Chapter 2

When Clar looked into a slightly broken mirror that was leaning on one of the walls in her room, she smiled victoriously. In the reflection, a figure with short, black hair that was flying in all directions covered the upper half of the face. She lifted the fake bangs to carefully drop a liquid on her cornea. She blinked a few times until her blueish iris changed colour to dark grey. You never can be careful enough, she thought to herself, while roughly covering her face in dirt. She laughed to relax her face but also at the fact how well she could act as a beggar - in the end, real experience, however old, is the best teacher.

Inside her torn, and dirty clothes, she put yesterday's newspaper and rushed out of her room.

After a few minutes of running and avoiding the evening patrol, she finally saw her beetroot from afar. A stack of papers was being handed over from a woman in ordinary servant clothes to the hands of a tall person in a cape that covered their face.

Luckily, they chose a busy place, Clar thought while going around through the crowd with her head down. In her peripheral vision, she registered a movement of the two. The caped person was now slowly walking in her direction. She checked that the newspapers are safely hidden inside her robe, she looked up, sniffed, and with her head down like a bull started to run towards the beetroot thief. People shouted at her but wisely got out of her way.

Crash! She hit her head on something hard.

"Oh, so-sorry for that mm-mister," she looked up quickly with her teary eyes, "I-I didn't wan-to bum-" In a second they felt a rush of wind and a shout of people.

Someone fell on the man in a cape which caused him to fall on the crying kid. He quickly covered their heads so that they would not take a critical hit from the flying items and confused people. He felt that she was scared, she held his clothes trying to hide underneath. As suddenly as the wind and chaos came, everything calmed down, only people still shouted at each other, arguing about whose cabbage it was, or who was responsible for ruining the dress.

"T-thank you for pro-tecting me b-but now…" At the moment, Clar didn't have to try hard to look freighted. It seemed like the man understood what she meant and scrambled to his feet. He shook off the dust and offered his hand in the direction where the kid lied just a second before, but she was already at her feet limping backward.

"Th-thank you m-mister, may you b-be blessed."

"Hey, come here!" he fumbled in his cape pockets. "Wait, take this to buy some medicine for the-" but when he looked up, there was no trace of her to be seen, "leg, well, it wasn't probably hurt that bad." He traced the presence of papers in his left inside pocket, and with a curious smile headed to a nearby alley.

Sorry not sorry, she thought.