I'd been boxed out from using the books in the bunkroom, banned from Mrs. Choso's bookshop, and essentially banned from the whole River's Run market - in other words, I had no way to study outside of class (aside from memory drills and partner exercises, but those were of limited usefulness) and no way to make money. And I was always just one careless move away from getting caught alone outright beat up by the Tetrad of Terror right on the streets - if I went anywhere by myself, they were liable to stalk me down and show me what they thought of Princess Manure in the most brutal terms. As if they hadn't already made their thoughts abundantly clear.

"We can try somewhere else in the city…" Zev said. I was the only one of our group of five who'd been banned from the marketplace - and for the time being, my friends were sticking with me. I wondered how much goodwill I had in reserve, because I doubted they'd buy me afternoon meals forever. My guess was that a few days of me living off their largesse without contributing would erode their willingness to try a new scheme to make some tollos.

"Hey, we could try the Mercantile Quarter," Nate offered, pointing vaguely eastward.

The Mercantile Quarter was across the Largotto just south of the Bannered Temple, accessible by the Sun's End and Sun's Start bridges that spanned the river with Caravan Island in between. It wasn't too much farther to walk to than the River's Run Market, so it was an obvious place to look for work. Unfortunately, the real movers and shakers of Floria's trade were wealthier than the petty merchants of River's Run - much wealthier - and they could hire couriers for any messages that needed sending. They didn't need child messengers, and they weren't shy about saying so.

"I have no wish to have my letters stained by grubby hands and read over by every lout with a pico to spare," one of them told me. And she was one of the polite ones.

"These nobs got no use for us," Aldo grumbled. "Where else we got?"

"We could do the Foreign Canton, or else take the ferry south to th' Captain's Canton?" Zev suggested.

"Hilaire said kids should never go to the Captain's Canton alone…" I observed… "or the Mendicant's Canton. Or the canals… or the Dead's Canton…"

"Hey, that's like half the city," Nate said.

"That don't make it not true," Aldo said. "Of course, we wouldn't be alone… there's five of us…"

"But River's Run is so close to the Collegium," Mailyn said. "Look… how about just for today the four of us take care of messages and Vix can… uh… check the Foreign Canton for more jobs. That's not too far, right?"

"It's a bit far," Nate said.

"Not like she's got anything else to do," Aldo said.

"What if they follow me?" I asked. I hadn't seen any of the Tetrad since just after we left the hall… but just because I didn't see them didn't mean they weren't up to no good.

"They're not gonna follow you," Aldo said. "They got to find a new place for their scam and they're not likely to go that far south for it…"

"But if they do?"

"They're getting in your head. You gotta stop with that," Aldo huffed, balling his fists in annoyance. Whether he was annoyed at me, the Tetrad, or the situation in general, I wasn't sure.

"Maybe there are some Gionian booksellers in the Gionian neighborhood?" Mailyn offered.

"There's a Gionian neighborhood?" I said, perking up. I recalled Rose Argent mentioning an area where everybody spoke Gionian on our carriage ride up to the Scamp Hall, but it never occurred to me that it was large enough to be worth visiting.

"There's a huge Gionian neighborhood. Mini Gionika! It's gigantic! Like a quarter of the Foreign Canton!" Zev said. "We all speak pretty good Gionian…"

"Hey, why don't we go there?" Nate said.

I was practically vibrating with excitement. "Do you think they have a bookstore?"

Mailyn grabbed my arm. "I bet they have two!"

It so happened that, yes, there were several Gionian booksellers, and all of them were larger than Chosen Letters. And, yes, they were willing to speak with a girl with a posh Barsoan accent and the bearing of a little lady, even if her current wardrobe wasn't particularly ladylike. I imagine they assumed I was the daughter of a Gionian merchant or sea captain fallen on hard times or playing the part of a ragamuffin… after all, it happened in the storybooks. Speaking of which…

I found a bookshop, where the bookseller humored me when I listed the services I thought I could render, from my familiar messenger and courier services to letter-writing to translation. Letter writers are fairly rare in Floria since most of the population is literate, but they were a common way for people to pick up extra tollos in Portogarra, either transcribing dictated correspondence or reading said correspondence to an illiterate recipient.

"I haven't got any need for a letter-writer, young miss," Silvidor Hianchi, the proprietor of 'La Sieurhom Entelektua' (The Learned Gentleman in Gionian) said. "But… repeat to me the languages you can read and write, please?"

"Yes, sir! I know Gionian, Kronojic, and S…" I almost said Selenite, but my instincts suggested I might leave that bit out. "…Some Old Turan. And I'm getting pretty good at Perditalog!"

Mr. Hianchi winced at that proclamation - our entire conversation thus far had been in Gionian. "It's an ugly mongrel tongue, is it not?"

