[Mekatra]

"Now you're starting to think... so since you need some leather and something to write with, perhaps that should be your next little training exercises. There are some hides for writing in the king's study. If you get caught by the guards you'll spend the rest of the night in lock up until the king wakes to pardon you in the morning." She had brought him to the courtyard of the castle. "You'll have to do twice the work tomorrow to make up for the rest of the missed night."

She considered brushing off his questions, not really wanting to speak about herself. "My mother was a maid in my father's house. When she became pregnant my father's wife cast her out and she eventually ended up in a brothel. I was raised there. The woman that ran our brothel was a devotee of the masked god, so when she saw I had a talent for slipping around unseen she convinced my mother to take me to the shadowed temple. I was trained... and then worked in the slums and lower quarter until my father came looking for his lost progeny. All of my siblings had died in childbirth so he spurned his wife and thought to seek out my mother and I... Thus I became nobility."