Dragon Thief by S. Andrew Swann Read Free Book Online Page B

three girls peppered me with questions I saw Grace’s expression of irritation shift halfway toward amusement, as if she got some sort of satisfaction from my discomfort.
    I would have called the expression predatory on anyone other than a fourteen-year-old girl. Our eyes locked for a moment, and I could see she knew. She could read my face and saw that I had jumped in over my head just by implying I was “the Snake.”
    Whose skin was I wearing?
    Whoever this Snake was, at least half the girls in this little band looked up to him. In the face of the youngest, I saw something like hero worship. Fearless Leader let the others obsess without doing a thing to correct them or rein them in.
    Oh, you’re a smart little girl, aren’t you?
    Grace could have stepped in, questioned who I was directly, but if she did, at least some of her girls would resent having their assumptions challenged. Better to let the prisoner stumble on his own feet of clay.
    Yeah, there was a reason she was in charge.
    She watched as the Snake fans questioned me nonstop. At least I had some time to think about what to do because I couldn’t get a word in as the girls talked over each other and answered their own questions. She let it go on for a long time, enjoying my discomfort,
then
she cleared her throat.
    Everyone stopped babbling.
    Grace smiled all too sweetly at me, and asked a question that was way too perceptive.
    â€œHow does such an
effective
outlaw land naked by our campfire?”
    I didn’t even need to answer that. It went right at the heart of my implied claim, and I could see doubt cloud the two older girls’ faces.
    It irritated me because I hadn’t even been
trying
to con anyone.
    I wasn’t about to be outmaneuvered by some brat. It was misplaced pride on my part, but I did a stupid thing.
    I lied.
    I rationalized it by telling myself that as long as at least some of Grace’s girls thought I was actually Snake, it meant that I would have them on my side. So I decided to leap from lies of omission to full-blown fabrication.
    It was not a craft I was unskilled in. Even before I opened my mouth to answer, I saw Grace’s smile falter as she saw my own.
    â€œRemember when I said that the blood was not my own?”
    I had their attention.
    â€œYou know the town nearby here, about an hour’s ride?”
    â€œWestmark?” the youngest one offered.
    â€œThat’s right,” I said, having no idea if it was or not. “You know why I was there?”
    Everyone shook their head as my mind raced to find an answer for that rhetorical question. “I had just finished up an accounting in Delmark, leaving both guilds there with a smaller treasury than they started with. I came here with my haul to pay a visit to a woman—”
    â€œYour true love?” asked the young one.
    Well, thank you, little girl.
“There’s no such thing in an outlaw’s life,” I said, shaping my lies to fit my new target audience. “Yes, she said she loved me, and I might have loved her . . . but she had family in the White Rock Thieves’ Guild, and while she’d helped me take the guilds for their gold and jewels, when I returned to give her share to her, she became greedy.”
    A tale of tragic love and betrayal and I had the girls hooked. Half of them anyway. Even the small quiet one who hung back with Grace and the redhead started listening raptly. Grace herself wore an expression of growing disbelief. I couldn’t tell if she was reacting to my story, or to the fact that her group was buying my story.
    I kept going, bringing all my skills to bear. I played up Snake’s reputation to the bleeding edge of what I considered plausible, making him a tragic hero who had suffered a lover’s betrayal that cut worse than any assassin’s dagger. Weasel’s goons became a squad of armed mercenaries. The ambush by the Sanhom Assassins became an epic