The last fiery red light of sunset glared over the peaked rooves of the village of Korvo, just violent and desperate enough to tear through the dark storm clouds that had been looming all day. In the snow blown streets, women in brightly colored dresses decorated with shiny tin coins and men in dark jerkins over vibrant shirts rushed home from the afternoon’s errands, heads down, eyes on the cobblestones. The beggars and street urchins common to every settlement since the Tyrant King came into power had quietly disappeared into the dark, dank hideaways where they took shelter in times of inclement weather.

If not for the furtive glances at the heavily armed Ustars patrolling the village, the citizens could almost have been hurrying to beat the coming snowfall. But the shoulders hunched as if awaiting the fall of an Ustari ax, the skirts clutched just so to muffle the jingling of the coins and avoid drawing the patrols’ attention, the silence—that cursed silence—that filled the streets were dead giveaways to the sharp eyes of Roark von Graf. These were the cheerful, friendly mountain folk he’d known his whole life. People who used the coming of a late-spring blizzard as just one more excuse to drink and sing and tell tales all night at the inn.

A little heavy snowfall was nothing to them.

Roark sunk back into the shadows of the narrow alleyway as a pack of Ustars tromped past, fanged halberds in hand, snake-jawed helms all facing forward. Thick woolen cloaks emblazoned with the Tyrant King’s winged serpent whipped along behind them, protection from the cold, and one more testament to the fact that they did not belong among Korvo’s hardy people.

With all the noise they were making, passing undetected was almost too easy. Roark listened to the clank of the patrol’s heavy armor get farther away, then slipped across the street into the alley behind the butcher’s. The cold mitigated the stench of the day’s refuse, but not by much. Feral cats and a mangy stray dog looked up from the entrails, regarding him warily as he passed. A battle-scarred tomcat laid back what was left of its ears and yowled a warning to stay away from the food.

A bad omen if the Lyuko travelers who came through every year could be believed.

“This was my city before it was yours, Tom,” Roark murmured to the territorial old grouch as he passed. “And it’ll be mine again after tonight. All of bloody Traisbin will be free, and you won’t even have to thank me.”

The stench of rotting meat faded behind him as he followed the alley to its end. From there, a sharp left took him behind the motley collection of businesses that lined the street. No glow lit the windows of the dwellings over the businesses. No laughter, no children playing, no idle music or clinking of pots as food was prepared. Tonight was a night of silence, of fear, of anxious listening at the door for the sound of heavy Ustari boots thundering up the stairs.

Roark stopped in the shadows along the rear of the fabric store, searching up and down the alleyway and darkened windows for spying eyes. No witnesses who could later relay his whereabouts to the Ustars.

As he ducked inside, a minor writ scrawled hastily at the bottom of the door caught his attention:

Shoulde any baring the wingd serpente of the Tyrante King cross this thresholde the shelfs of fabrik along the walls of this store shall colapse with a great combustione.

It was meant to sound the alarm if Ustars crossed the threshold, but it was done so badly that only someone displaying the winged serpent prominently would set it off, and then, the shelves which were supposed to collapse noisily—causing what the half-literate idiot who’d written it had probably meant to be a great commotion—would instead catch on fire, taking everyone inside the fabric store and half of the town with it.

Probably more of Albrecht’s work, that careless buffoon.

Shaking his head, Roark knelt inside and quickly rubbed the mess away with the palm of his hand. With his pen knife, he carved a corrected writ into the wooden planks, adding a clause to make the carvings appear as nothing more than the scratches of a family pet begging to come inside. The moment he sealed it with the punctuation, the magic went into effect, the letters becoming incomprehensible canine scratches in the wood.

Before the Tyrant King came to power, only the nobles and wealthy in Traisbin could afford to send their children off to learn the magic of letters. Since then, only those children the tyrant handpicked to be groomed as mages for his armies were taught to read and write. The odds that a literate Ustar would happen upon the writ were nearly zero, but if one of the Tyrant King’s guards recognized it as writing, his forces would converge on the fabric shop and execute everyone inside, literate or not. Mages who didn’t bow to the Tyrant King often found themselves without a head to bow.

Potential village-destroying fire and bloody executions averted, Roark slid the pen knife back into the hidden pocket inside his jerkin and eased the door closed.

As he walked through the empty store, Roark ran his fingers over the many textures of fabric. It was an old habit from childhood, back when he couldn’t believe so many different tactile sensations could exist in one place: smooth, coarse, knobbly, velvety, gauzy, woolen, ribbed, woven, embroidered, satiny. Korvo being on one of the few roads that led through the mountains, it was uniquely suited to sell goods from both sides of the continental divide—a fact his merchant-minded mother had once been quite proud of.

Behind the seller’s bench, Roark found a thick carpet pulled aside and a trapdoor leading down into the cellar. With a shake of his head, he banished the bittersweet memories and returned his mind to the matter at hand.

The stones stairs had worn uneven over the centuries, but he took them two and three at a time with the easy grace of a child of the mountains. The murmuring of voices carried into the dark corridor, ghostly whispers compared to the solid clunk of his boots on the stone. A line of jade light leaked from beneath a door up ahead.

