Snakes and Ladder-20...part one.

Chapter 20

She’s well ahead of me as I’m trying to wrap my head around that last part. Thief? Shaya?

“Hey! Waitaminute!” I head up the stairs after her and she’s laughing and she does that elfin light-footed thing up the stairs like they’re not really there. Me I’m in better shape and with having two legs now it’s still a luxury to me but I can’t keep up. “Shaya!”

I catch her at the door to our rooms bent over and laughing at me as I’m panting. “Okay, okay first you were a thief? You’re a princess how and why would you be a thief…. (pant) and what in the falling leaves is so funny?”

She actually has tears in her eyes from laughing. “You…boobs…bouncing, oh gods alive so much bouncing!”

And I get to do the angry girlfriend and cock my hip and slowly cross my arms under my chest with that “Ahem” look.

Actually ley her feel it through the link.

Kinda embarrassing, added to her feeling me up like it was….okay I’m fifty fifty on that bit just because she loves me so much but still the bouncing is not funny. Kinda funny, no, not funny.

And they’re kinda sore.

She stops and sits up and slide/glides over to me and kisses me. “I’m sorry beloved, I love your breasts it’s just that I have never seen such a sight in my entire life.”

I kiss her back, actually a few more times or she’s kissing me it’s all good….

“Sigh…so you…you were a thief?”

She looks at me and pulls me with her as she walks backwards to our rooms and our gear.

“It was after Kailynn had defeated Illian and brought me home and mother had healed me making me whole and who I always should have been. The people hated Illian and because that was who I had used to be they hated me and the political branches of the noble houses used it everyday as a way to attack my family.

By that time I had told my family everything that had happened and even what had happened with Jaiden and yet they wouldn’t bring him home because father couldn’t pardon him for the crimes he had already done and he was far too useful placed as he was in the underground. Me I chaffed under all of the pressure and the guilt of him and I breaking apart so I ran away from home seeking him out so I could apologize to him and make things right between us so….how do you really find a thief?”

“You become a thief.” I smile. “Okay so how does that happen princess?”

“I’ll tell you as we get ready.”

** Shaya…….

Well it had all sort of stared around three hundred and fifty years ago. I didn’t have you nor did I have Bhlaze so my recovery from both the wounds of the battle between Kailynn and myself so I didn’t really recover from things the way that I do now. Now add in the fact that at the end of our battle was when he used the spell to cure me and I was in bad shape. My wounds and the fact that my body was now matching my soul recovery from that was a long time in happening.

There was all of those years I lived as the fake me that years added up on me in layers of my smothering clay or something self hardened into all my walls and my hurts and even my majik at the time. It was all ripped away and scoured clean and in doing that it stripped away a lot of my essence.

When all of that was stripped away, and I was damned near cast back into Sylvan adolescence. As much as that was something that I had always wanted to have the chance to live and grow as the real me I wasn’t ready for it.

Needless to say after hiding away and trying to recover and not to cause my family any more troubles by the time I was recovered I was more than needing to get out into the world. Stir crazy I think you call it honey.

So one night when there was one of the large royal fáªtes going on and the palace was busy I snuck out through the servants service tunnels out of the palace with a few things I might need and some spare coin that I could take with me without having to go to the bursar and I headed out into the night to try and find out just who I was and to find and reconnect with Jaiden.

I really needed to find my twin brother and to try to explain things and put things to rights between us.

Things were very different outside of the palace. I was a knight and yes I’d fought in many places and had seen life in the field but it’s not the same thing as walking in the world where you’re not royalty and you’re not known.

I hadn’t even walked on my own that far in my life as from the palace to the capitol city. It’s the first time in my life that I ever really had blisters on my feet. I was tired too like I never really knew by the time I hit the streets of the capitol and everything was just starting for me then. I had no idea of how the common people lived and what they had to do and all I knew was that I couldn’t find lodging in anyplace that was likely to be looked at by the watch. So I went from the highside homes and manors and walked down the hills to the seaside where the city expanded out into the commons.

