Quin nearly spat their tea across the table. "No way," they said. "I took his arm off and ran him through."

"I remember," I said. "I was there. I don't know how, but he lived. Seemed pretty damn smug about it too."

Quin leaned forward, resting their elbows on the table and hanging their head in their hands. "Who the fuck can do that? He should have bled out within a few minutes at most."

Mouse took a book off the top of his stack and flipped it open. "We'll have to double check next time. Incinerate the body or feed it to a dragon or something."

I rolled my eyes. "Mouse, you know there hasn't been a dragon here for the better part of a century."

"Hyperbole," said the wizard. "The point is, we feed him to something big enough to crunch him up into little pieces. Let's see him come back from that."

"I don't know about you two," said Quin. "But I'm hoping there won't be a next time."

Mouse looked up from his book with a long sigh. "There will be."

"How do you know that?" asked Quin. "I'm sure he got what he wanted from the Tower. This has gone beyond us. It's time for someone at the Phoenix Roost, the Blackstone, hell even Ren's Hollow, to take the lead here. Anyone is a better choice than us."

Mouse reached down the collar of his robes and drew out an amulet on the end of a slender chain. "But only we have the key he needs."

I shot the wizard a scowl. "What in all hells are you talking about?"

"The seal he took from the Tower before he tried to kill the two of us. It's the family crest. Whatever he's looking for, I have the only way to open the vault it's in. I hate to say it but we're on borrowed time here."

"This didn't seem like something you should have mentioned earlier?" I asked.

Mouse shrugged. "For the past little while, we've been busy keeping you alive, and before that we were trying not die, and before that we trying to keep Quin alive, and then we're back to trying not to die again. I haven't exactly had ample free time to think about it."

"Point taken," I said. "So this vault, what's in it?"

Mouse ran his hands through his hair and looked up towards the ceiling for a moment, thinking. He looked like he was trying to peer into his own brain to find the thought he wanted.

"I'm not exactly sure," he said. "We had a lot of ancient stuff from the Empire, the Wars of Collapse, the Dark Times. My great-grandfather had a soft spot for history and nearly spent the entire family fortune on antiques and old relics. He filled a whole tower full of them, and then the library that cataloged what everything was burned down. We have a whole tower filled with mysteries."

Quin let out an acidic bark of laughter. "Well if that doesn't scream 'we have too much money' I don't know what does."

"Look, Quin," said Mouse. "If I could have gone back in time and stopped him from buying all that garbage in the first place I would, but I can't change the deck now. We just have to play the cards we've been dealt."

"Could always sell." Quin waved a hand at the few people milling around behind us in the tent. "I might know a trader or two here that could make that happen."

Mouse tucked the amulet back into his robes. "You're not the first person to have that idea. It didn't end well." He grew distant, staring off into the middle distance, lost in memory. "Not in the slightest."

I reached across the table and put a hand on his arm. "It's not a weight you have to carry alone. We're here if you need it."

Mouse nodded and blinked away a tear. "I know. Maybe some other time. For now, I think I'd like to spend some more time with the books. Focus on work, you know? There has to be something written somewhere that will point us in the right direction."

I frowned at the stack of books. "Is stabbing in the dark and hoping to find something in a random assortment of books really the best choice?"

He shrugged. "I don't know what else to do. Plus, the spells here are really useful. It's helping."

I wanted to say more but Quin tapped me on the shoulder and pointed towards the door. "Come on, Snip. Let's leave our bookworm with his books." Quin led me back out into the scorching heat. "Mouse has always been honest when he needs space. No sense pushing him."

We took a short walk around the village but the sun was too much for me and Quin soon had to find us a shaded spot to sit down and some more water. We sat under the only tree in the village, if you could call it that. The tree, for lack of a better word, was tall and thin with skinny, tangled branches and long red thorns instead of leaves. We sat in silence and watched the Townsfolk go about their day. For a small village it was busy enough. A caravan of squat wagons drawn by lean, long legged creatures with scales and horns pulled into town and the villagers rushed to attend to the travelers. Goods changed hands. The animals were fed. And almost as soon as they arrived the caravan was off again, long legged, lizard horses plodding through the sand and dragging the carts north towards the mountains.