Roark threw open the door, revealing the green-lit war room. Frightened gasps went up, hands grabbed frantically for maps, and chairs scraped away from the huge central table. Ancient tapestries flapped against the old stone walls, and the emerald burung fire burning in the sconces flickered before returning to full strengthen once more.

A dozen pairs of wide eyes settled on Roark’s lean form. Only a dozen. This was the T’verzet, the Rebel Council. The last unified resistance against the Tyrant King, Marek Konig Ustar. And they were cowering in a basement like kicked dogs.

“Graf, you nearly gave us a heart attack!” snapped Cambry, the elderly owner of the fabric store. The old man slammed the maps clutched in his hands back onto the table. “Shut that damn door!”

“Is it true?” Roark kicked the door closed behind him with a heel and strode farther into the room. “That he’s in Korvo? That he’s staying at the Graf Manor House—” He slammed his fist on the table, rattling the cloudy glass panes in the burung lamp at the center. “My manor house?”

Across the table, the scar-faced Albrecht snorted imperiously. “That house is as much yours as the Seat of Power is the Council of Ancients’.”

Roark raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth to point out Albrecht’s similar position in the von Herzog family’s former coastal holdings, but was cut off by an aged voice from his right.

“You walked the same streets as we did, Roark, you saw the patrols,” Morgana said, folding her gnarled, arthritic hands on the table before her. She twisted the opal ring on her thumb absently as she spoke; the fat gemstone was proof that she’d once sat on the true Council, handing down decrees for the entirety of the country. “The caravan was supposed to travel on to Moseley, but they can’t get through the mountains with the blizzard coming in. They’re waiting here for the pass to clear.”

“This is it, then,” Roark said, excitement fluttering in his chest. “We couldn’t ask for a better chance. I know that manor better than anyone. All the back ways, all the ins and outs. I can get to him, kill him now before the weather clears and they move on—”

“Absolutely not.” Morgana sat back in her seat, pursing her wrinkled lips. “We’ve no plan in place for this. It’s too much of a risk. If you fail—”

“I won’t,” Roark said, brow furrowed.

Albrecht threw up his hands. “Here we go! The lost noble of Korvo knows better than the combined experience of the entire T’verzet now.”

“I know better than that gibberish you scrawled on the door up there,” Roark said, infusing his voice with a lightness he didn’t feel. “It’s a wonder you’ve only burnt off half of your face so far.”

“Know-everything poseur,” Albrecht snapped, kicking up from his seat. “Acting like you’re not as self-taught as the rest of us—”

Roark snorted. “Can you even say your letters, mate?”

“You’ll want to watch that big head, Graf, before somebody kicks it in.”

“Both of you bullheaded pups shut your yapping!” Cambry boomed with a strength that belied his aging body. He gestured to Morgana. “What the councilwoman was trying to say is, so far, we’ve been blessed lucky in hiding the seat of the resistance. One slip-up—one hint that we’re here—and every Ustar in Traisbin’ll descend on this city like flies on a rotting corpse.”

“I won’t slip up,” Roark said with every ounce of the confidence he felt. “I know that manor like the back of my hand—I could walk its passages in my sleep.” In fact, he often did when he slept long enough to dream. “I can get in and back out again before Marek himself knows he’s dead.”

“The risk is too great,” Morgana said, shaking her head.

“But the payoff is everything we’ve been fighting for!” Roark tried but was unable to keep the desperation from his voice. “Twenty years of the Tyrant King’s oppression, and we could end it tonight!”

“Would you see Korvo burned to the ground?” Bran the barrel-gutted innkeeper asked, speaking up for the first time since Roark’s arrival. He leaned forward in his seat, bracing his meaty arms on the table, and continued in his quiet, measured voice. “Her people turned against one another as informants and snitches, turning their friends and neighbors over to the Tyrant King to save themselves and their children? Because that’s the price of failure, Graf. That’s what you’re gambling with here.”

“Laying aside the fact that this is hardly a gamble considering my familiarity with the manor house,” Roark said, “isn’t it worth at least that much? Did any of you join the resistance without realizing you were risking your life and the lives of everyone connected to you? Because you’re in the wrong line of work if you did.”

“Dammit, man, I’ve got a family!” the usually soft-spoken innkeeper thundered. Bran looked as taken aback at his outburst as anybody else. He lowered his head, collected himself, then went on in a voice once again calm. “I’ve five children and a wife to look out for, haven’t I? You may have nothing left to lose, Graf, but we do. You wouldn’t be so quick to throw it all away if you did.”

Roark felt his lips pulling up in a contemptuous snarl. He pushed down the sudden urge to leap across the table and punch Bran’s teeth into the back of his skull.

“You all feel this way?” His dark eyes slid from face to face in the green-lit war room, seeing nothing but fear and weakness reflected back at him.

One by one, the so-called rebels lowered their eyes or glared back at him as if he were the one who couldn’t understand.

“Cowards,” he spat. “If you aren’t ready to risk everything to free your people, then you don’t deserve to call yourselves T’verzet. When the right opportunity presents itself, you can’t hold anything back.”

Unable to look at them for a second longer, Roark turned on his heel and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.