THOM

On the day Rook became my brother again, I turned into a liar.

Balfour was the first to ask, once we started up a correspondence, whether or not I had any memories of my older brother. Our time together had been so distant, and to fondly remember a brother only to be confronted years later with the reality of Rook was bound to be a nasty shock.

The question surprised me, but I’d found myself writing an answer nonetheless.

Of course I remember John, I’d said, clutching at the few specifics that I knew to be true. They were enough to make these memories convincing to others and—after a time—I too became convinced.

After that, it was too late. When others asked me whether or not I remembered my older brother, I always said “Of course,” as though it was a foolish question, and didn’t bear thinking about. I’d always prided myself on my honesty—a rare virtue, since it was always the first thing a Mollyrat cast aside—and that I’d stifled it so quickly was a notion that troubled me.

“So you two are brothers?” the innkeeper asked. He was a short, provincial man, with one of those recognizably provincial accents: blurring his h’s and his e’s together, and rounding off his r’s, as though his tongue couldn’t quite shape them in time to get them out. I wondered if I could ascertain his place of birth and whether or not he had been raised there. To me, it seemed clear that he had been born in Hacian, just on the border between New Volstov land and the Old Ramanthe, but I never offered a theory on birthplaces unless I was a hundred percent sure. You never knew whom you’d offend, and among this man’s properties I noted a certain strength of arm, if not of character, that I myself did not possess.

I would let the matter go, though I would make note of it in my travel log.

We were far enough into the countryside that no one knew Rook by sight. We were anonymous travelers, with the mystery of the open road before us—though when I’d shared this sentiment with Rook he’d threatened to take my logbook and stick it somewhere where I need make no further entries. There was nothing to intimate that my brother was one of the greatest heroes of our time—the famed pilot of the dragon Havemercy, who had saved this country.

Not single-handedly, but for some reason Rook had a way of sticking in people’s minds like an irritating burr.

“Yes,” I told the innkeeper. “We are brothers.”

“Don’t look anything alike,” said the innkeeper’s daughter. She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring straight at the window, out toward whatever place Rook had disappeared to earlier. The excuse was that he intended to stretch his legs, but we’d been walking for half the day, and personally I would have found it more relaxing to take a hot bath, have a hot meal, and compile notes about what we’d seen.

“Ah,” I agreed, not trying to offend her either way. Searching for some other topic, I happened upon the only matter on which I was an expert. “I notice that you have an accent of peculiarly—”

“I’d best be seeing to the horses,” she said, hurriedly fixing a strand of her hair before disappearing out the door.

“Now you listen here,” the innkeeper said, reaching across the desk and grabbing me by the collar. “I don’t want any funny business in my establishment.”

“She’s just gone to see—”

“The horses?” the innkeeper said. “Horses my left nut. She doesn’t need to fix herself up for any horses. You find that brother of yours and you make sure nothing happens.”

“I will do my utmost,” I promised. It was the liar in me reasserting himself—though it wasn’t a true lie, since I did intend to try my hardest.

I just wasn’t particularly optimistic about our chances—mine or the innkeeper’s.

But what was most shocking to me was that anyone seemed to think that I’d have any influence on the situation. Despite what had changed since the time of our meeting in Thremedon—a time I preferred to examine in private, like poking at a bad tooth—it was fair to say that I still had very little influence upon what my brother chose to say and do.

To his credit, thus far Rook had managed to avoid any behavior that would have gotten us thrown out of a night’s accommodation, but this was hardly the first time I’d been threatened in this manner. And it seemed that all the innkeepers we’d encountered were under the misapprehension that I had some control over my brother.

This was far from the truth, but I found myself marching off to avert disaster as best I could—a lone sandbag against the coming flood.

The horses were liable to grow spoiled, with three people heading out to see to their needs. Except that it was only Rook who’d set out to look—myself and the innkeeper’s daughter were there for another beast entirely, and one that didn’t go about on all fours.

I had barely reached the stables before I heard his voice. Whether he’d lost the best of his hearing during his time with the Dragon Corps, or whether he just didn’t care who heard him, I had never been able to ascertain, but Rook was loud and it carried. He had no reason to quiet himself since, for Rook, reason was akin to desire. If he didn’t desire something, he found it completely unreasonable.

