He looked thoughtful. She could guess why—most Algardis citizens didn’t bother learning the name of the current ruler of Sahalia, let alone her ancestors.
    Ezekiel rubbed his jaw. “All thirty-six of them?”
    She smiled, a rarely present set of dimples appearing on her face. It was a trick question. “All thirty- eight of them. Including the lost emperor.”
    Then a grin came across his face. The fastest way to a scholar’s heart was through knowledge—she knew that firsthand.
    “Not many know about the lost emperor,” Ezekiel admitted from the ground, “or the twin rulers, for that matter.”
    “Not many care,” she said flatly. “I do.”
    He rubbed his shins with a pained expression. She waited to see what he would do.
    I might have been a little hasty , she thought. Maybe it’s up to me to extend the olive branch of peace.
    “Perhaps we’ve gotten off on the