Little Thieves (Little Thieves, #1)

by Margaret Owen

I open my mouth and she immediately claps a hand over it. “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t let you give relationship advice to my archnemesis.” “You haf an arfhnemefif?” I garble through her fingers. She lets me go. “I do. Keeps trying to upstage me every time we play the same venue. I hate him. Also: illegally handsome.

There’s just so much I could be stealing right now, if I didn’t have social obligations with the man who tried to poison me earlier in the week. And if it weren’t for the curse. And, I suppose, the law, though really we all know my concern for that is cosmetic at best.

There’s a quick speech (all Adalbrecht, because of course it is) and the steward, Franziska, comes forward with a ridiculous ostrich-feather quill (studded in sapphires along the shaft, because of course it is).

That’s a complete lie, but I’ll be a stone-cold corpse before I concede a point to a sentient fireplace poker with an undeservedly high opinion of itself.

“I can’t make fun of that, you inconsiderate ass,” I grumble.

After he’s done swearing at me, I observe, “You know an awful lot of big-boy no-no words for a man of the gods.” “You are an absolute terror,” he snaps. “At this point I’m frankly amazed nothing else cursed you before now.” I shrug. “Who’s to say they haven’t tried?

“You see,” I say gravely, “when two people love each other very much, or at least think the other’s passable if they squint—”

For someone who’s supposed to be a highly trained supersleuth, he’s awfully easy to pickpocket. “What’s the deal with this? Special gift from Papi Klemens?” He snatches it out of my hand. “Will you please refrain”—I pass him his writing charcoal—“from robbing me”—and his makeshift notebook—“while I’m working?” Then he lets out an exasperated sigh. “I need my spectacles to see, Miss Schmidt.”

How much time do we have left?” I shove my hands in my pockets, annoyed, and annoyed that I’m annoyed. “Sorry, I don’t speak Sanctimonious Coatrack.”

“Well, this is happening. Canoodling youths it is.” Emeric wrings his jacket in his hands. “There has to be an alternative—” “We get caught and probably die, that’s the alternative,” I hiss back. I pull his jacket free and toss it haphazardly on a shelf, like it was discarded in the throes of a very unlikely passion, and undo a few buttons on my blouse to add to the illusion. Then I make myself grab a fistful of his shirt and pull him closer. “If it’s any consolation, this isn’t how I envisioned my first—” “No.” He braces a hand on the shelf behind my head, leaning away like I’m poison. “I don’t—I don’t want to do this.” I let go, a little staggered. He doesn’t want to kiss me. No—not just doesn’t want. The notion is so repellent, he would rather get caught by Adalbrecht, the monster at both of our throats. Oh gods, I want to die. I want the floor to cave in. I want to shrink until I’m small enough to hide behind the towels. It’s not that I want to kiss him—I don’t think I do—it’s just gutting to be reminded that without the pearls, I’m not … Not Gisele. It doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself. I don’t know what I expected. I may not be a good person, but I know too well how it feels to have something forced on me, and I won’t do that to anyone.

I absolutely LOVE this. The lack of consent that goes with this trope has always bothered me and this passage puts a BIG ol spotlight on that

I never understood why anyone would wake up after a hundred years and marry the prince who broke into their bedroom for a kiss. Or dance with a stranger once and decide to spend the rest of their lives together.

Sleeping beauty and Cinderella

I always felt a baffled kind of melancholy when others raptured over love at first sight, like maybe something was wrong with me, maybe I didn’t know how to love someone at all. I didn’t know it wasn’t just me.

I am not going to smile at him. I refuse on principle. (The principle is: I’ve already met my emotional-availability quota for the day.)

“I don’t want to marry him,” the princess said. The tears in her eyes were neither of joy nor of relief. “No one ever does.”

No. I am not coming out of this night grudgingly liking the smug bastard. I refuse on yet another principle (which is: There’s only room in this town for one smug bastard. That smug bastard is me).

this is how men like him work. They do something wretched and try to convince you it wasn’t that bad, then pretend it never happened at all.

gaslighting

I’m a bit disappointed that we’ve gone back to “Miss Schmidt,” but it would take a knife to my throat to make me admit it.

“You are an absolute fool, Emeric Conrad,” I tell him, because I will not admit I’m glad he’s here, with or without a knife to my throat.

But if Gisele prefers girls, the candidate pool would be severely limited, leaving only the few noblewomen able to conceive with her.

Lesbian and trans women rep!!! I fucking LOVE how this book is so causally queer. I makes my heart sing

And maybe giving the notes back won’t change a thing either, but it feels like—ugh, I can’t believe I’m saying this, who am I—it feels like the right thing to do.

“Yes, fine, we’re friends,” I grumble. “Even if you have terrible taste in sweethearts.” “I think she tastes—” I clap my hands over my ears. “NOPE. Don’t need to hear it.”

There’s a strange kind of horror in seeing someone cry for the first time.

In the last ten seconds I’ve whipped from sympathy to embarrassment to indignation to a mélange of all three, garnished with a flicker of bewildering warmth at being vouched for. Any attempt at articulating that is going to come out as a mortal scream.