“We can do this easy or you can be difficult about it, but it’s gonna happen, so you might as well be a good girl and keep your mouth shut, all right?”

A sinking feeling settled into my stomach. Visions of being thrown bodily from the establishment, of sleeping on the hard ground in the cold with no respite for either my tired muscles or my grumbling stomach, flitted through my mind. I hoped the innkeeper was still inside, or at least tending to matters that would keep him there for a while, for I was in no mood to consider giving up the bath I’d been fantasizing about all day. I picked up the pace.

Fortunately, it was a short enough distance across the courtyard that I didn’t have time to call up anything too lurid in my mind. Perhaps it was because the circumstances under which I’d been reunited with my brother had been so particular, but I found myself consistently expecting the worst.

As Rook had kindly suggested, offering his opinion on my “nerves,” I was a grim little fucker when I set my mind to it.

When I reached the stables, he was bent double, digging a stone out of one of the horses’ hooves with his pocketknife. The innkeeper’s daughter was standing as close as she could without chancing a stray kick. She held her hands clasped nervously in front of her. It was as innocent a scene as I could have hoped, and I couldn’t help feeling some perverse disappointment, as though I’d somehow been tricked.

“Picked up a stone, did he?” the innkeeper’s daughter asked.

“She,” Rook grunted, his attention on the horse, who didn’t seem bothered in the slightest, though I knew that if I’d attempted the same trick, I’d have received a good kick to the chest for my efforts. Rook’s hands had that effect on animals—and women too, I sometimes thought in my less charitable moments, but I prized myself on being too much of a gentleman to voice the comparison. “Not her fault. Some people have a hard time followin’ the trail.”

He’d added that last part just for my benefit; he must have, since Rook was of the opinion that it wasn’t any fun listing my shortcomings unless I was in the room to hear them. I thought I’d been rather quiet in entering—not knowing what I was about to walk in on—but apparently my best was still not enough to catch Rook off guard.

I should’ve known, but that didn’t stop me from trying every now and then.

“That wasn’t a trail, it was the side of a mountain,” I sniffed, crossing my arms. “And if I’d known you were going to declare your own shortcuts every ten miles, I’d have prepared myself better.”

The innkeeper’s daughter spooked like a startled horse. She hadn’t heard my approach, nor did she know enough of Rook to know when he was needling someone in the shadows, and she proceeded to glare at me as though I’d interrupted the most intimate of encounters.

Fortunately, I’d survived glares more withering than hers.

She was a strapping sort, and it was obvious that, despite her father’s precautions, she could take care of herself. Only Rook wasn’t the sort of man you could take care of yourself against, no matter who you were. The countryside had never been prepared for him. He was like a walking natural disaster—one for which the Esar provided no compensation or monetary relief. In fact, since the dissolution of the Dragon Corps, I was sure he wanted nothing to do with Rook, and the sentiment was entirely mutual.

“Hungry,” Rook said, more like a grunt than a word.

The innkeeper’s daughter didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll bring in some supper,” she supplied, moving past me as though I weren’t even there. I could hear her feet crunching the hay, and the whinnies of the horses as she hurried off.

“Amazing, isn’t it,” Rook said. He whistled, a low sound to soothe our horse, then dug the pocketknife in deep and, with one fluid motion, eased the stone out.

“That is one word I’d use to describe it,” I admitted. “I wonder if she’ll bring two plates.”

“You didn’t fucking ask,” Rook pointed out. He flipped the stone over in one hand, the nails of which were cracked and muddied, before he held it out to me with a grin, knowing full well that I’d recoil. “Memento? Souvenir? You’re always asking about ’em.”

“Rook,” I began.

“Didn’t think you would. Can’t put this kinda thing down in your book, can you?”

I couldn’t, and it was impossible for him to understand. The beginnings of a headache—not unfamiliar to me now, as all my days ended with them—were creeping toward my temples from the bridge of my nose. I recognized the dull pain instantly, and knew there was only one solution: a hot bath, a full meal, and a good night’s sleep.

