Page 161 of Rogue Elves of Ardani

It was the sort of place only ghosts inhabited. She envied Vaara for having a beautiful forest and a community to go home to.

She went up the stairs in darkness. There was no need for light. She knew the house by heart.

She went to her room, dropping her pack on the floor, and sat down on her bed, on its familiar too-soft, too-small mattress. It had been purchased when she was much younger and smaller, and she had long since grown out of it, but Patros had never bothered to replace it.

She was free now. And she was alone.

She put her face in her hands and softly cried.

Chapter 44

Weeks passed.

The days grew shorter. Crow didn’t often leave her small bed. The long hours of darkness every night made it easy to spend more and more of her time there.

Then the solstice passed, and the days got longer again. In the mornings, the sun would slant through her window at an angle that shone directly into her eyes, and she was forced to awaken. Gradually, she spent more time around the house.

As much as she resented the place, it had also been her home for the majority of her life. She debated for some time about whether to sell it, or to stay and make the best of it. In the end, she decided that the house had been her home as much as it had been Patros’s. Allowing him to taint it for her felt like letting him win.

So she sold everything in the house except for the contents of her own room. Then she moved all the things from her room into Patros’s old room, which was bigger and more centrally located, not like the closet she’d been in before. It was the type of room a free, independent woman should sleep in. On her first trip back to the market, she bought a bigger bed for herself.

When she began to feel that the walls of the house were too small and too familiar, she started venturing out into the city more often.

She was unpleasantly surprised when she found Toreg waiting for her at her front gate one day. She stopped on the inside of the locked gate and crossed her arms.

“What do you want?”

He grinned and leaned against the bars of the gate. “Come on, now. Is that how you greet an old friend?”

“You can tell me,” she said, tracing a finger slowly along the bars beside him, “or I can take a look and find out for myself, if you prefer.”

He took a step back, raising his arms in surrender. “I have a proposition for you.”

“Do you?” She examined her nails.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on the house. I know you aren’t busy doing anything else.”

She looked up in surprise, and made a mental note to hire a mage to reactivate some of the security systems Patros had put in place around the property. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t keep an eye on my house.”

“Patros’s death left a hole in the world of information trading,” he said, ignoring her request. “I think you could fill it.”

“That’s what you came to talk to me about? Filling holes? Typical.”

“I’m saying there’s a job you could be doing, if you wanted. You have skills no one else in Valtos has. Right now, sitting in this house doing nothing, you’re leaving money on the table.”

“Did your employer ask you to come pester me?” That was the last thing she needed—for someone else to find out who and what she was.

“I have no employer,” Toreg said, arching an eyebrow. “I think we share a mutual dislike for employers, generally. That’s why I’m proposing that we work together, as independents.”

“Doing what?”

“The same thing Patros was doing, mostly. Obtaining and selling information. With my infiltration skills and your... things that you do, we could have access to places even the best spies in the country don’t have. I already have contacts who I know would be willing to buy from us.”

Crow didn’t answer right away. She’d expected someone would come asking her something like this eventually. A part of her was tempted. The idea of using her magic the way she liked, without being at someone else’s beck and call, and making her own money from it, was enticing.

But her work with Patros had left a bad taste in her mouth. She wasn’t going to go back to that kind of work—not for a long time, at least.

“Think about it,” Toreg said. “I’ll be awaiting your decision.”

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