Lost Destinies

↳ 21: At Least The Evil People Have Fashion Sense

Soft, brown leather boots pounded the forest floor, short red hair sticky with sweat flying, and fleetingly Calico Bygul thought that this was what freedom felt like.

Whether she was truly free... that was debatable. She'd sworn loyalty to the queen on her eighteenth birthday and had climbed from stablehand to the royal errand runner in the seven years that followed. In this way she did have a master. But this—oh, running through the trees with the warm wind at her face and the rush of adrenaline in her veins—this had to be freedom. Because there was no greater feeling in all the world.

She skidded to a stop at the base of a tree and redirected her momentum upward, latching onto a foothold and scaling the branches fluidly as a cat. From here she could see the whole wood. Her fingers flew to the digital monocular fastened behind her ear and around the back of her neck, flipping it down from her head to zero in on her target. Damn. These guys were further than she'd thought.

Calico stepped carefully onto an outstretched branch, nimble on her toes, and inched towards the end of it. One step. Two steps. Three...

She leaped, grabbing on tightly to a branch on the next tree. She continued to move from one to another as silently as possible, keeping her gaze trained on the masked bandits following an uneven dirt path. As soon as they made it out of the forest and reached whatever vehicle was waiting for them on the other side, she would lose them, and this would all be for nothing.

But that wasn't going to happen. She'd done this a million times and knew these Central Tower forests like the back of her hand.

Minutes later, she was finally close enough to hear their raucous chatter and the clinking of gold coins in duffel bags. Bingo. Calico snatched up a sticky purple vine, braced herself, and swang.

She was soaring, soaring, soaring... and then she'd landed in a crouch right behind the bandits, saber extended.

"Hello, boys."

They spun, weapons drawn in an instant. There were three.

"Ah, great," grumbled the one on the left, brandishing a jagged dagger. "Who's this sonofagun?"

"It's Calico Bygul, an' I'm delighted to meet you," she said with an air of mocking politeness, taking a bow. She didn't imagine that she looked an intimidating foe, a young woman of average stature and willowy frame named after a breed of cat. "That money you stole from the tax collector's office belongs to the royal family."

One of the thieves snorted, tightening his grip on the bag over his shoulder. "Does it, now? The people's money belongs to the royals, yeah?"

Calico spun her sword in her hand, shifting her weight to stay light on her toes, prepared for a fight. "See, maybe you didn't go to school," she taunted, "but the people pay money so that the royals can give it back to them in service. Isn't it magical how that works? Oh, no." She made a face. "Don't tell me you all don't pay your taxes."

"All we doin' is takin' back the citizens' cash," drawled the one with the dagger and the mohawk, prowling forward.

"So... you're going to donate it to charity?"

When he responded with a flat glare, she exaggerated a horrified gasp.

"No! You're only scalin' it for personal gain? What a way to stick it to those selfish royals, right?" she said wolfishly, baring her teeth. Scale meant steal—she had long picked up Towerian slang. Her voice sharpened and she pointed her blade at Mohawk, waving it impatiently. "Give it up. You can leave this broke or with broken limbs."

"In your dreams, kittycat."

Mohawk slashed at her and she parried, twirling with her saber like an acrobat and transitioning smoothly into a back walkover, giving him a faceful of her boot along the way and ducking the second thief's sword while slicing at the third one. He had little in the way of weaponry and was stuck carrying the most of the money. Unfortunately for Calico, he was also the largest of the three, and swinging at her with the force of his weight combined with one of those heavy duffel bags would've knocked her out had she not managed to sweep in a graceful arc through and around the tangle of limbs and blades.