It was actually as scary as it was thrilling because I was a young waif out in the world and people looked at me and all they saw was me the girl that I was and not Illian.

I also found out though just how many people hated and mistrusted me or rather him.

That was all kinds of heartbreaking as you would say love.

I ran out of money pretty fast as well it was pretty soon between getting my own pockets picked and just the cost of things out in the real world when I didn’t have access to the royal coffers that things got hard.

I stayed in Celestine for close to a month getting odd jobs and learning the art of being a scullery maid and being a fishwife down at the wharves until Kailynn would show up far more often that I realized…it was the first time I really had seen some of what he does…and that’s going down into the poor quarters, into the thieves markets and he plied his powers and his majik as a free healer to the poor.

It was really the first time outside of noble pride that I felt any sort of real pride for my family as the people that they are.

But…as much as I loved seeing that I was pretty sure that Kailynn was using his charity works to look for me. He has his own information network in his own right because of what he does…just about everyone in the realms that wasn’t born of privilege talks to my brother.

So I had to leave Highwood and I needed a place to go. And as scary as it was I had no other choice but to return to Skywood. Back to the moon that had been the place where my Uncle Lyam had ruled for so long and where I had been twisted and trained and raised into being the monster that I was when I was Illian.

Back to my old stomping grounds as it were I think that’d you say….Gods I love that you get this…that coming back to that place that you grew up even if they might not recognize you…but you really get it don’t you Wren?

That bad homecoming where people you knew might know you and just dredge up all that painful uhm…bullshit that you need to be left behind…

Sigh

Okay…going back hadn’t the terrible fanfare that I had thought that it did and there wasn’t people there waiting for me trying to spot the “changed Princess Shaya” and tear me limb from limb.

Actually no one really saw me as anything but another poor person coming to Skywood looking for work. And that was exactly what I did…maids work to get me a place to stay and then to get my slipper into the doors of several noble houses.

I knew the nobles there, I knew the rich lords that courted Uncle Lyam in hopes that in supporting him and his attempted coup of the throne they’d be rewarded with even more titles and property. If he’d been High King then he’d have control over all of the lands of the Moons and they could own things, lands and rule over other places that just their holdings there on Skywood.

I’d been an honoured and feared guest in their mansions and castles. I was feared enough to come and go as I had pleased and I used that to ferret out secrets for Uncle Lyam to use against them.

So I knew my way around these places. I had a good idea of just who owned what and what they had under serious guard or lock and key and I started to steal from these places trying to make my way earn my name.

And it was only a matter of time before the guild came looking for me.

You don’t steal without being part of the thieves’ guild. It endangers them. There’s all these things to consider that I had no clue of and it didn’t take long before I was woken up in my flat in the middle of the night by a dagger to my throat.

Oh…I’m glad that there’s stuff like that where you are from beloved. And yes, I was stealing and running my own game on someone else’s turf.

Specifically The Red Raven guild.

I was tied…bound by my hands and my feet and hooded and take to Bandit…

Yes that was actually his name…

No…he didn’t have a fast airship…or a moustache…or and no…he wasn’t being pursued by a fat guardsman with an idiot for a son.

Yes…okay…if we ever return to your realm I shall watch this “Smokey and the bandit with you….It sounds interesting…is this Smokey a dragon?

Wren…

Are you done giggling?

Sigh…

Alright?

His name was Bandit and he was a legend amongst the thieves. He was an ex-knight and from Marahaesh…Yes honey Darkelven…In fact I had chased him many times as Illian for the things he had stolen from my uncle. There were several close chases and I had burned him three different times with a magefire pistol and had even put a clothyard arrow into him.

I had caught, tortured then killed more than a few of his fellow thieves trying to get to him.

I was even more scared when I hadn’t been untied and he had taken off my hood and was kneeling on the carpet beside me a straight razor in his hands.

His first words to me were.

“Hello Princess.”