The drip of water on stone was the only sound he heard. The fabric of the blindfold was the only sight he saw. His hands were bound, and a large rock wrapped in fabric was wedged in his mouth, making it impossible to speak. It was too heavy to spit out so all he could do was shake in his chair and scream incoherently through the gag. He had tired of that hours ago and now sat, quietly awaiting his fate. Tears ran down Kid’s face as he thought of all the things he would never get to do. All for the sake of a single piece of silver.

Greed truly was the death of thieves. Kid choked on a sob as it failed to escape the gag. Marc had blindfolded and gagged him as soon as they were outside. It felt as if they had walked across half the Outwalls before Marc finally opened a door and pulled him inside a building. Kid repeated the mantra in his head he had been reciting for the past hour. Forty paces straight, fifteen paces right, twelve paces left, fifteen steps down, thirty-two paces straight, ten paces right.

If he was given any chance at all, he was going to make it out of here alive. When he had first been put in this room, there had been yelling from outside. He recognized Hilda’s voice but couldn’t make out the words. It had been nerve-wracking, but the silence that reigned now was far worse. What if they just left him here until he died of thirst? Kid could think of few worse ways to go. More tears fell from his eyes as he screamed again, more just to hear something than with any expectation of help.

Kid jumped with fright as he heard a door open, followed by bootsteps thumping across the floor. “Come on boy, it’s time,” A voice said. Marc’s.

A rough hand unbound him from the chair and hauled Kid to his feet. Kid stumbled forward, arms still tied behind his back as Marc pushed him onward. He kept careful count of the steps in his head. Marc opened a door and shoved Kid into a new room. It was silent inside save for the sound of someone weeping ahead. However, Kid could sense the presence of dozens of men inside. The room was far too warm.

Marc dragged Kid forward and threw him to the floor. Kid’s head bounced against the hard-packed dirt. He tasted blood and felt one of his teeth chip against the stone wedged in his mouth. Kid fought the urge to sob. As he tried to roll to his side, a boot was planted between his shoulder blades. This was it. He was about to be executed along with whatever poor bastard was crying next to him. Kid tensed for the blade that would end his miserable existence.

It never came. Instead, his bonds fell away. Kid immediately reached into his mouth and pulled out the gag. He gasped and coughed as it came out. Divines, his jaw hurt like hell. Kid pulled the blindfold from his face and stared in terror at the sight around him. He was surrounded by Sons armored in thick iron armor. In their hands were weapons that any thief worth his salt would recognize as steel. A wall of shields ringed him. The Sons wielding them wore their masks and watched him like statues on a silent vigil.

Marc stood in the ring alongside Kid and the other prisoner. He was a boy, maybe a few years older than Kid. A flimsy beard grew on his face, damp with the tears that flowed from his eyes. Kid noted his tanned skin and distinctly southern heritage.

Marc held up his hands and turned in a circle as if calling for silence despite there being no sound. He grinned wolfishly. “Brothers, today is a glorious day because today we add another to our ranks. Kid of the Outwalls. He may look like a scrawny little shit, but believe me when I tell you he has more courage in him than most grown men I’ve met.”

Marc paused in his speech to place a hand on Kid’s shoulder as he hesitantly rose to his feet. Kid met Marc’s eyes. “He surprised me and I’m not afraid to say I’m proud of him.”

Kid felt a stirring in his breast and looked away, unable to meet Marc’s gaze a moment longer.

Marc continued, unabated. “One thing that every one of our brothers and sisters must come to understand is that we must pick up the sword if we are to have any hope of one day putting it down. The blood we spill today will nurture the pastures of our grandchildren and the sacrifices we make will ensure their freedom.”

Marc drew a steel dagger from his belt and flipped it in the air, catching it by the blade. “The Reaper takes all, sees all and will find each of us when the time comes to pay our due. May all of ours be a long time coming.”

Kid’s eyes widened as Marc held the dagger out to him. The room was deathly silent as every eye bored into Kid. He reached out and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the blade and took it from Marc’s fingers. Marc grinned down at him. He lowered his voice, speaking only to Kid. “I must admit I didn’t expect to see you again. You’re stronger than you look boy. Are you ready for your final test?”

Kid looked at the armed men ringing him. He suspected he didn’t have a choice. Kid nodded.

Marc grinned and gestured to the southerner. “Every man among us is bound by purpose. Show me you mean it Kid.”

