Chapter 1 Chapter 1
Under the kitchen floor, there were spider webs, dirt, and the smell of old wood.
Kaelen, who was eight years old, tried not to breathe too loudly as he pressed his face against the cold stone.
Through the cracks in the floorboards, rays of light from the lamp moved across the ceiling above him.
After that, the front door blew up.
It didn't work. They made it explode.
Heavy boots stomp in, hinges scream, and wood flies. Four pairs, maybe. Men who didn't show up to talk.
His father's voice came from the kitchen. He got loud and angry, which is how he acted when he was scared. "What is this?" "Get out of my house right now!"
A man laughed. Not the kind that means anything is funny. "Merchant, SIT DOWN. We have business with you."
Something heavy fell on the table. His mum yelled. Just a sound, no words, and then it stopped fast like a hand covered her mouth.
Kaelen shut his eyes so hard his head hurt. His heart was beating against the ground beneath him. Don't move. Don't breathe. Be nothing at all.
Another voice. Younger. "Check the rooms. Make sure we're alone."
Boots moved through the house. A door slammed open. Then Lira started crying in the bedroom. That shaky hiccup cry she only got from bad dreams. He heard her door open.
"Please don't." Lira's voice. Small and shaking. She was four years old. "I'm scared."
"It's okay little one." The young voice said it but didn't mean it. Something in the sound was wrong in a way Kaelen couldn't name but his stomach knew.
"No!" His mother's voice came out muffled, like someone was holding her. "Leave her alone she's just a baby!"
Something crashed in the bedroom. Lira screamed once. Short and sharp like a struck match. Then nothing.
The whole house went quiet and the quiet was worse than anything that came before it.
His mother started sobbing. "Please. Not my children. Take anything. Take everything. Just please."
"Sit her down," the deep voice said. "We got questions for your husband first."
Chairs scraping floor. His mother's crying moving further away toward the corner.
"Liam Valerius." The deep voice said it slow and flat. "You been expanding. Making deals with the eastern merchants. Cutting into territory that's not yours."
His father's voice shook but it tried to hold itself together. "I don't know what you mean. I trade leather. I don't bother a soul."
"You bother Lord Alden." He said the name like it was supposed to do something to the room. "He sent us to deliver a message."
"Lord Alden?" His father sounded genuinely confused, not performing it. "I never crossed him. I barely know who he is."
"You know his business partner. The one you undercut on the spice route. That's his cousin. You made him look small in front of people. Lord Alden doesn't forgive that."
"That was fair trade. His prices were too high and people came to me instead. Since when is that a crime?"
"Since he said so." The deep voice exhaled like a man tired of a conversation he's had too many times. "Get it over with."
His father yelled something. A word Kaelen didn't know. Then there was a wet crunch that he felt more than heard and a gasp and then the sound of a body hitting the floor.
His mother screamed his father's name. Over and over. "Liam, Liam, no, Liam!"
More sounds then. His mother fighting. Something hitting her. Another wet sound. Then it went quiet again.
Kaelen lay under the floor with his cheek against the cold dirt and listened to the silence and the silence pressed back against him like it had weight. He covered his mouth with his hands so he would scream and catch their attention.
Drawers opened. Papers moved around.
"Check the study for the ledger," the deep voice said. "The boss wants the numbers straight."
Footsteps again. Then the younger voice, close now. Right above where Kaelen was lying. "What about the boy? The list said a son."
He stopped breathing. He could see a dirty boot through the gap above him. He could smell the leather of it.
The deep voice made a short sound. Almost bored. "Not here. Probably sleeping at a friend's."
The boot didn't move.
"A pup with no den won't last the winter." Flat. Tired. Like talking about weather. "Leave him for the city to eat. Let's move."
The boots walked away. The broken front door creaked on its ruined hinges. Footsteps on the street outside. Then nothing.
Kaelen didn't move. He physically could not make himself move. He stared up at the sliver of light through the floorboards and watched it change from yellow to pale grey while something inside him went somewhere he couldn't reach.
He didn't know how long he was there. At some point the cold from the stone got all the way into his bones and his fingers stopped feeling like fingers.
He pushed the loose board up and climbed out.
The kitchen smell hit him and his body understood what it was before his mind would let itself. Sweet and thick and wrong. Like the butcher shop in summer heat. All his emotions ran dry. He went looking at what was before him. His body was shaking with tears falling down his cheeks. No sound of cry from him. Just tears.
He made one rule. Don't look. If he didn't look it wasn't real yet. He fixed his eyes on the back door and he walked past the table.
He screamed while crying “I will make sure y'all pay dearly for this!”
Lira's doll was lying face down in the dirt next to her little bean plants she'd been so proud of. He stepped over it. Through the gate. Into the alley.
The city was waking up around him like nothing had happened anywhere. A wagon rolling somewhere. A man shouting at someone to move. Kaelen walked and didn't know where and didn't care. The house was behind him. If he turned around something inside him would crack open and he wouldn't be able to stop it.
A woman at the well watched him pass. A boy in a nightshirt, grey with dust, walking like he'd forgotten how to be a person. She said something to her neighbor. He didn't hear the words. Everything had gone far away, like listening from underwater.
He walked until his body just stopped. He ended up under a bridge near the old canal. Green slow water that smelled like rot. He crawled back into the shadow and put his back against the wet stone and sat there.
A pup with no den. The city would eat him.
He watched the water. He didn't cry. The grief was there, he could feel the shape of it somewhere deep, but it was locked behind something and he was eight years old and he didn't have the key.
Ten years later a man came through the Trader's Gate.
Grey coat, road dust, eyes that didn't move to the things most people's eyes move to. People stepped aside without knowing why. The way you step around something you can't quite look at directly.
Kaelen Valerius. Eighteen. His face had stopped looking eighteen somewhere along the way.
He walked through Charter and the city showed him two versions of itself at once. The real one on top and the old one underneath. The corner where his father's cart used to sit. The sweet shop his mother loved with its window boarded over now. The alley where Lira played tag and always cheated and laughed about it when she got caught.
Ten years and the city had just kept going. That was the thing that sat wrong in him. It had just kept going.
His feet took him to the Ashen Quarter the way feet do when somewhere is burned into them. Narrow streets. Buildings leaning in. And then there it was.
Two walls left standing, black from fire, open to the sky. The garden swallowed by thorns. Some pale white flowers growing through it all like the ground didn't know it was supposed to be a grave.
He stopped at the broken gate. The same gate he used to hold open for Lira when she came through with both arms full of something she'd found.
He stood there and waited to feel the thing he'd been expecting to feel for ten years. The big feeling. The one that would mean something.
It didn't come. Just that cold weight in his chest that had lived there so long now it felt like part of his body. Like a stone swallowed young that the flesh had just grown around.
An old woman behind him. Bent low, carrying firewood, eyes gone white with age.
"You lost, son?"
He looked at her. Then at what was left of the house. At the two black walls and the open sky and the pale flowers growing through everything.
"No," he said. Rough voice. Unused voice. "I found it."
She shuffled off muttering about ghosts.
He stayed a while longer. Wind moved through the open walls and the house made a sound like it was still trying to say something after all this time. Like something in the bones of it hadn't finished yet.
A pup with no den. The city would eat him.
He turned away from it and walked.
The stone settled in his chest where it always lived.
They left him for the city to eat.
He was back now.
And he was hungry for revenge.
