The sword changed nothing.
That was what Brennan told himself the morning after he found it, lying in the grey light of Petyr's loft with the wrapped blade beside him and the rain still going outside. It was a found object. A piece of old iron with pretty markings. It had no bearing on the price of bread or the cold or the fact that Holt and his friends would be looking for him when the market reopened.
He told himself this with the particular discipline he'd developed over years of not having the luxury of hope. Hope was a transaction he couldn't afford. You paid for it upfront and collected nothing on the back end.
He unwrapped the blade anyway.
In the morning light the etchings were invisible. Just dark iron, dull and unremarkable, the kind of sword a man might carry for utility rather than pride. He ran his thumb along the flat — not the edge, he wasn't stupid — and felt the faintest texture where the markings were, like scar tissue beneath skin.
He wrapped it back up. Hid it beneath a loose board in the loft floor. Went to find work.
He found it at the stockyards on Ashfeld's northern edge, where a livestock merchant needed hands to move cattle pens before the morning drove arrived. Hard work, honest pay, the kind of labor that left your back aching and your hands raw and your mind blessedly empty. Brennan worked without complaint and without conversation, which the merchant seemed to appreciate, and by midmorning he had four copper coins and a heel of actual good bread — soft, still faintly warm — tucked inside his coat.
He was eating it on the stockyard fence when the horse arrived.
Not a working horse. That was the first thing. Ashfeld's horses were broad and patient, built for plowing and pulling, their coats muddy and their eyes kind and tired. This one was tall and dark bay with a white mark on its face like a thumbprint, and it moved through the crowded market road with the particular arrogance of an animal that had never once been asked to pull anything.
The rider matched it.
He looked about Brennan's age — sixteen, maybe seventeen — but he sat the saddle with the relaxed authority of someone who had never questioned whether he belonged somewhere. His clothes were traveling clothes, deliberately plain, but the fabric was too fine and the boots were too good and the sword at his hip, a proper longsword in a dark leather scabbard, had the quiet confidence of a blade that had been made rather than found. He had an open face, dark eyes that moved quickly, and the kind of jaw that would look distinguished in ten years and currently looked merely earnest.
He was also, Brennan noticed, being followed.
Two men on horseback, twenty yards back. Not servants — their eyes were wrong for servants, too watchful, scanning the crowd rather than their charge. Guards, then. Trying to look like they weren't.
The young rider slowed at the stockyard gate and looked at Brennan with the uncomplicated curiosity of someone who had not yet learned to pretend other people were invisible.
"You work here?" he asked.
"This morning," Brennan said.
"I'm looking for an inn. Something clean."
"Wrong town for that."
The rider looked at the main street, then back at Brennan, and laughed — a short genuine sound, surprised out of him. "That bad?"
"The Rose and Thorn has beds that don't move when you sleep in them. Most of the time."
"High praise." He tilted his head. "What's your name?"
Brennan considered not answering. "Brennan."
"Edric," the rider said, as though the name were simply information rather than the opening move in a social ritual. He glanced back at his two guards with the expression of someone perpetually slightly irritated by their presence. "I don't suppose you know this town well."
"Well enough."
"I'm here for three days. My father has business with the magistrate." He said my father the way people said things that were complicated — without elaboration, with a faint tightening around the eyes that he probably didn't know was visible. "I'd rather spend those three days not sitting in a room."
Brennan looked at him. At the fine boots and the good sword and the guards trying to look like they weren't guards. Then he looked at the four copper coins in his pocket and thought about how quickly winter was coming and how thin his bedroll was.
"I know the town," he said. "It'll cost you."
Edric smiled. It was an irritatingly easy smile, the kind that didn't calculate. "Fair enough."
They left the horse at the Rose and Thorn's stable and walked, Edric's guards trailing at a distance that satisfied nobody. Edric seemed unbothered by this arrangement. He walked the way he rode — like he belonged wherever he was, which Brennan found simultaneously impressive and faintly aggravating.
Brennan showed him the market, the river walk, the old garrison wall on the town's western edge where you could see three different villages in the valley below on a clear day. He did this with the efficiency of someone completing a transaction, not the warmth of someone sharing something loved. He didn't love Ashfeld. He simply knew it.
