Guards pulled me off her almost instantly. I'd been expecting that. Two of them grabbed me, each holding an arm tightly. Kassia, on the other hand, was gently helped to her feet. At least the guard kept a grip on her arm. She dusted off her dress and looked at me, her eyes so full of anger that I almost thought I'd drop dead just from looking at them.

Everyone in the room was standing. Some chairs had even been knocked over in the nobles' haste to get to their feet. The king, at the far end of the table, looked particularly confused. He left his space and walked around the table towards us, the clicking of his boots on the stone floor the only sound in the room. He ignored Kassia, instead coming to a stop in front of me.

It wasn't until one of my guards pushed my head down that I even remembered that one was supposed to bow in the king's presence. I stared down at his shiny boots, and for a moment I wondered just how expensive they were.

"What is the meaning of this?" the king asked. His voice boomed out in the almost perfect silence, and I flinched.

I hesitated, pulling myself away from his expensive boots, from the thought of who he was, and focused on Kassia. I didn't look up as I replied, as steadily as possible, "The girl is an assassin."

"This girl?" he asked. It didn't sound like he believed me, but at the same time he seemed a little wary. He couldn't risk not believing me. He walked away, and only then did I raise my head. He was standing in front of Kassia. The guard beside her let go of her arm and took a step back. "Who are you?" the king asked.

Kassia stared at the ground. Her hands were clasped and she was wringing a bit of her dress between them. She started to murmur out a reply.

"Louder, girl," he ordered.

Kassia gulped and looked close to tears. "M-my name is Kianna. I've been working in the castle as a maid for as long as I can remember." Her voice was still quiet and tiny. She didn't look anywhere but the floor at her feet, and her hands kept fiddling with the bit of dress. I would have believed her if I didn't know her.

"She's lying," I said.

King Edarius spun around and the guard on my left twisted my arm back painfully. I bit my lip and ducked my head again, not wanting to make things worse by looking at the king. He had just begun to approach me when the door behind us was flung open.

Tannix didn't look at me, but I had never been happier to see him. He walked into the room calmly, Tandrin and about a dozen guards behind him. "Your majesty, there's an assassin in the castle." 

The authority in his voice was a sudden reminder of who exactly Tannix was. Lord Tandrix of West Draulin. I knew the real young man behind the title, but the title was always going to part of him. He outranked most of the people in the room.

The king showed no reaction to Tannix's news. "We've already caught him."

"Him?" Tannix glanced at me, emotionless. "We're looking for a young woman."

I couldn't help myself. "She's right..." But then I stopped, because she was gone.

Everyone turned to look at where Kassia had been standing. The guard looked sheepish. "Your majesty, I..."

"Silence," the king ordered. He reached up, rubbing his beard with his hand. "Lord Tandrix, what is going on?"

Motion across the room caught my eye. Behind a pillar, I saw the swish of a white dress. I wrenched myself from the guards' hands, taking them by surprise with the suddenness of my movement. They yelled at me—everyone was yelling—but I ignored them all as I bolted across the room. Kassia had already started climbing up a bookshelf. She was heading for one of the tiny windows up near the ceiling. Guards and nobles tried to grab me. Luckily, I was fast, and they were all shocked enough that no one really got close to me.

The bookshelf was as easy to climb as a ladder. My wrist started aching again, but I pushed it to the back of my mind and concentrated on speed. The wall above the bookshelf was smooth and decorated by large paintings. It seemed risky to climb the paintings, but Kassia already had. I reached for the thick plaster frame of the nearest painting and pulled myself higher up the wall. Above me, Kassia slipped through the window.

With a dull thud, an arrow slammed into the painting next to my left hand. I almost recoiled, and only just managed to keep my grip on the frame. I risked a quick glance down. People were moving around the room, confused at what they should be doing. Tandrin was talking to the king. There was one archer by the door. Tannix's hand was wrapped around the bow just above the archer's, tilting it slightly. Once again, I owed him my life. He looked up briefly, meeting my gaze, and nodded.

He was encouraging me to keep going, so I turned back to the wall and climbed up the last little bit. I easily fit through the window. The storm had finally broken, and the rain was so heavy it soaked me instantly. Kassia hadn't gained much distance. Through the pounding rain, I could see her drop over the edge of the roof. I scrambled to my feet.

