this might become a longer story if I have the time someday.

Fenris knew something was awry as soon as he entered the manor.

Of course it was rather hard to find a specific symptom of something amiss in a house overrun with rats, skeletons, and fungus. But Fenris had a very definite sense that someone else had been here, and as a fugitive he was inclined to take those instincts very seriously.

He drew his sword and stepped carefully forward.

"Come out and face me, if you dare!" the elf called to whoever might be listening. He lit his brands until they blazed and whirled around at a sudden, high-pitched squeak that issued from behind him. He might have simply raced at the source of the noise — stab first, ask questions later — except that he had noticed a small detail that made him pause.

His intruders were tiny.

Tinier than elves or dwarves, even. They appeared to be children.

They were trying, very ineffectively, to hide behind one of the curtains.

Fenris sighed. He generally tried to forget that he had neighbors now, and never gave a thought to what they might think of him. But he knew he could easily be blamed for frightening the local brats and burned out of his home for it. He would have to handle this carefully.

He set down his sword and allowed his brands to cool. "Come out of there," he said crossly.

A nervous giggle issued from the curtain, but no movement followed.

Patience was not a virtue Fenris possessed in abundance. He tore aside the curtain and exposed the two hiding children sitting on the windowsill, who cringed up at him with enormous eyes.

"Out," he commanded them.

The two children crawled down from the sill and scrambled to their feet. They were little human girls with dark faces and huge brown eyes. They wore brightly colored dresses festooned with flashy scarves and mismatched accessories, and the lacey skirts were dirtied about the knees. The larger one rushed to brush the dust and cobwebs off first her dress, and then her sister's.

The tiny one had shoved all the fingers of one hand into her mouth and was busily sucking on them. Fenris had no way to tell how old she would be but she must have been very young. She looked like a giant head floating a spindly little body beneath it, and her face screwed up as if deciding whether to cry.

The elder child hastily finished shaking the dirt from their clothes and took the smaller girl's hand protectively. Unlike her sister, she looked him right in the eye, and did not blanch.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"We're spies," the littler one said around her fingers.

The elder one nodded. "That's right."

He glared at them in perplexity until he realized that this was a pretending game.

Yes, children did that, didn't they? He had no experience with children and no memory of his own childhood, but Hawke had decribed something like this in his stories about Lothering. Sometimes young people would playact at being adults. For some reason.

He couldn't resist correcting them. "Spies would not dress in such vivid, easily visible clothing."

"We're Orlesian spies," the elder child helpfully informed him.

Which drew a sudden, surprised chuckle out of the elf. He supposed that made its own kind of sense. The Orlesians having very little grasp of subtlety in his experience.

The tinier human looked offended at his laugh. She was very serious about being a spy. "Make him stop," she prodded her sister.

Her sister lowered her eyebrows and attempted to look fierce. "We have infiltrated your house. Now you have to tell us things."

Fenris leaned back against the wall and contemplated the two little spies. "A spy does not ask his target for information. A spy observes in secret."

"We did," she complained. "We watched out the window. And we looked at the mail that's all piled up outside your door."

"And what did you learn?"

"Nothing. You come and go a lot but you don't talk to anybody and everybody's afraid of you. They say they're not, like Mr. Harriman does, he says all kinds of things he would do to teach you a lesson, but I think he's a liar and he wouldn't dare." She looks down at her shoes for a moment, as if wondering if she shouldn't have said that. Then she thinks of something else. "There's a name on the letters but it's not yours, because Papa says the house isn't yours and that means the mail isn't yours either."

"Correct."

"Then what IS your name?"

He regarded the both of them seriously. "If I tell you, will you leave?"

They looked at each other.

The elder child said in a solemn voice: "Our mission would be complete then, so… yes."

"My name is Fenris."

The little one cocked her head to the side and screwed up her face in a dissatisfied manner. "Fenris what?"

"I have no other name."

She took a moment to consider this, with great seriousness, and must have found it an acceptable answer. Suddenly she grinned. "Okay. Bye!"

She tottered up to her feet and skipped blithely away, her big sister starting after her. Turning quickly to wave, she told him, "I'm Jamila and she's Rita. Nice to meet you!"

And she too scrambled out of his view, little legs pounding noisily against the cobblestones.

Fenris harumphed and closed his door and resolved to block the entrances more effectively next time.