“Sure is taking a long time to get the fuck out of this country,” Rook muttered, giving the horse one last soothing rub before clapping her, in an unsettlingly recognizable way, on her rump. Even she allowed these offenses with a pleased whinny, and I gave up hope of ever convincing anyone that Rook’s abuses were not misplaced signs of affection. It was all too easy to fall into that trap with Rook. Whether it was conscious or not, he encouraged that response—the angry sort of person fools believe themselves capable of calming.

I had assumed—quite miserably presumptuous of me—that things would change when we were on the road, but every muscle in Rook’s body was tightly wound with such thrumming, anxious tension it seemed at times he would snap like a metal coil and ricochet with violent speed in an unknown, dangerous direction. He was no longer openly hostile toward me, however, and I was grateful for even this smallest of changes.

Logic said you couldn’t change a person, but I was committed to trying.

“Well, Volstov is very large,” I reasoned, shoving my personal thoughts aside in an attempt to soothe him with facts. I always found facts very soothing. “I could show you the map again, if you’d like.”

“I thought I told you to take that map,” Rook began. Before he could finish, he nearly ran into the innkeeper’s daughter—which on any other occasion wouldn’t have stopped him, but she was carrying a plate of the most incredible countryside food. The very smell of it was so delectable I found myself transported to another time and place, and my stomach rumbled so loudly I couldn’t help but be embarrassed.

“I prepared it for you myself,” the innkeeper’s daughter said, somehow managing to support the heavy-looking tray on one arm while twirling a stray lock of hair with her finger.

“All the loving care of home, huh?” Rook asked. “Well, this idiot’s hungry. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

“What?” I asked, snapping back to reality a little more rudely than I might have wished to under the circumstances. Someone had to defuse this situation, and it certainly wasn’t going to be my brother.

“Pardon?” the innkeeper’s daughter managed, fluttering her eyelashes with what seemed to be a nervous tic.

“Been listening to his stomach growl for near on an hour now,” Rook said, taking the tray from her hands as though he wasn’t drawn in the slightest to its symphony of aromas. “It’s grating on my fucking nerves.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the innkeeper’s daughter, in a way that really meant she was sorry, but it was only because I was there at all.

Rook shrugged, thrusting the food at me without as much as a cursory glance. “He’s too stupid to say anything. Got dropped on his head as a kid and he’s never really been the same since. Hard traveling the country with a brother that slow, but we’ve all got our burdens.”

Excuse me, I wanted to say, but my mouth was full of bread and turkey gravy, and I couldn’t quite form the words. It was rude not to speak when spoken to, but ruder still to speak while eating.

“Oh, I didn’t realize,” said the innkeeper’s daughter, looking at me with a sudden sympathy. “Have as much food as you like. It tastes delicious,” she said, the words drawn out and slow as though she were teaching an infant to speak.

Rook chuckled as though he’d found a silver lining in the cloud after all, then clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s all right. He’s just like a big animal, really. Real sweet-tempered until he gets into one of his fits.”

Once again, I tried opening my mouth to defend myself, but all I could manage was a kind of grunt in protest.

“I’ll just show you to your room then, shall I?” Hands free once again, the innkeeper’s daughter brushed her skirts out and eyed Rook in a way that suggested hope sprang eternal in the hearts of some women.

“Sure,” Rook said, starting off like he knew the way better than she did. “Come on, Thom. You can finish inhaling that bird when we get there.”

I followed in his wake, careful not to choke myself with the dual purpose of eating and walking.

It was strange to be addressed—in that voice—by a proper name after Rook had put so much time and energy into thinking up the most caustic, personal insults. Stranger still were the times when we forgot ourselves and slipped into John and Hilary—though this happened rarely, after a mutual decision on both our parts.

“It’s just too fucking weird,” Rook had said, which meant that it was too fucking weird when other people called us by names we had long since put aside.

I’d agreed. It was one of the few instances I could recall that we’d been on the same page regarding even the simplest of issues.

“We’re crowded tonight,” the innkeeper’s daughter explained, skirts swishing as she followed Rook up the stairs.