"Seriously," I said. "It is a marvel that people can live here. How do you do it? Magic? Is all of your stuff enchanted to keep you cool."

Quin shrugged. "It's not magic. There are a lot of semi-permanant camps and villages around the desert like this one. Most people make a living herding the Desert Skinks around. We move them from oasis to oasis. It's a bitch of a job really. Skinks eat everything and you need to be careful they don't devour all of the plants and drink all of the water whenever you stop. So, we keep them moving. By the time you leave one green space the next one is usually recovered enough to harvest again."

I looked around at the endless waves of sand rolling around us. "If this is what you consider a green space, I'd hate to see what you call a barren zone."

Quin laughed. "This is more of a trading post than a grazing area. Close enough to the mountain communities in the foothills of the Sunfire's to the north and the Skink drivers to the south that it serves as something of a rest spot between the two."

"Makes sense, I guess." I scooted closer to them and rested my head on their shoulder. "So this is how you grew up? Traveling to places like this between long stretches of desert?"

Quin tensed and started tracing an idle scribble through the sand with one finger. "I guess you could say that."

"You guess?" I laughed. "I'd think that would be a yes or no answer."

"It's complicated. We did trade a lot. But we also fought a lot. Ran a lot. Drank a lot. Yelled at each other. Not of all of the things we traded we ours." Quin let their thought trail off and grew distant.

"That makes it sound like were bandits or something."

"We called ourselves family at the time, but you're right. Bandits is a better word." The village healer stepped out of a tent on the other side of town and Quin nodded in their direction. "Things were better when Grandfather was in charge. He likes to exaggerate, so I wasn't quite as small as he said I was when he left. I was maybe ten. Certainly old enough to remember what life was like when he led us, and what it was like after he left. Things got really, really bad, Snip. I am not the good person you think I am."

I took their hand in mine, interlacing our fingers and kissed the back of their hand. "What you used to be doesn't matter. The Guild takes that, remember? The only thing that matters is the person sitting next to me now. That's the person I love. I don't care who you were before."

"Like always, you're too good to me, Snip."

"Besides," I said. "It's not like I'm exactly sweet and normal either. A mercenary pulled me out of a vegetable patch and put a sword in my hand as soon as I could walk. Kind of messed up when you think about it. So if you're okay with courting a crazy person who's first memories are learning to fight, then I think I can be okay falling in love with a reformed bandit."

"We did a lot of evil, Snip. Homes got burned down. People got killed."

"When I was eleven, just after you joined the Guild actually, Hawk took me on a quest to wipe out a pack of Ogres. They were minding their own Ogrely business. Unfortunately that included stealing livestock and eating people. We burned homes that day too."

"That's different though. Ogres aren't people."

"Not as different as you might think. They were beating drums and singing songs when we showed up. They might not be people but they're closer than you think. They had families too. I still think about that day a lot. Still dream about it sometimes."

"Well look at us then, couple of sad, haunted excuses for Guild Heroes."

"I don't see us that way. I say we're both people who made mistakes and who have a chance to do better next time."

Quin leaned down and planted a kiss on my forehead. "I like the sound of that."

"Can I ask what changed? What made you leave your family and find the Guild?"

Another wagon crested the dune to the south. This one was pulled by a single reptile that looked like the smaller, meaner cousin to a Lowland Drake, and had a black banner mounted on a pole attached to the back.

Quin pointed to the cart. "She did."

I squinted out over the sands. The person driving the cart looked to be armed. The pommel of some kind of weapon peeked up over their left shoulder.

"Who are they?" I asked.

Quin stood and headed for the center of the village. "She called herself Vulture when I knew her. She was only an apprentice then, so I'm not sure if that's changed."

"Is that an option?"

Quin shrugged. "Pretty sure I've heard of that. One of Sabres other apprentices was excited to earn full Guild status so he could change his name."

