I wanted to scream the words at him, but it would be too hard to explain that I had no intention of being caught, simply giving Flick time to get away. He called me boy, though, which was good.
“You caught a live one,” another man chuckled, as if I wasn't already outweighed by the first one. I didn't stand a chance against two grown men in hand-to-hand combat. The last thing I needed was to fight off a rape at a time like this.
There weren't many girls in my line of work. When you grew up in the slums, there was really only one career choice for a pretty girl. Whoring. That had never sat well with me, and thankfully Bloodeye had seen talents beyond the income I might earn on my back with my legs in the air.
I fairly much lived in boys’ clothes: a loose shirt and leather breeches with an oversized tunic to hide my womanly curves. It had clearly been too much to ask of Aana, our Goddess of Fortune, to bless me with a boyish frame. Thankfully, this guy seemed too distracted to notice as he restrained me.
“It's too late for him,” the man snapped in my ear, and I got the distinct feeling he thought he was saving me. “They've caught him red-handed. There's nothing you can do now.”
Sure enough, the palace guardsmen were already binding Flick's wrists and throwing him over the front of a horse to be taken to the royal dungeons. It was a crime to steal in Lakehaven. Hell, it was a crime to steal anywhere in the Kingdom on Teich, but it was a whole other thing to steal from the royals themselves.
As the tubby guard rode away with my little friend, the man's grip loosened on my face, but not from around my waist.
“You can thank me now, boy,” he muttered sarcastically. “I just saved your life.”
“You can let me go now, letch,” I sneered back at him, pitching my voice a little lower than a girl’s and peering down at the hand still clamped firm across my abdomen. Any higher and he would have felt the evidence that I was most assuredly not a boy.
A gold ring on his pinky finger gave me pause and I leaned a little closer to make out the crest. Then gasped in horror.
“Your Highness,” I breathed with dread and revulsion. I'd just tried to kick one of the Royal Princes in the balls with my heel.
“Shit,” the man—prince—holding me cursed and the other man groaned.
“Seriously? You forgot to take off your ring? I'm never letting you sneak out with me again, little brother.” The second man sounded exasperated, but also a touch amused.
I just wanted to get the hell away from them. Little brother meant that this was another of the crown princes!
“Please, Highness,” I whispered, “Let me go, I swear I won’t tell a soul that you're here in the city.”
The one holding me released his grip abruptly and I stumbled forward a few steps, letting my hood fall further over my face to hide my features.
“Go, then,” he snapped. “But we were never here.”
Nodding as frantically as I could without displacing my hood, I kept my gaze firmly on the ground to avoid any further insult as I sketched a shaking bow and backed out of the alleyway. As I reached the crowd, I couldn't help myself, I glanced back into the shadows to get a look at the princes.
Could anyone blame me? No one had laid eyes on our Frog Princes in ten years. Not since they'd ended the plague by summoning hundreds of drachen--a magical creature that was actually a small variety of dragon, but looked a lot like a frog. The drachen swept through the land, devouring the insects which carried and spread the plague, and within a year, it was extinct.
Typical of my luck, though, all I could see in the shadows were three sets of men's boots, and a ripple of fear ran through me. Three. All three princes were within breathing distance of me … and I'd walked away with my life.
The notorious Rybet Waise didn't rise to such heights of crime in such a short time on luck alone though. No, I had a natural instinct towards danger. Premonition, Bloodeye liked to call it, but I preferred instinct. After all, none but the royals possessed any magic since the Age of Darkness.
My instincts, the ones I’d trusted all my life to keep me alive, told me that this wouldn't be the last time I'd encounter the three Frog Princes of Teich.