I hadn’t seen many other guests about, but then we’d arrived at the inn rather earlier than I’d expected, on account of Rook’s little shortcut. Inn traffic, as I’d made note of in my travel log, seemed to pick up most at night after the sun had set and travelers realized they hadn’t planned ahead to where they’d be staying. One had to strike first in order to secure the best accommodations, and if one was lax in his preparations, one found himself sleeping under the stars.

It was an unsettling way to go about things, but it seemed to have worked out well so far.

Rook, of course, thrived on it, as he thrived on all things where there was a chance of being eaten or drowned or falling off a cliffside.

The innkeeper’s daughter unlocked the door to our room and stood back to let us survey the surroundings. I tucked the tray of food a little closer against my chest, following Rook inside. It was a fairly standard room, bare but well tended to. Clean. No bugs that I could see, and therefore superior to most of the lodgings I’d taken in Thremedon.

“Bathroom’s just through there,” she said, still behaving as though Rook were the only guest for the night. “I’ll be showing guests in for the rest of the evening, but if you need anything at all, my room’s second from the left on the first floor, and local people know not to bother me much past eleven.”

I couldn’t help but wish that Rook’s particular charisma worked half as well on the innkeepers as it did on their daughters. We might have had extra gravy, or perhaps a discount.

Rook surveyed the premises with the same bored, slightly derisive air he’d had for almost everything we’d seen up until this point. The innkeeper’s daughter twisted that stray lock of hair in her fingers again, anxious to know whether he’d heard her and not entirely willing to ask.

“I’m gonna take a bath,” he said, nodding when he’d decided that the room was suitable. “Bring me up some dinner when you get a minute, will you? He doesn’t really know when to stop, and I don’t think there’ll be much left when he’s through.”

“You poor thing,” the innkeeper’s daughter murmured, staring at Rook with such rapture that you’d have thought he’d up and announced he was joining the Brothers of Regina.

I’d been mentally compiling my update to our log, but this was enough to make me pause.

“I beg your pardon,” I began.

“That’s all,” Rook said to the innkeeper’s daughter, still hovering in the doorway.

“I’ll have it right up,” she promised, smiling as Rook disappeared into the bathroom.

We were left together, staring at one another, completely at odds. “Thank you,” I began, but my pleasantries were too late; she swung the door closed behind her without a second look at me.

“Am I invisible?” I demanded, going over to the bathroom door once she’d gone and there was no chance of her overhearing me. It was ironic, really, as there had been numerous times in my life when I’d wished for nothing but the power to be invisible. Now that I had it, such treatment was beginning to wear on me.

“Not the way you’ve been eating,” Rook snorted. “Get out, Cindy. You ate my dinner. I’m taking the first bath.”

“Please,” I said. “That language.”

“Look,” Rook said, not for the first and no doubt not for the last time. “I’m tired and I’ve been traveling just as much as you. You wanted to come along, so you play by my rules. Eat your fucking turkey and leave me be.”

Once again, a door was shut unceremoniously in my face, and I was left alone. The room smelled of gravy and horses, and the mud of travel but also of clean sheets. There was only one chair, and one of the legs was shorter than the others, so that when I sat the thing nearly went out beneath me.

To soothe my spirits, I took out my travel log and began to write of that day’s adventures. No matter how minor, I did wish to remember them.

ROOK

The only problem I had with the fucking Hanging Gardens of Eklesias was actually getting there.

I repeated the same thing over and over to myself, trying not to rip any throats out. You try traveling with someone who spends more time talking about what he’s seeing than actually seeing it and you ’ll know what I mean. It was like dragging a lame horse along behind me, helping it out because of sentimentality instead of shooting it like I should’ve done, and I never had too much patience for that shit in the first place.

Now he was tired, now he was hungry, now he was a bit fucking parched—there were any number of fucking problems that could make a good day’s traveling take three instead. Stopping to talk about a ruined wall or a pile of stones or an old farmhouse wasn’t my style. I didn’t care if this was the famous spot where Absalom the Gentleman had killed himself only to reappear months later in the Arlemagne countryside, and I definitely didn’t care that this was where some Ramanthine revolutionaries had made their last stand.