 As I reached the edge of the roof, I caught sight of her again. She was heading down, jumping from one bit of roof to the next, getting lower and lower with each hop. I jumped down more hastily than I should have and almost lost my footing. Everything was slippery and wet, and I quickly prayed to Zianesa that I wouldn't fall and break my neck.

I didn't get any closer to Kassia, but neither did I fall behind. We finally reached the ground floor in one of the passages that would eventually lead around to the main courtyard. I lost sight of her when she turned a corner ahead of me. I ran around the corner a moment later, and skidded to a shocked stop on the wet cobblestones. She was missing.

I glanced around frantically, hoping to see her boot or a flash of her dress. The rain wasn't helping anything. I reached up to brush my soaked hair away from my face, and just at that moment, hands tugged me to the side.

She had me up against the wall with a knife at my neck before I understood what was happening.  Any thought of trying to fight back was abandoned when she touched the knife to my skin.

"Finn," she cooed gently. "Don't even think about it." Her voice sounded slightly different, and I suddenly understood that she'd been putting on a Native accent before. A good one. The memory of her speaking Deoran the day we'd nearly been caught stealing flashed through my mind.

"Why?" I wasn't asking about her words, and she understood.

"I was following orders," she said. With her free hand, she reached up to stroke my cheek. "I never meant to get caught up with you, but I was acquainting myself with your lovely city when I saw that man attacking Castin, and I'm not out to let little boys get hurt." 

"What about the director?"

"You're clever. What do you think happened?"

"You didn't know who you were supposed to talk to, so you had to wait for us to figure it out," I guessed. "But I still don't know why he was involved."

"Oh, Finn. You're smart enough to know that I'm not about to explain the whole plan to you." She smiled briefly, and her hand drifted up to my hair. "I do like you, for what it's worth. But unfortunately I have to run, and I don't think you can keep up. At least this works out in my interest. The guards already think you're involved, so now they might just forget about me."

She leaned forward suddenly and our lips met. Taken by surprise, I didn't know how to react. She shifted to wrap her right arm around my neck, and she lay the flat side of her knife's blade against my cheek, probably to remind me that it was there. It wasn't until I heard a quiet click that I knew what she had done.

I jerked away from her and met her gaze. Without looking down, I gave my right wrist an experimental tug, but the cuff she had placed around it felt strong and my wrist was already sore. I panicked, but tried my best not to show it and glanced down at my arm. The cuff was attached by a short chain to a ring in the wall.

"Shh, Finn." Kassia's hand cupped my chin and she moved my head so that I had to look at her. She almost looked like she regretted what she had just done. "They'll arrest you, but I'll get away." We both flinched suddenly when something clattered against the wall near us. In unison, we looked towards the sound to see an arrow falling to the ground.

Maybe I could distract her long enough for the archer to catch up. "Kassia. You can't just—"

"I really am sorry about all of this," she interrupted in a rush. Then she was gone, running through the rain.

My left hand flew to the cuff around my wrist. I tried to slip it over my hand, but it wouldn't fit. In vain, I kept trying, desperately hoping that if I could just move my thumb in the right way, the cuff would come off.

Tannix's arrival surprised me. He was holding a bow in one hand and had a quiver hastily slung over one shoulder. He glanced at me, then up the passage, obviously contemplating chasing after Kassia. Then he looked back at me and he noticed the cuff.

"You missed," I said dryly.

He shouldered the bow and walked over to me. "I'm not an archer. Stop that." He gently pushed my left hand away from the cuff. Without explanation, he pulled out his dagger and stuck the blade into one of the chain links. He sharply jerked the dagger to the side and the link snapped, freeing me from the wall.

I wanted to go after Kassia, so I started forward, only to be stopped when Tannix grabbed the front of my tunic and pushed me up against the wall again. I understood why a moment later, when we heard footsteps running along the battlement above us. We were perfectly still for a moment, letting the wall hide us from sight, until the footsteps disappeared into the rain. When they had passed, I tried to move, expecting Tannix to let go of me as I did. Instead, he only tightened his grip on my tunic and pulled me closer.

