Crow looked up at Penelope again as she explained what had happened to the knights’ camp the night before. He was surprised to hear that she hadn’t been exaggerating but had been accusing him because someone—or perhaps a group of people—had come in sometime during the night to raid their camp and slaughter all of the guards. He folded his arms over his chest, just as mystified as she was about how that could have happened. All he knew for sure was that whoever had done it must have shown up after he and his companions had finished their own raid, since all of the guards had been alive at that point.

For a moment, he wondered if the Younisians had done it to sabotage the Brerratic knights. It seemed like a desperate enough trick to pull, so he wouldn’t have put it past them, especially if they felt like they were going to lose the war. However, that didn’t add up to him. For the intruders to have killed the guards and escaped with half of the nobles’ supplies so seamlessly meant they had to have some skill with thievery already. He knew for a fact that the Younisians had no such talents because of all the times their barons had tried to recruit him and his companions to steal for them. If they already had members among their ranks who knew how to raid a camp, they would have had no need to hire thieves from another kingdom to do it for them.

He was just about to ask Penelope if there was anyone she could think of that the knights had wronged, when he heard the sound of a voice that made him stiffen in surprise. He looked over her shoulder to see none other than Gavin step into the clearing with a hand resting threateningly on the hilt of his sword. Immediately, Crow took a defensive step back and reached for his own weapons, narrowing his eyes hostilely at the new arrival. Aside from the fact that the knight had interrupted his time with Penelope, he didn’t like how close he was to the thieves’ camp.

His eyes flicked to Penelope as she spoke to her ex suitor. Her words made him falter. [i]She told him to ‘let her handle this?’[/i] he thought with a pang of annoyance. It sounded like she had still been keeping in touch with Gavin even after he had asked her to keep her distance from him. However, he didn’t have time to focus on the detail. With his gaze fixed on the knight’s sword hand, he silently drew his daggers beneath his cloak, readying himself to fight if the man came after him.

As Gavin told him to tell the truth, the thief stood up slightly taller and shot him a cold glare. “I owe you nothing of the sort,” he spat obstinately. “Why don’t you just run back to your camp now and keep your nose out of places it doesn’t belong?”