Personally, I thought the language was great fun to learn, but I wasn't about to disagree with a potential employer. "It's more like a cartel of words than a proper language," I said - I'd heard one of my teachers say that and, though I wasn't totally sure what that meant, her pronouncement had about the right amount of scorn involved.

Mr. Hianchi nodded - apparently, I'd passed muster. "For translation, I'll pay you a tollo per two pages…"

"Wow!" I blurted before quickly guarding my expression. "I mean… uh… that's not much. Will you let me read whatever book I like for an hour afterward?"

"I'm not a library," he huffed, crossing his spindly arms.

"I know," I said. "I'm not allowed into any libraries."

"Hmm… fine… one hour… and you need to do at least six pages…"

Six pages? At a tollo per two pages? That was three tollos in the bank. So I readily agreed and spent the next two hours translating not six but eight pages of a Kronojic alchemical text into Gionian. I'm sure I butchered all of the technical terminology, and I didn't understand ninety percent of what I'd translated, but Silvidor Hianchi seemed satisfied with the completed chapter.

Afternoon had already shifted into the long shadows of late afternoon and the sun dipped lower yet toward evening, but I didn't head back to find my friends because, for the first time since before St. Lethis's feast, I had access to books. Any book in the library… er… bookshop! For a whole hour!

And what book did I select? I could have selected any number of academic or technical volumes that would have helped me with my schoolwork. Yes… I could have. But, then again, The Adventures of Silvia Valia: The Golden Masque (by Ms. Eliza Peretti) was right there, and it called to me. Mr. Hianchi chuckled when he saw what I'd picked.

"Of course you'd pick a spatback," he mumbled.

"A what?"

"A spatback. You know… a pulp book with about as much literary merit as my nana's shopping list?"

"Oh. I'm not sure I care about, uh, literbrary merit…"

"That much is obvious. But it's a real page-turner…"

I scratched my head. "How else would you read books?"

"Just read, girl," he chuckled. "And do tell me what you think."

So I sat down and, an hour and fifteen minutes (and only one warning that my time was up) later, had devoured The Adventures of Silvia Valia: The Golden Masque, more adventures of the notorious cat burglar of Gionika! The gentlewoman thief! The Gilded Lily herself! And, as I read through clever, crafty Silvia's adventures, a capital-I Idea came to mind…

Well… more like I shamelessly copied the idea from the plot of Ms. Peretti's latest novel. But at least I realized that it was applicable in my case. The plot was thus:

In The Golden Masque, Silvia is set on a course against the Marquis do Andopol when she attempts to steal the masque - for the dastardly marquis has plans to unleash the same masque's ancient power in a plot to assassinate the High Prince of Gionia! Due to the madman's thorough control of local law enforcement through his position as the Duke of Prosecay's security minister, Silvia is sent fleeing from the city and is unable to warn the prince. But she uses this slightly unfair persecution (only slightly, since she did attempt to steal the masque to begin with) against the Marquis, planting a trail of her own stolen goods for the duke's men to find, only to lead them straight to the dastardly marquis's treasonous operation, where they catch him red-handed. And, of course, during the ensuing chaos, Silvia's confidant and erstwhile lover, Konstantin, steals one thousand qattrokronos worth of heirlooms from the marquis's family vault with Silvia's help. Classic Silvia!

Granted, my life at the time didn't have much in the way of court intrigue or midnight trysts (which, frankly, sounded weird and involved far too much kissing and mushy talk for my tastes). However, the nucleus of Silvia's plot had merit and I thought I might employ it against my evil marquis - in this case, four seven- and eight-year-old bullies. Of course, I didn't exactly have a cache of stolen goods handy to use as lures…

"Sure, I can get stolen stuff," Aldo said off-handedly.

"What? Really?" I sputtered. "From where?"

He looked at me like I was an idiot… which I might well have been. He'd once been a street kid for over a year. Of course Aldo knew how to steal stuff. He was, by a significant margin, the most street-savvy of our lot. He grinned cheekily, sandy blond hair fluttering in the breeze. "From where? Take your pick - that ain't the problem. The question is what to do about the stuff I've stolen…"

"You get that, if you get caught, the guards will probably kick all of us out the market," Zev observed.

Aldo shrugged. "Sounds like we might have new gigs anyway…"

I nodded uncertainly - while I had found a gig, at least a temporary gig translating Kronojic into Gionian for Mr. Hianchi at The Learned Gentleman, he certainly didn't have need for or money to pay our whole motley crew. But they were resourceful and, if I'd found steady work in the course of an afternoon, they probably could, too. It might even be better than the River's Run, I told myself, because relatively few Scamps spoke Gionian fluently (though all spoke at least some since we took it in our Languages class). Plus, this wasn't just about my loss of a gig…

"This is about revenge, cher," I grumbled.

"Share what?" Aldo asked.