I hadn't been expecting his kiss any more than I had the one from Kassia, but this time I responded. Suddenly Kassia and the king didn't matter. All that mattered was Tannix, his lips warm despite the cold rain, his arms holding me tightly in place. My confusing feelings for him swirled around in my head, fitting together in new ways. I understood why I wanted to see him so often. I understood why he had become such a good friend so fast. His actions made sense, too. The money, how gently he'd tended to my injuries, how panicked he'd been in Tandrin's room. The typical Telt image he had been chipping apart shattered. Tannix made sense. Somehow everything made sense. Then, before I was ready for it, Tannix broke away from the kiss and his grip on my tunic loosened.

Everything made sense, but words failed me. "Tannix..."

"Lord Tandrix!" The call came from down the passage, and we both turned to look for the speaker. A small group of guards had just turned a corner and could see us clearly. It was a harsh reminder of the reality of our situation. Tannix let go of me, but it was too late by then. They'd seen me and it would reflect badly on him if he let me go. I knew what had to happen.

"Tannix, arrest me."

He tore his gaze from the approaching guards to look at me. "I... I can't. Not again."

"You have to." My mind was racing, trying to come up with a plan. Any other plan, but nothing came to me. "I can survive prison, I did last time. The only way I'll get out is with your help, and you can't help me if you lose credibility for letting me go in the first place." At this point, the guards were close enough that I wouldn't be able to get away from them either way.

Tannix sighed, frustrated. "I'll get you out," he said.

I nodded, hoping I didn't look as terrified as I felt. There wasn't time to say anything else.

He gripped my tunic again, but this time he used it to pull me away from the wall. For a moment my eyes landed on his wrist. There was a line across his skin, a thin silvery scar.

For a moment I thought that if we had more time, I would have liked to kiss that scar.

Then the guards reached us and I was pulled away from him. My hands were held behind my back while someone roughly tied them together.

"Well done, my lord." The captain of the unit bowed his head slightly in respect to Tannix.

"Thank you," Tannix replied coolly.

"The king would like to speak to you," the captain said. "We'll allow you to inform him that the assassin has been caught."

"Thank you," Tannix repeated. He didn't correct the captain. He would have to explain everything to the king. He brushed past the captain to approach me. "I'm allowed to take a prize, am I not?"

"Of course, my lord. He is your prisoner."

Tannix reached up to my neck. He slipped a finger under my chain, pulling it out from beneath my tunic. The Order ring was still hanging on it, but he clasped his hand around it before any of the other guards could see, and he slipped the chain over my head. Briefly, our eyes met.

"I doubt he has anything else of value," Tannix said, his voice laced with contempt. "He is just a common thief, after all. I'm done with him."

The guard holding me started to pull me away, but a wave from the captain stopped him. "My lord, are you not going to tell him his sentence?"

Of course, I hadn't expected a trial. They thought I was in on the attempt; there was only one punishment for treason.

Tannix turned back to me. He was squeezing my ring so tightly his knuckles were white. "You'll be imprisoned for a year and a day," he told me sharply. He then paused, which probably looked dramatic to the men, but I could read him better than that.

I knew what he was going to say, and somehow it didn't scare me. I knew he would get me out of prison. He had a year and a day.

Tannix cleared his throat in a useless attempt to stall, then finally looked up. The rain flattened his hair over his eyes. I had never really thought about how nice his eyes were. How the blue of his eyes matched the blue he always wore. His soaked tunic draped across his shoulders heavily and clung to his chest, leaving very little to the imagination. I was seeing him in a way I had never really let myself see him before. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me—shivering in the rain, flanked by guards twice my size. 

I wondered how long he had been looking.

"And then," Tannix interrupted my thoughts with a weak attempt at his earlier distain, "you'll be executed."

***

And that brings us to the end of Without a King!

This is obviously not the last of Finn and Tannix. The second book in the Greatest Thief series, An Aimless War, is already posted!

Keep reading for some information about what's next for this series, a sneak peak for the next book, as well as some bonus short stories!

- The Greatest Thief (Finn as a child)

- The Reasons to Steal (a series of short stories about how each of the thieves ended up living on the streets)

For now, thank you for reading Without a King!

Special thanks has to go to @Navneruvesentlig for being the first person on wattpad to get to know Finn and Tannix. And another thanks to @spelunkadunk for some extremely helpful suggestions!

- Julie