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thoughts?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “I’ll take care of the sentry.”
    â€œJust you?”
    â€œJust me.”
    It wasn’t bravado on my part. I just saw the size of that campsite, and I knew Grace was not the best at calculating the odds. The numbers favored the home team at least two to one without taking into account that on one side we had a bunch of young girls, and on the other we had trained professional assassins.
    Also, if things went wrong I’d feel better if the bad guys had no idea that the girls were here. I at least had the advantage that these guys didn’t want to kill me. Even if I ended up where I’d started, tied up in a burlap sack, at
some
point this spell would wear off and I’d be back in Lendowyn Castle.
    At least I hoped it would.
    If that happened, I’d feel better if I didn’t leave a pile of dead teenage girls in my wake.
    I watched the campsite for a few hours as the night deepened and the cook fires burned low. At some point Grace whispered, “You staring them into submission?”
    â€œThere are two types of thief, young lady.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œThe first type is gone before you realize your purse is missing.” I placed my hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eyes. “The second clubs you with a rock and swipes the boots off your corpse. There’s probably twenty trained killers sleeping down there. Tell me which thief has the better chance of making it out alive?”
    She sighed. “The first.”
    â€œGood choice,” I said, holding up the dagger I’d lifted from her belt with my other hand. “Because that’s the kind of thief you’ve got.”
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    I wasn’t kidding. That
was
the type of thief I was. It didn’t matter if the camp was twenty people or two, the last thing I ever wanted was a physical confrontation. That kind of thing most likely ended in blood and humiliation even before I’d been princessified. Every fight I’d ever won had been through dumb luck.
    Or cheating.
    The sentry fell victim to the latter.
    I studied his movements, and once the camp seemed mostly asleep, and the lone guard was deep in the middle of his watch, I waited in the shadows by a tree in the path of the circuit he walked around the camp. Just as he passed, I pulled a rope taut at ankle level. As he tumbled forward I took a large rock and helped his head into the forest floor.
    While he was stunned, I tore his mask off and shoved it into his mouth. I used the rope to tie his ankles and wrists together behind his back, and to hold the makeshift gag in his mouth. By the time I was done, he was groaning and struggling ineffectively. After disarming him, I dragged him off into some brush so he was hidden from the camp.
    Now I just had to swipe a wagon.
    Sounds simple, right?
    Strangely enough, these people didn’t leave their horses tacked and harnessed to their wagons overnight while they camped. I guess they wanted their animals to rest and graze for some reason. That meant I had to quietly fetch a team and hitch them up to one of the wagons without alerting the camp.
    Yeah. Simple.
    It was already pretty clear what I had to take. There were a couple of large wagons that seemed capable of carrying most of the men and gear, but either one would have taken a four-horse team to move. Trying to hitch up four horses quietly in the dark pushed way past the bounds of sanity. So I just took my dagger and started cutting reins, bridles, and straps. It wouldn’t permanently immobilize them, but after the damage I did it would probably be a good hour or two before they’d be able to hitch a team to either one again.
    My target was a smaller, but much more opulent, vehicle. The carriage was all gilding and elaborate scrollwork, and bore a coat of arms that I couldn’t make out in the dark. The girls might be cramped inside, but it only needed a