Kid looked from the dagger in his hand to the man before him. Kid’s eyes widened, and his heart began to beat even faster. He opened his mouth, but no words came out.

Marc put a hand on his shoulder. “Always remember Kid, blood is but water and men will drown. Prove to me that you are more than a child from the gutters. Prove to me that you have the strength to do what needs to be done. Prove to me that you are a man.” Marc raised his voice. “End this Bastard!”

The men around Kid began to chant, yelling in time and rhythmically beating their weapons against their shields. Kid stood in the center of a maelstrom of sound, completely petrified. The chanting grew louder around him, and men cheered him on. He began to shake. The southerner moaned but the sound was lost in the clamor.

Marc knelt next to him. “Every southerner is a threat to the people we love. Would you let him hurt Lissa?”

Tears filled Kid’s eyes. “No,” he whispered.

“Then show me.”

Kid’s grip tightened on the dagger as he thought of the crosses by the gate and Imagined Lissa’s small arms unnaturally bent into a mockery of wings. Her lifeless eyes- Kid shrieked and plunged the dagger into the southerner’s gut. The man shrieked in pain as blood welled from the wound and dripped from his mouth. Kid stared, mesmerized by the sight.

“Again.”

Kid obeyed, finding the second time easier and the third easier still. Soon he lost track of how many times he plunged the blade into the man. In the back of his mind he was aware that he was now just stabbing a corpse, but the voices cheered him on, told him to keep going. He could barely see through the tears in his eyes and his voice was hoarse from shrieking. Blood coated his arms and its warmth was splattered across his face. He stopped only when Marc caught his arm.

Kid blinked away his tears as Marc held a mask in the shape of a wolf to him. Kid grasped the intricately carved wood and took it from Marc. It looked different than the other masks. The color was off. It lacked the reddish hue. Kid knew what he had to do and without waiting for instruction he placed his hand into the growing pool of blood and smeared it across his mask.

Marc smiled down at him in approval as Kid set to the grisly work. Cheers sounded all around Kid as he finished. The Sons broke ranks and gathered around him, patting him on the back, clasping his arm like a man, congratulating him on his first kill. Through it all Kid didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

***

Grim awoke to the smell of bacon. He couldn’t think of a single better way to wake up. His body ached from the beating he had taken last night but Melna had rid him of the worst of it. Edgar and James both lay fast asleep on the wood floor a few feet away. Grim quietly rose to his feet. The candles on the altar still burned, seemingly unchanged from last night. A tingle of discomfort ran down his spine but was quashed by the intriguing smell of frying bacon.

Grim followed his nose past the altar and found a small kitchen around the corner, past the stairs. Melna leaned against the wall next to the stove. She regarded Grim as he approached. “You look so much like your father.”

Grim halted in his tracks. That was the last thing he expected her to say. “I’m nothing like him.”

Melna shrugged and turned back to her cooking. “If you say so.” The sizzling of the bacon grew louder as she flipped it with a wooden spoon. The sound made Grim’s stomach rumble. “I wanted to say thank you for last night.”

Melna waved a hand at him dismissively. “Bah. A healer’s work is never done, only abated. If you want to thank me properly, just make sure your insides don’t become your outsides. An old woman like me only has so much time left to-” she trailed off as Kryll padded over to them. He sat back on his haunches, using his tail as a chair while he stared up at Melna expectantly.

The old woman shook her head. “You two seem to have a lot in common.”

“Great minds think alike.” As Grim spoke, Kryll turned his head to regard him as though listening in on the conversation. Grim reached his hand out to pet the Keeper on the head. Melna smacked his hand away with the wooden spoon.

Grim yelped and pulled his hand away. “What the hell?”

Melna narrowed her eyes at him. “I told you to stop doing that last night.”

“Doing what? I was just trying to pet him.”

Melna sighed. “Reaper help me. The young are so ignorant these days.” The old woman turned from Grim and returned her attention to the bacon that was turning a crisp brown.

Grim waited a long moment for her to elaborate. When she showed no sign of turning back to him, he spoke up, “Are you going to educate me or keep giving me cryptic answers.”

Melna snatched a piece of bacon from the pan and flicked it into the air. Kryll’s head snapped up to follow the flying piece of meat. His tongue flicked out like a frog and wrapped around the food. He retracted it as fast as it extended, grasped the bacon in his foreclaws and slammed into a tight ball. Grim heard frantic chewing from within. He stared at the Keeper dumbfounded. He’d never seen anything like it.

