"Perhaps we would have been wiser to not call upon him at all, then?" I asked. 

"He might inform on me, but the palace is a large place. We can't get in and out without a few prying eyes, but I would rather have steel with me as we do it." She reasoned, strapping the items to her waist with a sturdy belt. Kian did not wish to relinquish his staff, but it did stick out like a sore thumb. He had left it outside the gates after saving Camilla, to better grab it later. Despite my abandoning of the troupe, I held no illusions that after finding Camilla, we would have worn out our welcome fairly quickly. 

I grabbed a baldric, a brace of pistols, and a well-balanced sidesword. I was not very skilled with a sword, but it was better than using nothing and another staff or polearm would just stick out. 

"We're probably only a small problem to whoever is calling the shots now," Camilla said to me. 

"Optimism is a useful trait," I replied a bit snarkily. She grinned, and we drifted together and shared a few moments of passionate kissing, one of many tempestuous moments, before we drifted apart and made our way to the palace. 

Camilla opted to swing round the walls of the veritable fortress to the left, passing by many of the major businesses and getting within eyesight of the waterfront. It was more populated here and the walls were taller, the patrols more frequent, and that was exactly why we did not go through the gardens to the east, where they might expect us. It was an unexpectedly good idea, even to the clever Tilean woman. Once we reached the wharves, they were a shadow of their previous bustle, and the patrolmen were more than half what I had imagined. I still saw a few bodies of fallen swordsmen, blood staining the wooden tiles of the docks or the stone of the streets. 

Camilla and I vaulted over a short wall, cordoning off civilians from entering a warehouse in construction. We slipped in like ghosts, passing through the half open sky of the superstructure and reappearing near an alley past much of the docks, slowly but surely making our way toward the edge of the district. 

"We're going to use the rocks to climb the wall, aren't we?" I asked Camilla. Past the docks, jagged seaside rocks scythed against the waves, glistening from the spray and littered with barnacles. Some of them jutted up the walls until they were a scant arm reach from the parapets, and so far we had only seen a handful of armed men keeping watch. 

"Very good, you really are a university graduate," she joked.