“Perhaps some of Ghislain’s relatives,” Thom’d said, in that hesitant way he had that made me want to smack him.

“Sure,” I’d said. “Whatever.”

I didn’t want to think about Ghislain’s relatives—or Ghislain himself, to be perfectly honest, since then Thom’d wonder why I wasn’t “keeping in touch” or whatever the fuck it was he thought he was doing with that cindy Balfour. I couldn’t see much point in thinking too long on things that’d already passed, and everything that I’d had in common with the other members of the corps had gone out with our girls.

What I really missed these days—what was really getting under my skin—was how quick things used to go. How quick you could get from one place to the next when you weren’t stuck to the ground. When you were flying.

Horses were fucking slow, and they felt all wrong beneath you. The sounds they made were animal sounds—the kind of noise you had to tune out just to hear yourself think. Horses never asked you for an opinion and they never told you where to fucking shove it when you were going the wrong way. Fuck that. I was so tired of looking at horses, buying horses, trading horses, putting horses down for the night, shucking fucking pebbles out of horseshoes and making sure horses didn’t see snakes on the road that I was this close to leaving and doing things by myself, trusting my own legs and no one else’s. The only fucking problem was sitting outside the bath, eating the local gravy and writing about it in some idiot book he thought about more than he did about real people. That fucking problem couldn’t move like I could, and wouldn’t ever if he kept eating the way he did.

Yeah, I’d made a big mistake. And now I was suffering for it.

That made it even fucking worse—knowing it was my fault and not knowing how to get rid of it. Sure, I could just fucking leave him where he was. He’d probably find his way back to Thremedon, eventually, where all the walkways were paved and you couldn’t spit without hitting a building, and there were as many books in the libraries as there were people in the city. He’d be in his element again, talking to professors and experts, coughing up theories, and never going to any of the places he was chattering about.

I closed my eyes. The water was starting to get cold and I was starting to get pruny. The fucking braids in my hair took forever to dry, especially in the countryside, and especially at night, when everything got damp as—well, as fucking horses.

But I didn’t want to go outside and deal with the gravy, and I certainly didn’t want to go downstairs and deal with the bitch who’d made the gravy. I had an itch that fucking couldn’t fix and fucking would only aggravate it. And it wasn’t thinking of Thom getting in my way, or thinking of the problems it’d cause, or thinking of anybody’s feelings that was stopping me, either.

Point was, I just didn’t fucking want to. And that’d never happened before.

“Don’t expect you to believe me, but one day, Airman Rook, you’ll appreciate things beyond rutting with the loudest girls Our Lady has to offer,” Chief Sergeant Adamo’d said once, back when he was still Chief Sergeant and before he turned into some kind of fucking professor on us. Or so Thom’s letters said; I hadn’t wanted to stick around long enough to see what the boys did with themselves after the war, and Chief Sergeant Adamo turning professor on us was one of the reasons. At least it didn’t bother me to think about Adamo the way it did some of the others, and anyway I had bigger fucking problems right now than feeling squirrelly over the guys who were long past feeling anything at all. Anyway, I didn’t see as how what Adamo had said could be it at all, since I wasn’t even halfway toward appreciating any of the things we’d seen so far. We were moving too damn slow.

In fact, I didn’t remember any of our journey, excepting that time we’d taken the shortcut and the horse’d spooked and sent Thom straight into the blueberry bushes. Wasn’t the same as a handprint on his face and he sure as shit didn’t appreciate the memories as much as I did, but it’d kept me laughing all the way to that night’s inn.

But that “incident”—which was what he called it—had all been a couple of weeks back. After trading horses—what kind of an idiot could keep his hold on a dragon and not a horse, I wanted to know—I was getting mighty sick of traveling with the forgotten thirteenth wonder of the world: my fucking brother, the talking blueberry.

I twisted the braids back from my face—only thing more fucking annoying than damp hair was that same hair hanging in my eyes—and braced myself for whatever barrage of questions lay waiting for me on the other side of the door.

On a full stomach, Thom’s brain was more daunting than the entire bastion-damned Ke-Han capital laid out bare and blue. I opened the door.