"I don't think that's true. Hawk never said I could get a new name."

Quin turned and smiled at me. "I like Parsnip, though. It suits you."

"You really think it's the best name going forward? People won't listen to a Guildmaster Parsnip."

"I know I would."

"Yes, but you listen to anything I tell you."

"Not everything."

"No, and you're deflecting away from my question. So you met Vulture. What happened next?"

Quin shuddered. "After that was the shortest battle I've ever fought. See we had just pulled a string of bad jobs and someone called the Guild to take us down. We caught wind of it and spent the next week preparing for a whole damned army to march on us. Instead, they sent Vulture. She chased us across the dunes for a month and every time we stopped to sleep or rest, someone would go missing. Eventually it was just me left, and I decided to fight, like the idiot I was. I barely got one swing in. I thought I was done for, but the Quest card wanted us brought in alive. She gave me a choice, face trial with the rest of the family, or sign on with the Guild and leave it all behind. Things had been miserable for a long time and I didn't want any part of that life anymore, so I joined up. Trained a couple years at the Phoenix Roost before being shipped off to our Tower. And that was that."

"I'm glad you made the choice you did."

"Me too," said Quin with a sad smile. "I heard a few years later that some of the old clan tried to escape a fair trial. Paid for that mistake with their lives, and as far as I know, the rest of them are still in the dungeons below the Roost."

"You ever think about paying them a visit?" I asked.

Quin grit their teeth and shook their head. "Not even once."

We stopped in the center of town and waited for Vulture to make her way down the dunes. The cart rolled to a stop next to us and she swung down from the driver's seat. She was a tall and gaunt woman with sunken cheeks and dark circles under her eyes. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear she was part of Wraith's dead legions. She was dressed in flowing black robes with a hood but from the bunches and bulges in the fabric I could tell she was wearing armour underneath, at least a breastplate and pauldrons, and was carrying a handful of knives.

She smiled when she caught sight of Quin, but there was no real warmth or joy there. I'd seen Drakes grin like that before they swallowed deer whole. "Alessia Sand," she said. "It's been years. How are you?"

Hearing Quin's full, real name was weird. I didn't like it. It didn't fit who they were now. Something about Vulture set me on edge and I suddenly wished I had my bow to hand, or my sword, hell even my tiny knife. While the two of them busied themselves with small talk I stepped around to the front of the cart and introduced myself to the creature towing it.

It had yellow scales dappled with black spots, a short, wide head and a mouth the quirked upwards at the corners like it was always smiling. The lizard's limbs were thick with muscle and its toes were tipped with wicked claws. It looked friendly, but I had no doubt it would gut me and eat my innards without much of a second thought. The cold glare in it's grey eyes confirmed my suspicion. I kept a healthy distance and did my best not to make eye contact while it sniffed me and flicked its tongue in my direction.

It looked away. I wasn't a threat apparently.

I took a step forward. "My name is Parsnip. You are a very pretty creature."

The lizard turned back towards me and watched me with it's eyes half closed.

I smiled. That was an even better sign. I did my best to mirror its expression and took another step forward, still avoiding eye contact. "Good boy, or girl, I guess. Hard to tell with Drakes and their cousins." I reached for the reptile and it pushed its nose up against my hand. Its scales were rough and hard as iron. "You are very impressive. You must be very tough." I ran a hand down under its chin and along its jawline. "And I bet you can crunch bone like it's nothing, eh?"

The lizard's tongue shout out and licked my hand. It was rough as the sands under our feet.

"Not a very soft or cuddly beast are you? That's okay. Fluffy things get too much attention anyway."

I heard Quin say my name and pulled my attention back to their conversation.

"She's the Guildmaster?" asked Vulture. "The one talking to my skink?"

"That's right," said Quin.

Vulture stiffened and shook her head, peering down her beak of a nose at me. "Well then, Guildmaster. Report. What is is you need?"

The skink kept pushing at my hand with its nose.

"Um, sure," I said, looking down at the sand. "We should probably find some place to sit down. It's quite a story."