He walked rapidly, passing buildings of faded pastel clay with weeds growing out of cracks in the walls and the bitter stench of cheap pipe weed hanging heavy in the air. The four-story buildings were depressingly uniform in their decay. Inside, tiny apartments were rented out for coin or pipe weed or the kind of favors that the nobility in their fancy estates had no idea existed.
People sat on front stoops watching the street with careful attention. Sebastian met the gaze of a few of the runners—children responsible for quickly informing the right people about the arrival of the city’s guard or an unsuspecting member of the upper class—and gave them a look that promised consequences if they interfered with him.
He didn’t want trouble with those who ran the streets.
And he’d made sure to earn a reputation for seriously injuring those who brought trouble his way.
Sebastian turned a corner and faced the hill leading toward his mother’s house. Keeping his face expressionless in the face of the crumbling, filthy buildings took effort.
East Kosim Thalas had never been pretty, but before the recent introduction of Teague’s newest business venture, a drug called apodrasi, it had at least made a passable attempt at being clean. Now, addicts huddled on doorsteps or on broken blocks of stone, pulling at their hair and gnashing their yellowed teeth while they tried to sell their labor or their bodies for enough coin to get another vial. Now, the street bosses weren’t content to commit crimes against the merchant and noble classes. They had sellers moving through their own streets, giving free samples to those too young or too beaten down to refuse an escape from the life they led.
Apodrasi and Alistair Teague, the undisputed crime lord of all Súndraille, were east Kosim Thalas’s curse, and no one knew that better than Sebastian.
Making his way into his mother’s building, he climbed the rickety stairs to the third-floor apartment where he and Parrish had survived her neglect and his father’s whip.
He stood outside her door, scars aching, the tang of pipe weed resting on the back of his tongue, and listened while he fought to stay calm.
It had been six months since his father had left for his new job collecting payments for Teague in the neighboring kingdom of Balavata, but still Sebastian’s hands shook and his chest ached at the thought that the man who’d raised him might be on the other side of the door.
Dragging in a deep breath of dusty, smoke-scented air, Sebastian unlocked the door and entered. As the door clicked shut behind him, he rolled to the balls of his feet and raised his cudgel while he swept the room with his gaze.
His mother lay on the threadbare sofa, a filthy blanket pulled haphazardly over her legs while she slept, her fingers still curled around a pipe that reeked of the cloyingly sweet scent of apodrasi. The candle on the table beside her had guttered out, and a small puddle of wax had spilled across the surface, hardening around a layer of dust and bits of pipe weed leaf.
He walked past the couch and checked the tiny room that doubled as a makeshift kitchen and bedroom. It was empty.
The ache in his chest eased. His father was still in Balavata. If there was any justice in the world, he’d never return.
“Who’s there?” his mother asked, her voice husky with sleep and the lingering effects of apodrasi.
He moved into her line of sight, and she pulled herself up to a sitting position.
“Come to rob me?”
He sighed, a headache beginning to spike. “I never come to rob you.”
“Ungrateful boy, leaving me just like your father.”
It was ridiculous that even after years of shoring up his defenses against her, she could still find a way to hurt him.
He held up the sack. “I brought food for the week.”
“Did you bring coin too?”
He turned to unpack the sack’s contents into the single cupboard that hung over the slab of wood that served as a countertop.
“I asked you a question.”
A question he was sick of answering. “No.”
He ignored her string of curses and put the bread, figs, lamb strips, and potatoes into the cupboard. The oranges went into a cracked bowl on the countertop. Then he turned and interrupted her tirade.
“If you didn’t buy apodrasi with any coin you got your hands on, I might bring you some.”
“You know nothing.” She gave him a smug little smile and shoved her tangled gray-black hair out of her eyes. “Your father makes sure I get what I need.”
His hands clenched into fists, and his heartbeat roared in his ears.
“Does he?” Sebastian snapped. “Is that why your cupboard has nothing in it until I bring you food each week?”
She recoiled from him and bent to fumble along the floor for the pipe she’d dropped. When she sat up, she was holding her pipe and a tiny glass vial with a few iridescent drops of apodrasi left inside.
Mumbling something under her breath, she upended the apodrasi into the pipe and reached for the candle. When she discovered that there was no flame left to light her pipe, she turned beseeching eyes toward her son.
Sickness crawled up the back of his throat at the need on her face, and the answer to the question she’d always refused to answer was suddenly clear.
“Teague takes some of Father’s pay and gives it to you in apodrasi, doesn’t he?”
She lifted a shaking hand toward him. “Candle?”
He worked to unclench his fists. To draw a breath past the band of tension that felt like it was crushing his chest. When he was sure he’d erased all outward signs of anger, he approached her, blinking against the stench of her unwashed body mixed with bitter pipe weed and the sickly sweetness of apodrasi.
“You need help,” he said quietly. “A new place, far from here. Some time to come down off the drug and start over fresh. Hiding from your life in the bowl of a pipe isn’t the same as making a true escape.”
Her lips quivered, and her voice lashed out bitterly. “Like you did? Like Parrish? Leaving me here. Never coming back. Just like your father.”
He closed his eyes and crushed the fleeting longing that once—just once—she would speak to him like he mattered.
“I’ll be back next week. Don’t forget to eat.”
“What about a candle?” She lunged off the couch as he strode toward the door, her voice rising. “Sebastian! A candle? Please?”
He closed the door behind him and closed out the sound of the vicious words she hurled at him as he hurried down the stairs and out of the building. His hands were fists again, his stomach jittery as he walked toward the gate. Why was it that even after eighteen years of learning to expect nothing better, he was still disappointed every time he saw her? What was wrong with him that a tiny piece of his heart clung to the devastating need for her to see him as someone worth loving?
It was useless to think about. Useless to let it burrow under his skin and slice him raw. Instead, he had to focus on getting through east Kosim Thalas in one piece so that he could show up at the palace in the morning, apply for a job, and hope the king gave him a chance.
Picking up his pace, he moved through the city and tried to convince himself that by the time he reached the stables where he’d been sleeping, the memory of this visit with his mother would no longer ache.
SIX