Jonah’s death, Ramson had wanted nothing more than to get away from the military, from his father, from Bregon, from every single bit of the world that he’d thought of as safe and good, but that had betrayed him.
Twelve years old, he’d boarded one of the supply wagons from the military in the dead of night, with nothing on him but a pouch of coins and a name and address hastily scrawled on a piece of paper. He still remembered huddling in the back of the wagon between crates of stale vegetables and rotting meat, watching as the winking torchlights of the Blue Fort grew smaller and smaller.
The wagon driver found him curled up in the back the next morning and kicked him out. Ramson clambered to his feet alone but for the cloud-filled skies, rolling moors, and endless rain in all directions. He was lost then, without Jonah or his compass. He wanted to crawl into a water-soaked ditch and die right there in the mud, but he was too afraid, and he was too angry.
So he put one foot in front of the other, and every day, he told himself, Just one more day. Just one more day and you can see Jonah again.
Somehow, either by the Deities’ will or by some other miracle, he made it to a town. He stumbled into a bar, holding his pouch of dimes and begging for food and water.
Later that day, a group of older boys waylaid him. They dragged him, screaming and kicking, into a back alley, beat him, took his money and his dagger, and left him to die.
Still, Ramson did not die.
When he finally summoned the courage to hobble out of the alley, night had fallen. His lip was cut and swelling, his nose broken, and his ribs bruised, but he was alive.
This was the world as it really was. Not good and bright and filled with light—but rather, the gray place that Jonah had painted for him, where the strong prevailed over the weak and evil triumphed and flourished.
There was no goodness or kindness in this world. Jonah had told Ramson that—and eventually, the darkness had claimed even him.
Ramson begged the first person he saw, an old man in a horse cart, for shelter. That night, he curled up in the old man’s barn, unable to sleep. He pulled out the balled-up, soaked piece of paper with the name. The ink had bled into the parchment and smudged on his fingers when he tried to smooth out the wrinkles. But he whispered the name to himself over and over again that night. A sense of purpose gathered in his heart, filling his veins with a wrathful, churning energy.
In the early hours of the morning, he stole away with the horse and the cart of the old man who had saved him. He boarded a ship that night and never looked back, even as Bregon turned into a small speck on the horizon and then was swallowed whole by the infinite dark sea.
Weeks later and an ocean away, clutching the piece of paper with that name, he found himself in front of the gilded gates of the most beautiful mansion he had ever seen.
The guard laughed when he demanded to see Lord Alaric Kerlan. “I assure you, he’ll want to see me,” Ramson argued in his broken schoolboy’s Cyrilian.
The other guard roared with laughter. “This one’ll give you a run for your pluck, Nikolay!” he chortled.
Ramson was furious. “You don’t know who I am,” he snarled. “You don’t know how much value I’ll be to Lord Kerlan. And I’ll wager you that if he finds out you turned me away from his gates, you won’t live to see your family the next morning.”
The two guards howled with laughter.
“My, my. I certainly hope I haven’t garnered that kind of a reputation among the neighbors.”
Ramson spun around.
A slight man in a purple bowler hat stood before them. He was middle-aged, but he was the same height and build as Ramson, with a mop of receding brown hair and a twinkle in his eyes. Dressed in an ordinary shirt and breeches, he looked like a friendly next-door neighbor.
The guards stilled, their faces molding into casts. “Lord Kerlan,” they murmured.
Ramson stared. He’d heard his father speak of how the Bregonian criminal had fled to Cyrilia and built an empire on thievery and coercion, one with almost as much power as the Cyrilian throne. Alaric Kerlan was a legend and a monster, a