“She bring the food up yet?” I asked. Talking first was the only way to get the drop on him and it was near on fucking impossible to get a word in edgewise unless you came out swinging.

Fortunately, I had a lot of experience there.

He was writing, so of course he didn’t answer me right away, which was just another layer of icing on the fucking cake. We’d been through this before and he said it broke the flow of whatever he was writing and that he had to get his sentences down first before he forgot them, or the point he was making. Damn waste of my time is what I called it, and he was the one who got mad when I started throwing things to get his attention.

“Whatever,” I said, tucking in my shirt, then untucking it again, which pissed me off because I didn’t know why I’d done it in the first place. “Fine. Don’t let up on chronicling your fucking eating tour of Volstov’s piss-poorest inns. Guess you won’t miss me when I drop dead of starvation.”

The gobbler made a funny sound, almost like a snore, and his head drooped lower to the desk. I couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t been writing at all. He’d fucking fallen asleep.

“Guess you weren’t that eager for a bath after all,” I said, taking the liberty of moving the tray so he wouldn’t wake up with his face in it.

It took a special kind of witless moron to fall asleep with his head on a plateful of turkey, but that was my brother for you. At least he hadn’t gotten any gravy in his hair, except that saving grace was only because he’d taken the liberty of eating it all first.

I cracked my neck and pulled a jacket on over my shirt. Looked like I was gonna have to brave the wilderness of downstairs without him. What a fucking shame. With any luck the bitch’d stay in her room, waiting for my grand appearance—her getting ready for it was probably why she hadn’t brought us our second dinner—and meanwhile I could have myself a real night off.

She’d gone and told me where she’d be, after all, so I knew just what to avoid.

Of course, helpful little priss hadn’t told me anything useful, like where the kitchens might be, but unlike some people, I was resourceful. I followed my nose.

The common area was about as crowded as I’d been expecting, full of bearded men and their wives—who were less noticeably bearded, but not exactly picks of the litter, either. The conversation died down a little when I showed up, which was just fucking peachy by me since the last thing I wanted was someone striking up a conversation about my hair while I was trying to choke down a late fucking dinner.

I sat down on my lonesome, pretty set on avoiding anything that had both turkey and gravy since I’d seen and smelled enough of that for one night. I was far enough away from people that they’d know to keep their distance, but the whole place was small enough that I’d still have to listen to them talking.

That was fine. I’d tuned out raid sirens to sleep, so I could tune these bastards out.

“Let me see it, just once. I’ve always been so curious,” said one of the travelers’ wives. She was wearing some sort of bonnet over her hair, which was—according to the walking encyclopedia peacefully making drool stains on his travel log upstairs—a sign of chastity out here in the southern country. Her husband had a bored, red-faced look about him, and there were bits of turkey caught in his beard.

Not that I was interested, but after looking over it was pretty clear that most of the inn’s patrons were gathered together in a group, chattering among themselves like hens and roosters, and about that much brainpower among them, too. At the center of the group was some poor pockmarked bastard with milky-white eyes and drooping ginger hair. It made me laugh, since he looked about the same as if someone’d taken th’Esar and run him through a printing press. He moved like he’d had one bad fever too many as a kid and never quite bounced back, and every now and then his fingers twitched. A gruesome fucking sight if ever I’d seen one, but these country folk couldn’t seem to get enough of whatever story he was serving up. He was holding something in his hands, but I couldn’t see it over the top of somebody’s bonnet.

After that woman’d spoken up, asking to see “it,” a murmur of excitement rippled through the crowd—whispered comments and the creak of chairs being pulled forward as people jockeyed for a better position.

Take the bonnet off, bitch, I thought, and—despite how much I hated them all—I leaned a little closer myself. That was mob mentality for you, and even I couldn’t resist it all the time, even when I saw it coming. The trick to avoiding it was sticking to what was important. In this case, what mattered more than country gossip about people I’d never met was eating my dinner and getting out of here.

Turkey Beard muttered something and rolled his eyes. I was with him, particularly since the serving girl’d brought me a proper plate of food and I had something else to turn my attention toward.

