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Roald, repeating a correction he found himself insisting on constantly. “And as you know... food will spoil, and ale or mead drunk by others just means more troublemakers for me to deal with. Preventing waste and vice is its own virtue,” added Roald, but Gully had started chuckling at his cheeky airs long before he had finished speaking.
    “Without a doubt!” mocked Gully.
    “I give Almonee a few coins when I can spare them myself,” said Roald, made to feel selfish and greedy by a thief in his bed, as had happened on more than one occasion. He shouldn’t feel this way towards him, but he was in a way proud of Bayle, the Gully Snipe, the notorious Thief of Iisen. He was proud of the person his brother was.
    All the things Roald felt for the person next to him — the comfort, the pride, the affection, the longing — threatened to overflow. If his brother, Bayle, ever disappeared the way others in the kingdom had, especially when he was out in the woods and bogs, it would be more than Roald could take, he felt. Gully had said that Roald wouldn’t know what it was like to have someone he loved disappear. He didn’t, but he knew the agony of worrying about it, of feeling like it would one day be almost inevitable, and the loss that hadn’t even happened yet was almost crippling. The only consolation was that if there was one thing the Gully Snipe knew to the last detail more than even the city of Lohrdanwuld, it was the very woods and bogs of the Ghellerweald that could so easily claim the lives of others. He had been raised there as a child, after all, and had been taught its ways extraordinarily well by the father that had then disappeared himself.
    He had tried many times to get Gully to stop going back to the woods and bogs because of the dangers therein. Gully’s point, and Roald had to concede it was a good one, was that people disappeared from the city as well; it wasn’t anything unique to the woods. If the gypsies wanted to steal away someone new, the city walls seemed to provide no protection to stop them.
    Before they fell asleep, and before Roald said something even worse, he told Gully, “I know you know this, but I’m glad you’re my brother, Bayle.”
    “ Foster brother...” insisted Gully.
    Gully’s recalcitrance towards seeing Roald and his mother, who had found him alone and wandering on the edge of the woods ten years earlier, as real family instead of nothing more than a foster family always broke Roald’s heart.
    “‘Foster’ is but a word,” said Roald, his voice carrying the wound. “Even with your distance and your incessant wandering and your complete disregard for authority, I would not be able to choose someone better than you, Bayle,” he whispered.
    He said it and felt better for having done so, even if Gully would understand what he was really saying and would grow a little uncomfortable at his advances. He waited for Gully to push a little bit further away from him despite the bed offering little recourse.
    And as expected, Gully turned and faced away from him. But then his brother gave Roald a gift. Gully shifted back to press up against his brother and would-be suitor slightly. Roald sighed and placed an arm around Bayle and held him comfortably, accepting the small gift of affection from his brother. He even ventured to give Bayle a brief kiss on the back of his head.
    Gully warned, “As Vasahle is my witness, if I feel your blunted weapon at my backside, I’ll run you through with my knife as you sleep.”
    Roald smiled to himself and said, “It would be well worth it.”
    He closed his eyes to let himself sink into the sleep he’d waited for all day, but an eye crept back open as Gully said a moment later, his tone now gentler than the threat he had made, “If I am ever to be hauled off to justice for my crimes, I would prefer it to be by your hands before any others’, Roald. I would be proud of you. With everything in me, I would be proud for it to be you to