The plan was simple enough: break the wheel of the next cart, force someone to stumble at the gate, and use the confusion to slip in. But Sonder didn't think it was enough.
She was small and quick, but stealth and sneaking wasn't something she was more skilled in than the average person.
There was something else she thought she could use.
She reached out and gathered a handful of sand from the air.
They weren't a single thing, not a lump, but a thousand tiny individual pieces, each grain its own.
In the plains outside Gloam, the wind shapes dunes as if it were a living thing like water.
Now she tried to think of sand the same way: individuals that could be asked to bend and help her hide.
As she called on fire as a friend and sometimes spoke to the earth and the plants as their own creatures, she would now ask the sand for aid.
She offered them mana, just a fragment for each grain that would help her.
The sand accepted with immediate response. It stirred in a thousand small motions.
Threads of dust lifted, then more.
The grains drew up along her. The effect was not a cloak so much as a kind of camouflage.
When the cart came, it rolled like any other heavy thing, the axle whining a weary song.
Sonder waited until it reached the hairline crack in the paving stone she had chosen, then worked her spell with the smallest motions.
The wagon juddered. A barrel shifted, and it fell off. The driver swore.
A guard turned, hands on his belt, voice rising as if to scold. And a servant, forced slightly right by Sonder's power, stumbled into the guard, both falling.
Voices overlapped.
Everything was in disorder.
The sand that cloaked her held, and she moved close to the wall, almost becoming a part of it, and she slipped between them through the small service door into the House of Hoar.
Only then did the grains ease from her shoulders and settle back into the floor, like a tide returning to its place. She was in, and the house closed around her as if nothing at all had happened.