The breath vanishes from my lungs.
Not Roan. Liam. Liam, Roan’s older brother, who I thought was safely off studying history at some ivied academy by the ocean. Liam, who for ten years has walked in my nightmares. I’ve dreamed so often about the night we fled, I can’t separate nightmare from memory, but Papa made sure that I retained one thing: Liam Gerling was not our friend.
Liam tried to kill Roan when we were children. The three of us were playing in the forge, and Liam pushed his brother into the fire. If I hadn’t pulled Roan out before the flames could catch, he would have been burned alive. And as my reward, we had to flee the only home I had ever known, because Papa was afraid of what Liam would do to me if we stayed at Everless, knowing what I had seen.
Later, when I was twelve, Liam found Papa and me in our cottage outside of Rodshire. Their scuffle woke me in the middle of the night, and when I left my bedroom, my father grabbed my hand—he’d chased Liam off—and we fled a second time.
I’m paralyzed, seized by the sense that my worst fears have come to life—after all these years, he’s found me, found my father, again.
I know I should turn away, but I can’t tear my eyes from him, can’t stop picturing that face as it was ten years ago, staring at me in hatred through a wall of smoke, on the day we fled Everless for good.
I hear Papa’s voice in my ears: If you ever see Liam Gerling, run.
2
Even at ten, Liam was cold and remote. He went off to boarding school less than a year after we left the estate, but rumors about him continued to travel through his family’s lands. Everless servants on errands in Crofton said that his quiet exterior could turn to rage in the span of a heartbeat, that his parents feared him and sent him away. But it wasn’t rage that made Liam push his brother toward the fire in the forge, or chase us to Rodshire. It was cruelty. I can’t imagine how his malice might have grown in the years since.
Now, as I shrink back into the nearest doorway, I wonder how I ever mistook him for Roan. The boys share the same height, the same strong frame, the black curls—but where Roan’s hair is unruly, Liam’s has been wrangled and slicked back from his face. His mouth is a thin, humorless slash; his eyes hooded, impossible to read. Rising above the crowd on his horse, he looks like a statue, sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle—proud, unyielding, and eternal. He surveys us, the line of people waiting to see Duade.
Too late, I reach up to raise my hood, but his gaze has already landed on me. Do I imagine that he pauses for an instant, his eyes lingering on my face? Fear has lodged in my throat, and my hands tremble as I pull my hood over my hair. I want to turn away, to flee from the line, but that would only make me more conspicuous.
Thankfully, lowly townspeople don’t seem to catch Liam’s interest. His eyes scan past me, and he looks down to where his guards hold Duade between them.
The old time lender looks terrified. Roan would have called off his men, but Liam has none of his kindness.
“Please . . .” The quiet is such that I can hear Duade plead from where I stand. “My lord, it was an honest mistake, nothing more.”
“You broke the law. You bled time from a child.” Liam’s voice is deeper now, but just as cold as when he was a boy. “Do you deny it?”
All around me, shadows of remembered pain flit across faces, and I know these are the parents in the line. Children’s time is unpredictable, hard to measure and hard to bind, and it’s easy to take too much and accidentally kill the giver. Yet many have had no choice, and I imagine that watching your child bleed is its own punishment, crueler than anything the Gerlings could dream up.
“How was I to know she was a child?” Duade stares up wildly at Liam, excuse after useless excuse tumbling from his lips. “I believe only what I’m told, my lord, I am nothing more than a servant—”
Liam’s voice cuts through the air as cold and sharp as a knife. “Take him back to Everless. Bleed a year.”
This stops Duade short. “A year?” For a moment, he just seems stunned. Then panic fills his face. “Lord Gerling, please—”
The collectors haul Duade toward a waiting horsecar. Liam twitches his leg, as if to dismount, and my stomach churns with nausea. I suddenly feel in danger of fainting. While Liam is distracted, I duck my head and hurry from the line, toward an alley I can take as a shortcut home.
At the edge of the market, I glance back. Immediately, I wish I hadn’t. People are drifting away from the time lender’s shop, but Liam is still there, looking straight at me. My heart stutters, and for a moment that lasts entirely too long, I’m frozen, trapped in his piercing gaze. If he recognizes me . . .
Run. My father’s voice.
But he digs his heels into his horse and turns it away, back toward the main road, as if he can’t wait to be quit of so contemptible a place as our village. My breathing is ragged in my own ears as I turn, too, and hurry homeward.
When I emerge from the village into our barren wheat field, the panic clouding my mind fades a little, leaving only the deep, inescapable dread in my stomach that Liam put there with his look. I’ve had nightmares since the night we were banished from Everless—smoke-filled night terrors of the fire grew into dreams of being pursued by a faceless killer. Dreams of fire and terror and the acrid smell of hot metal and burning straw, which fills my nostrils again as I picture Liam’s eyes.
Ten years have passed since he last saw me, I remind myself again and again. Papa and I were only servants, me a knobby-kneed seven-year-old girl in a servant’s cap. He might recognize Papa, but there is no reason he would know me.
It’s not until the cottage comes into view, a paltry wisp of smoke drifting from the chimney, that I remember I meant to bring home our dinner. Amma’s strip of dried venison will have to do for tonight. For Papa’s sake, I hope the hour-coin I fetched for the trout will be worth the empty belly.
The sun sinks lower. I look west, toward the horizon, where the sky is laced with gray and golden red. Another day spent.