Synthia Candle left Magnimar in the dead of night, at a dead run.
After four years of juggling the competing interests of three very different masters, Synthia had finally dropped all the balls at one foolish stroke.
Raised on the streets of Dockway by her sole living relative, Oris, a brother ten years her senior, Synthia knew she was destined to follow him into the service of the Night Scales, the city's oldest thieves' guild. She quickly proved adept at the high-stakes game of burglary, and so caught the eye of Lady Vammiera Symirkova, leader of a rival guild, the Gargoyles. When Oris was killed by his immediate superior in the Night Scales as part of a putsch for a new Guildmaster, Synthia's first instinct was to flee to the Gargoyles. But Lady Symirkova wanted more from her than just a another pair of deft hands. The Gargoyles wanted eyes and ears within the Night Scales, so Synthia became a spy in a house of thieves, only working for the Gargoyles when a particular job required her particular talents.
But she wasn't working for either the Gargoyles or the Night Scales the night she was finally caught. Impulsively, Synthia had decided to do a freelance second-story job, robbing the personal holdings of a merchant she knew from guild contacts was on an overland run to Korvosa. What her contacts hadn't told her was that the merchant was a personal friend of Captain Acacia Uriana, fiery head of Magnimar's City Watch, and that the good captain was keeping a close eye on her absent friend's holdings.
Finding herself caught elbow-deep in the merchant's safe, Synthia had little choice but to surrender. After first keeping her mouth firmly shut under questioning, she was surpassed into talking when Captain Uriana revealed that she knew all about the double-game Synthia played with her life, though the captain refused to reveal her sources for that information.
And so, the double-agent became a triple-agent.
For four years, Synthia thieved for both the Night Scales and the Gargoyles, spying on the former for the latter. For four years, she fed a steady trickle of information about the operations of both organizations to Captain Uriana.
For four years, she was sensible.
What could upset such a dangerous balance? A big score, of course.
A month past, the ruler of Magnimar, Lord-Mayor Haldmeer Grobaras, threw an extravagant ball at Defiant's Garden, his home in the Naos district. For the wealthy and noble, it meant the social occasion of the year. For the thieves of Magnimar, it meant that every significant manor in the city would be empty for one night. Both the Gargoyles and the Night Scales planned multiple jobs, and both included Synthia in their plans. In the past, when her competing allegiances conflicted, she had always managed to find a way to satisfy both. This time, she would satisfy neither.
Let less burglars rob empty houses. Synthia Candle decided to rob Defiant's Garden, on the night it would be most closely guarded, on the night when everyone who was anyone in the city would be very much present.
Her target was the Lord-Mayor's private safe on the topmost level the manor. Synthia penetrated the grounds, climbed the outer walls of the house in full view of any of the drunken party-goers who would have simply had to look up to notice her, and made her way past the trapped and locked window. She checked to make sure the room's door was locked, and set to work on the complicated lock of the safe.
She was done in by lust and drunkenness. Not her own, but that of the Lord-Mayor, who chose that moment to cajole a reluctant young scion of a Riddleport merchant family in to his study to look over his engravings.
Caught red-handed, Synthia made for the window and the gardens. She was forced to fight her way free, and to this day does not know if the young City Guard she cut down as she fled in to the night survived.
What she does know, is that within an hour, other City Guards were patrolling the streets outside two of her bolt holes, including one she'd never told anyone about. Her third option seemed safe until she noticed two people having a friendly conversation in a nearby alley. One of the people was the Night Scale who had killed her brother. The other was Lady Symirkova's erstwhile daughter, the assassin Mizmina. She was burned on every side.
Not knowing what else to do, Synthia opted to flee the city. She knew the tide was on its way out, and that there would be ships making sail away from Magnimar. She weighed her purse and she weighed her options, then turned and ran for the docks.
And so found herself aboard the Jenivere, bound south.