Edric asked questions constantly. Not the polite questions of someone filling silence but genuine questions, the kind that suggested he was actually listening to the answers. What was the garrison wall for. Why was the market arranged this way. What happened to the building on the corner with the caved-in roof.
"Fire," Brennan said. "Three years ago. Magistrate's clerk kept something there he wasn't supposed to. Nobody investigated."
Edric looked at him sideways. "How do you know that?"
"I was sleeping in it at the time."
A pause. "You were in the building when it caught fire?"
"I was out before it was fully going." Brennan said it flatly, the way he said most things. "I smelled it early."
Edric was quiet for a moment. Then: "Where do you live now?"
"Cooper's loft."
"Does the cooper know?"
"He's deaf."
Another pause, longer this time, and Brennan waited for the pity. He'd learned to recognize its shapes — the softening of the eyes, the slight forward tilt, the careful voice. He didn't want it and he'd developed efficient ways of closing conversations that moved toward it.
But Edric just nodded, slowly, like he was filing something away. No pity. Just attention.
It was, Brennan thought, despite himself, an unusual response.
They ended up at the river in the late afternoon, sitting on the bank where the water ran shallow and cold over pale stones. Edric had bought food from a market stall — more than he could eat, which Brennan suspected was deliberate and chose not to comment on — and they sat in the grey autumn light and ate and didn't talk for a while.
"Your father," Brennan said eventually. "What's his business with the magistrate?"
Something moved across Edric's face. Quickly, controlled, but there. "Land surveys. Border questions between Earnmere and the highland reaches." He paused. "Administrative things."
He was lying, or at least not telling all of it. Brennan recognized the shape of partial truths — he used them constantly himself. He didn't push. A fair transaction didn't require full disclosure.
"Your father," Edric said, turning it back. "Is he—"
"No," Brennan said.
"I wasn't going to—"
"You were." He said it without heat. "It's fine. I don't know who he was. It doesn't matter."
Edric looked at him for a moment with those quick dark eyes. "Does it not?"
"No," Brennan said, and believed it completely, and was wrong in a way he wouldn't understand for a long time.
The river moved over its pale stones. Somewhere in the town behind them a church bell rang at the fifth hour, slow and slightly off-key, the way it always rang. The sky was going amber at the edges.
Edric said, "I'll need a guide again tomorrow."
"Same rate."
"Same rate," Edric agreed. He stood, brushed grass from his coat, and looked down at Brennan with that uncomplicated expression that Brennan was already finding difficult to read, which was unusual. He could read most people. "You're strange, Brennan-with-no-last-name."
"You're paying me to walk you around a provincial town," Brennan said. "We're both strange."
Edric laughed again — that same genuine, surprised sound — and went back toward the inn.
Brennan sat by the river a while longer. He thought about the sword under the floorboard. He thought about the execution ground and the dead oak and the crows. He thought about the way Edric had said does it not — with actual curiosity, like the answer might surprise him.
He picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. Four hops. The river swallowed it.
He went home.
That night he took Cinder out again.
He didn't know why. He unwrapped it in the dark of the loft and held it across his knees and looked at the blade where the etchings were invisible in the darkness, just felt them faintly under his fingers. There was that settling again — that wordless recognition he'd decided not to think about.
He held it loosely. Shifted his grip without thinking. His wrist rotated and the blade moved through a short arc in the dark, a motion his body seemed to already know, and he stopped and looked at his own hand as though it belonged to someone else.
He'd never been trained. He'd never held a proper sword before this one. There was no reason his wrist should know that motion.
He set the blade down carefully.
Outside, the wind moved through Ashfeld's narrow streets, and somewhere across town at the Rose and Thorn, a boy with good boots and an easy smile slept in a bed that didn't move. And in the magistrate's hall, behind closed doors, a man with Edric's jaw and harder eyes sat across a table from a nervous official and discussed things that had nothing to do with land surveys.
And in the loft above the deaf cooper's workshop, Brennan lay in the dark with his hand resting on dark iron and felt, for the first time in as long as he could remember, that something was about to change.
He wasn't sure yet whether that was good.
He suspected it wasn't.