I shrugged. "Tasks, maybe? I'm not sure." Then I realized Aldo's confusion. "Oh! Cherrr. I think it's a Frissonic word… maybe for a very handsome man?" There was quite a bit of romantic subtext I hadn't quite gleaned from Silvia Valia's adventures.

"Well," Mailyn said. "Since there aren't any very handsome men around, let's hear about our tasks."

My adaptation of Silvia's heist was reasonably straightforward. Each of us had parts to play in my little plan, an ingenious (for a seven-year-old) scheme balancing petty crime, misdirection, and reconnaissance. Our setup was as follows:

1) First, Aldo would steal about twenty easily-identifiable items from vendors while Zev kept lookout. It wouldn't count as stealing, though, because the vendors would get most of their stuff back. Aldo was to avoid getting caught no matter what.

2) A few seconds after Aldo made off with the goods, Nate (whose broad, slightly-chunky build was an awful lot like Oltzen's) would pretend to steal something and make a visible getaway. Notably, Nate would also wear a ratty wool cloak that looked an awful lot like the one that Oltzen liked to wear.

3) Zev would be nearby to hide Nate before anybody could give much pursuit. We had a few ways to do that, but most of them involved tossing a canvas drape over Nate's back while he curled up and Zev then sitting on top of the boy-sized bump. Amazingly enough, nobody ever caught onto the fact that the little boy sitting on top of a random, canvas-covered lump off to the side of the shops was, in fact, hiding another, slightly-chunkier little boy.

3B) We now had a few dozen witnesses who'd watched a kid who looked and dressed a lot like Oltzen making off with marketplace items in an audacious, low-stakes crime spree.

4) Meanwhile, Mailyn would keep lookout for the guards and the members of the Tetrad of Terror. Whenever one of the Tetrad was nearby but the guards weren't, she'd signal me and I would scamper around, pretending to be on messenger duty near Chosen Letters, as if I'd never been banned from the marketplace at all.

Amazingly enough, the setup for my plan worked, right down to Nima and Thero giving me the stinkeye as they watched me dart around the River's Run market while the guards were away. Neither Aldo nor Nate got caught, and we easily had enough purloined items for the sting. At the end of the day Aldo showed us his sack of ill-gotten goods, bemoaning the fact that he wouldn't get to keep them.

"I could get three tollos for this one, probably," he said, waving the painted, carved bone pepper grinder he'd stolen from Mr. Foiero's streetside shop.

"We're not keeping any of them," Mailyn stated before turning toward me. "Right?"

"Um… right," I said, tearing my eyes away from the little beanbag blackbird in Aldo's haul. It reminded me of my stuffed magpie, Triss, and I was sorely tempted to claim it. But I didn't, because sometimes you had to sacrifice for a mission.

The stage was set for Operation: Just Like Golden Masque.

Our plan for the second part of Operation: JLGM was to be as follows:

1) I was to be the main bait, loitering around in front of Chosen Letters and pretending to still be doing messenger work.

2) If any of the guard patrols got too near, Mailyn would distract them - we swapped clothes and her hair was braided like mine, so she resembled me enough from afar that the guards would check to make sure she wasn't me, Alvixia Altonelli, the girl who'd become a persona non grata in the market. This would only work a handful of times, so everything else had to run apace…

3) Once I attracted the attention of any members of the Tetrad, I would signal to the boys, who would wait until they saw me retreat from the area around Chosen Letters.

4) I would lure the Tetrad into following after me by retreating into a secluded alleyway. If needed, Mailyn, quasi-disguised as me, could lure other Tetrad members into the general vicinity so long as she wasn't busy with the guards.

5) Meanwhile, Nate, once again disguised as Oltzen, would visibly and publicly 'steal' an item from Mrs. Kilierie's stall, which was near the side road leading back to the Tetrad's secret hideaway. He would make a racket and then retreat toward the Tetrad's hideaway.

6) Meanwhile, Zev and Aldo would distribute the stolen goods along the pathway toward the hideaway, making sure they were placed where the guards would see them. Finally, if they saw anybody approaching, they would open the hatch to the Tetrad's base.

7) Pursuing me and blind with rage, the Tetrad would chase me right back to their hideout. Meanwhile, the guards would chase Nate along a different route, encountering the stolen goods along the way.

8) The guards, following Nate and/or the trail of stolen goods would coincide at the hidey-hole at time to intercept the tetrad members following Mailyn and/or myself. Whereupon, they would find the tetrad's little stash and the group would not only be framed for a theft that they didn't actually perpetrate, but the goods that they actually had stolen would be found! They would be banned from the marketplace and, if any of the books I'd allegedly stolen were found, I'd be cleared of wrongdoing.

The perfect, foolproof plan!

Perhaps not… still, it was my second ever audacious scheme, so perhaps a little leniency is in order.