Page 49 of The Hood and his Thief

“As if you could,” she murmured under her breath, her mind already more on the task before her than the conversation.

The small door bore the crown jewel of locks for a lock pick: a Chubb lock. It wouldn’t be able to be raked open, all the pins simply knocked into place. It would take finesse and subtle patience.

With that, Rhosyn got to work. She carefully selected each instrument in turn, inserting them delicately into the lock and feeling carefully for the pins’ movement with a hand laid on the cool metal.

Her mind blocked out Ansel’s presence, for the first time in hours forgetting the potential consequences of her actions. Where “patient” had never been a word Rhosyn would use to describe herself, she somehow managed it with the puzzle of a difficult lock before her. She had once asked Nate if it might be a Talent, but he told her he sensed no air of the supernatural around her. So, she practiced and practiced until the only person with a better knack for espionage was Contessa herself.

In the near trance that Rhosyn fell into when picking a lock, blind to all but the subtle changes in resistance under her fingers, she wasn’t sure if it was five minutes or fifty before the last pin slid into place and her tools twisted easily in the keyhole.

The door fell open, revealing a thick sheaf of papers. At the sound of shuffling, Ansel left his post at the door, barely cracked to allow him to peer into the hallway.

“Are they there?” he whispered over her shoulder.

She quickly leafed through them, hissing when she gave herself a papercut in her haste.

“These look like sponsorship contracts to me,” she said. Although not familiar with fancy legal documents, Rhosyn caught the words “Talented”, “pardon”, and “owed service” among the text. “What are the names on the documents we need?”

She bit her tongue around the word we, but Ansel answered before she could correct herself.

“Just take the whole stack.”

“Have you ever robbed anybody before?” Rhosyn asked incredulously. “The less you take, the longer it takes people to realize something is missing—and the colder your trail will be when they try to find you.”

“Well, you couldn’t find me, so obviously my way works.”

He grabbed for the papers in her hands, but she twisted away quickly, and his fingers closed around thin air. She narrowed her eyes at the concentrated jumble of words, seeking to find where the names of the Talented to be pardoned and employed were.

She located the names at the bottom of the page.

Name: Thomas Pemberton

Talent: Combustion

“Explosions?” Rhosyn mouthed in confusion. She couldn’t fathom what service that might do to a fine family of the upper city, although maybe they didn’t mean to use it at all and instead to have him be a footman. She spied Mr. Gower’s signature at the bottom of the page.

Ansel peered over her shoulder, breathing down her neck impatiently. “We don’t have much time.”

Rhosyn ignored him in favor of flipping to the next page, also signed by Mr. Gower.

Name: Theo Hamilton

Talent: Walking through walls

Another odd Talent to pursue for a sponsorship, when there were others who could cook a perfect pie every time without a recipe. The third page was just as confusing.

Talent: Control over lightning

“Look at these Talents.” She shoved the stack of papers into Ansel’s hands. “And they’re all for Mr. Gower.”

Ansel flipped through pages, his eyebrows raising as he shuffled through faster and faster. There were dozens of documents.

“Doesn’t it seem like…” she started.

“He’s building an army,” Ansel finished grimly. “Looking at the crimes these pardons are for, many of these are not just petty thieves, but violent criminals—murderers and rapists.”

“What on earth for?” Rhosyn asked.

Ansel shook his head, and his expression was stony as her stomach felt. This, combined with the odd state of all Mr. Gower’s servants, came together to paint an incomplete but sinister picture.