Chapter 2

Clara's POV

The man didn't move.

He stood on the bank like a black stone figure someone had forgotten there, one hand wrapped around a crude bamboo fishing rod, the other lifting a dented flask to his lips. He tipped his head back and drank. The sharp smell of liquor drifted across on the wind, tangled with the cold river stench, and pushed its way into my nose.

The soldiers saw he had no intention of reacting, and whatever wariness had flickered in their eyes vanished on the spot. What replaced it was greed, and a particular kind of cruelty men only show when they're certain they can afford it.

"Look at this little thief, doesn't know when she's dead." The leader spat on the ground and jabbed his spear forward. The tip caught the gray winter light and threw off a pale gleam. "Hand over the flour, and maybe we leave you one hand. Maybe."

I kept my eyes on them and let my right hand slide quietly toward my sleeve, where I'd hidden the thin blade I'd used to open the grain sack. "Stay back," I rasped, my voice wrecked from the cold, and I began edging toward the riverbank.

They laughed. That particular laugh — the cat watching the mouse decide which way to run.

"Don't say we didn't warn you." The leader lunged, driving the spear toward me.

I twisted to dodge it, but the stones underfoot were slick with moss. My boot slid out from under me, and the spearhead caught my left arm instead of passing wide. It shredded the coarse cloth and dragged a line of fire across the skin beneath. The pain whited out my vision for a moment, but I didn't have the luxury of stopping. I knew the next thrust would go for my throat.

In the instant before he pulled back for the second strike, I made the only decision left to me, and it was a lunatic one.

I spun around and jumped.

The river swallowed me whole. The cold was not cold in any ordinary sense — it was a full-body violence, ten thousand needles of burning ice driving into every pore at once, stealing the breath straight out of my chest. My lungs seized. My arms and legs went from agony to numbness so fast the two felt like the same thing.

I fought to keep moving, clawing through the current even as my fingers stopped registering what they were touching. The water was murky and full of drifting ice shards, and every gasp felt like swallowing something with edges.

Then, from somewhere above the surface, a voice came through.

"Leave."

One word.

A hand closed on the back of my collar, and I was hauled out of the water in a single motion, the same way you'd pull a drowned cat from a bucket.

I hit the deck hard. The wood came up to meet me and I lay there coughing river water, trembling so badly I couldn't have stopped if I tried. When my vision steadied enough to be useful, I looked toward the bank and found the soldiers already gone — heads down, retreating without so much as a parting threat.

"Thank you—" My teeth were rattling against each other. I tried to push myself upright.

The man capped his flask and, for the first time, actually looked at me.

Up close, his face was different from what I'd expected. His features were sharp and even, with long, narrow eyes and skin that was pale in the way of someone who'd never had to spend a winter without a roof. No scars. No soldier's weathering. He didn't look like the dragon riders or the mercenaries who drifted through Greyhaven. He looked like something else entirely.

He looked dangerous.

The name came to me without much effort: Silas Veyne. He had to be from the Valley Kingdom — I'd know a Lyr face anywhere. I'd heard of Lyr men who'd gone over to the Empire and climbed their way into comfortable positions, but those men tended to stay well behind the lines where it was safe. What he was doing this far into occupied territory, I had no idea.

"Can you row?" he asked. He said it the way someone asks about the weather — no particular interest in the answer.

I blinked. "Yes."

I'd grown up on the docks. Every child in Greyhaven knew how to handle a boat before they knew how to read.

"Then get up." He gestured toward the stern oar. "Take me downstream."

I didn't ask why. I didn't ask who he was. In times like these, curiosity was more reliably fatal than poverty. I got to my feet, made my way to the stern, and took hold of the oar.

The boat pushed away from the bank and found the current.

The Blackwater in winter was never quiet — it ran cold and complicated, full of hidden moods — but I knew it well enough. I steered around the rocks I couldn't see and used the current where it helped, and the little boat moved the way a leaf moves, easily, without argument.

The man sat at the bow with the flask in his hand and his eyes on the water. He wasn't drinking. He was just watching.

"You're from Greyhaven?" he said, not turning around.

"Yes." I kept my attention on the river.

"Anyone left there for you?"

My hands slowed on the oar, then found their rhythm again. "There was. My father ran a ferry crossing. And I had a sister."

"Now?"

"My father died in the fighting, nine years ago." I kept my voice level. "My sister — we lost each other. I expect she's dead."

As I said it, my hand moved without thinking to the pocket pressed against my ribs. Inside it was a copper coin, split cleanly down the middle, its edge worn smooth from years of handling. My father had left it to us the day before he marched — a misprint, he'd always said, unique in all the world, which was why he'd treasured it. He'd given one half to me and one to my sister and told us that no matter how far apart we ended up, those two halves would find each other again someday.

It was nothing more than a keepsake now. I knew that.

The man was quiet for a while. He didn't seem surprised. "Bear left," he said. "Into the side channel."

I turned the boat. The channel was narrow, hemmed in by stands of dead reed grass that hissed and rustled in the wind as we passed.

"Raven's Perch is ahead," he said. "It runs under Skeld Compact authority. No imperial garrison."

I looked up sharply.

Raven's Perch — the closest smuggling port to Greyhaven, and the main overland entry into the Northern Compact territories. He was heading there?

"We're here."

The boat nudged up against a rough wooden dock. I stepped off and tied the line to the post. The place was bleaker than Greyhaven, stripped down to its necessities, but the absence of soldiers made the air feel different.

The man stood and straightened his cloak. He looked, at that moment, like nobody in particular — a traveler passing through, nothing remarkable about him. If I hadn't seen him send four armed soldiers retreating with a single word, I'd never have connected him to anything that mattered.

"Thank you, sir," I said, and bent my head. "Safe travels."

He looked at me once more. Those long, pale eyes held on my face for a moment, as if weighing something, and then he turned without a word and walked up the dock.

I watched until the reeds closed behind him and let out a slow breath.

My hand went to my chest. The stolen flour was still there — soaked through, most of it, but flour could be dried. It would do.

My other hand was closed around something else. A leather purse, solid and heavy in my palm. I'd lifted it from his belt when I stumbled on the boat, the motion buried in the noise of my coughing.

I slipped into the reeds and opened it.

Three gold coins. A handful of silver. Enough to last me several months, if I was careful.

I tucked the purse against my ribs alongside the flour and turned toward the far end of the dock. Whoever he was, whatever he was doing in Raven's Perch — that wasn't my problem. I had money. I could survive the winter.

Everything else was a worry for another day.