“If ‘not being satisfied by a man’ was grounds for a murder charge, you’d have a lot more suspects,”

“Yes, she is mean, but she is my friend, and she is trying. And you are all hurting her.”

“Just money?” I gasp through the cacophony, and sweep a hand at the children watching flames devour the Gänslinghaus. Only some of them even have coats on. “How are you going to feed them? Where are you going to stay?” I shake the purse at her. “How are you going to buy a new house, Gisele? How can you live like this for a year, and still say it’s just money?”

Emeric kneels on the floor by my feet, and my mind can’t quite wrap itself around the way that makes me feel.

If I found it disorienting for him to be on his knees, I am in no way capable of reckoning with him slowly, cautiously beginning to unlace my boot.

“I think there are lives that make it easy to be good. Or what most people call good. When you have wealth, status, family, it’s easy to be a saint, it costs you nothing. I can’t say if you’re a good person or not. But the more I know of you, the more I understand that the world keeps making you choose between survival and martyrdom. No one should fault you for wanting to live.”

Some part of me has always looked for how I brought these things on myself. I missed a spot of tarnish on the silver, I missed the way the dame gripped her mead, I missed something and set them off and if I could figure out where I went wrong, they wouldn’t call me stupid or throw things or strike me. There had to be a reason for it. That made it something I could control. Something I could hope to stop.

I want him to stay like this. Close to me, touching my face feather-light, like I am something precious, I am worth taking care. Like I deserve to live without wounds, not despite them.

“So … that was a really good apology.” (Was I significantly distracted for most of it? Yes. Am I mulling over the viability of you have to take the other stocking off now, for symmetry as a compelling argument? Also yes.)

grief is a house on fire. It needs to burn itself down.

You know the saying, little thieves and great ones?” I nod. “I’ve always hated it. It’s everything wrong with the empire, that we punish people who are usually just trying to survive, when people like the margrave get away with whatever they want.

This is why he keeps tripping me up, finding truths that catch me in the throat. Our lives are very different, but we both speak the brittle language of loneliness.

This is when I realize: I want that. I want him to chase me. But it’s not just the chase. I want it to be him. There’s a shimmering, intoxicating kind of thrill to it, this game between us. I am his puzzle and he is my lock, and it’s an arms race to solve the other first. But somewhere in all the knots and twists and trapdoors, he turned to an arsonist, leaving his embers in my veins, smoke on my tongue, a fire burning softly in my heart. And it will not die easy. I want him to chase me. I want to know what it feels like to be caught. I want to burn with him.

He picks the Page of Grails, so we both take a drink. That has to be it, right? It’s the wine making me notice the lines of his throat, how he missed the top button on his shirt in his haste. It’s only the wine gathering the firelight along his narrow jaw, the way his black hair falls over his brow, into something I find handsome. (It’s not the wine. I don’t want to talk about it.)

“Nothing you haven’t already heard.” “I want you to tell your own story.”

Even though it hurts, this is what I want: to bleed the poison out.

Von Reigenbach will face justice if I have to drag him to it myself.” You would think the most formidable thing in Castle Reigenbach wouldn’t be a reedy law library incarnate, but in that moment—he is, because I believe him.

I am not prepared in the slightest for the simple, devastating intimacy of being believed.

I’m going to strangle him. Or kiss him like the empire depends on it.

About what he wished he could say to Klemens (goodbye, mostly), and what I wished I could say to the von Falbirgs over breakfast (eat glass, mostly).

Emeric isn’t the same. I want to think of another puzzle he can’t solve. I want to empty his pockets and get caught in the act. I want the simple peace of being known by him; I want this strange, terrible hope he’s given me, that I could build a life where I choose, instead of living ready to leave everything behind.

I don’t know what’s worse: that he’s slipped into my heart like a knife, or that I like the feel of him there.

“I cannot tell you how many principles of knife safety you are violating right now.” “Where’s your sense of adventure?” “When it comes to stab wounds? On indefinite sabbatical.”

I’m at a loss for words. Probably because I’m having an extraordinary and overwhelming number of feelings right now, and chief among them is outrage that I am this attracted to a personified pocket ledger.

I’m assuming you only like girls.” “I—I’m pretty sure.” “Then it makes all the sense in the world why you would hide it. It narrows down your prospects.” She nods, face tight. “There are … options. I’ve heard of warlocks who could help me have a child. And a few noble families have daughters they thought were boys at birth, so they might … But I’ve never met them, and Mama never would have paid for me to travel across the empire just for that.”

This is how I discover that despite fielding ludicrous amounts of flattery on Gisele’s behalf for the past year, I am completely unprepared for someone I like to say something sincerely nice about me. This is also how I discover my panic response is to laugh so loud a passing donkey brays back.

I don’t know how to explain it to them, that it just reminds me of what I’m not, what I will never have. That just because he and I are playing outside the rules of the trinity of want … doesn’t mean he wants a girl like me. That girls like me, neither lovely of face nor sweet of temper, are not courted. They are simply used to pass the time.