Ginger Hair clearly felt differently. The more he was pressed by the squabblers around him, the more important he became to himself, making a big to-do of going through his pack, drawing out a smallish metal box, and unlocking it with a key he was keeping—like it even mattered, like anybody fucking cared what he was hiding—around his neck.

Someone gasped. I took an extralarge bite off of whatever poor animal they’d served me up instead of fucking turkey and let out a belch. Just to even things out.

“Only eyes, please, no hands,” Ginger rasped in a reedy voice, like straw breaking. “Not that I don’t trust your company, but I paid good money for this, so don’t muck it up.”

“From one of th’Esar’s dragons,” murmured one of the bonnets, only I didn’t really catch her face. It was what she’d said that mattered.

“I don’t believe it,” sniffed a little man, who wasn’t quite man enough to have sprouted his own beard yet. “Why would it be here? In the hands of someone like you, to boot? It ain’t real.”

“Jealousy’s disgusting in a child,” Ginger replied. “I’ll tell you what the peddler told me: Even if history doesn’t appear in the books yet, one should still be mindful of it.”

“Everyone knows the dragons went down in the middle of the battlefield,” the little man said, but he was just as interested as the rest of them. My teeth were so tight my jaw was about to crack.

“And then they were destroyed,” said a woman. “Everyone knows that, too.”

“Destroyed, or merely disposed of?” Ginger asked. These weren’t his lines; he was too gormless for that. Someone’d fed him a story—a story they were all eating up. Someone was out there selling bits of shit and telling country suckers they were off my fucking girl. All of a sudden, I could hardly hear anything over the roar of my pulse thumping away in my ears.

I stood up, leaving my half-finished dinner on the table, since I didn’t have anything even remotely resembling an appetite anymore.

“I’d like to fucking see that,” I said.

Everybody stopped talking, which had been the fucking point. The bonnets and the beards alike all looked at me like I was a barnyard animal suddenly asking them to please pass the fucking potatoes, their jaws hanging open and their eyes glazed over.

“Am I speaking fucking tongues?” I asked. “Last I checked, I was in fucking Volstov.”

Ginger must’ve known which way the wind was blowing—not in his favor—because he nudged the bonnet sitting next to him out of the way. Damn right, I thought, but I didn’t take her place, just shoved in to stand over him so I could see what the fucking deal was.

In the box was a scale. It’d been pretty badly burned, of course, but one side of it hadn’t taken too much damage, and on top of that, it’d been polished to look like it was pristine. Some of the gilding was worn away because of it, so it caught the light all wrong. Silver, so it wasn’t mine, but I’d seen that color before. I’d know it even if I was asleep.

“Chastity,” I said.

Everybody was looking at me like I’d gone crazy. Maybe I had. But I couldn’t take their gawking for another second. I was going to start knocking heads together, beards and bonnets alike.

“The fuck are you looking at—” I started.

“Rook!” Thom said, from across the common area.

“Rook?” a bonnet said.

That name was starting to be a fucking problem. I didn’t have time to be recognized or sign anything. I didn’t want to tell stories, or answer stupid questions; I didn’t want any of these idiots to know how things really were because unlike some people I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t know how to explain anything. The whole mess just was, and it wasn’t for anyone to know about but the people who already knew. It was why I’d left in the first place. Maybe I’d been a hero for this country but now I couldn’t stay here one fucking second longer, and even that was starting to be too much.

Without thinking about how much Ginger paid for it or even how he’d shit his breeches, I elbowed him in the face and grabbed the box from him—everybody else still too dumbfounded to make a move against me or figure out what I was doing before it was too late. Someone in the crowd let out a shout, but I was already turning away.

Thom’s face was blotchy and horrified, with an ink stain under his nose like it was bleeding. I could’ve punched him right then, but I could’ve punched anybody at that point. Who it wasn’t didn’t matter.

“Are you stealing?” Thom demanded.

“Can’t steal something that didn’t belong to a man in the first place,” I snarled. Everyone was shrinking away from me now, but I didn’t care what they were thinking. “Someone’s selling our girls. Piece by fucking piece.”