Melna removed the pan from the lit burner and turned to face Grim, hands on her hips. “Don’t you dare talk like that to me boy. You will address me with respect or not at all.”

Grim looked down at the small, shriveled woman, her intense eyes meeting his own. Grim averted his gaze. “Sorry.”

Melna stared at him a moment longer before turning to the pan, pulling the bacon onto a nearby plate. “Make yerself useful and pour some of that grease into that tin on the counter. I’m going to be using that for dinner.”

Grim nodded and followed her instructions, grabbing the pan and pouring the hot liquid into a tin set aside on the small counter by the stove. As Grim let the last drops fall, Melna spoke up. “Everything has some latent power in its blood. It’s why we used to sacrifice to the Reaper,” she said, nodding to the stained altar. Keepers are special animals. If you had half a brain you should have already guessed that. They can latch onto a sliver of that power and feed on it. When they do they turn into walking hearths. Useful during a cold winter.”

Grim set the now empty pan down. He looked at the Keeper, still wrapped up behind its wall of plates. “Are you saying that I’m god-touched?”

Melna snorted. “Get your head out of your arse and deflate that ego before I put a pin in it. If you were god touched, you would know. Power is in the blood and some bloodlines are stronger than others. How do you think kings became kings and lords became lords? Divine right. All that Kryll is showing us is that you’re well-bred. I’d say-” Melna paused to think. “Maybe one in a hundred people in the city could make him do that. Possibly less now that the Greencloaks took most of the touched south to the capital.”

Grim chuckled. It was the first time anybody had ever called him well-bred. “So, I can’t touch him without that happening?”

“Not until you get your intent under control. Right now, you’re like a little boy taking his first piss. Your little willie is waving all over the place, hitting everything except what you want it to.” Grim narrowed his eyes as Melna continued. “It makes it damned easy for Kryll to leech a little when you touch him.”

“How do I control it then?”

Melna turned from him and began to place more bacon into the pan. “You don’t. there’s no point in bothering with it if you can’t use it anyhow.”

Kryll unfurled himself and looked expectantly at Melna. She tossed him another piece of bacon and he fell into a ball even quicker than the last time. Melna turned to Grim. “Now be a dear and fetch me some water,” she said, gesturing to a pair of buckets in the corner of the room. “The well is a block to your right when you leave the house.”

Grim opened his mouth to object, then he looked at the bacon. His stomach rumbled, and he thought better of it. Grim fetched the buckets and walked out of the kitchen and into the foyer where Edgar and James still lay, snoring softly. Grim walked up to Edgar and nudged the captain in the side with his boot. Edgar groaned and opened his eyes, waving away Grim’s foot with one of his hands.

“I’m up. Divines, I’m up. Stop poking me.”

Grim prodded him one more time. Edgar grumbled as he rose to his feet. Grim handed him one of the buckets. “C’mon, we’re fetching some water.”

Edgar sighed and followed Grim out the door. Dark clouds blanketed the sky above them, growing lighter as the sun began to peek over the horizon. Fog blanketed the streets in a misty haze. Passersby ghosted in and out of sight through the mist as the two men walked down the street.

“I hate days like this,” Edgar grumbled. “Makes watch duty even more boring than usual.” He looked to Grim. “You feeling alright? Yesterday was-” He paused. “A lot.”

Grim felt the claws of hatred wrapped around his heart tighten. “I’m fine.”

Edgar snorted. “You’re a shitty liar. It’s easy to see you’re wound tighter than a Keeper around his meal.”

“I’m Fine,” Grim repeated.

Edgar grabbed him by the shoulder and turned Grim to face him. “Listen. I know you’re not, so stop trying to play the hero. You’ve got nothing to prove to me.”

A flash of anger flared up in Grim, but he quashed it. Edgar was right. “I want to burn that damned estate down, piss on its ashes and give every one of those bastards their wings. I want to suffocate Longreen under the corpses of everyone he loves. I want to bury his head in the castle outhouse after every goddamn person in this city fucks his skull. That is how I feel.”

Edgar blinked. “Sounds like a great way to spread the Southern Pox.”

Grim opened his mouth to respond but couldn’t find the words to answer that. He shook his head and kept walking. The clouds above became lighter as they walked, turning from almost black to a light grey in color. More people began to take to the streets as the work day neared. Grim kept his head down, not wanting to be recognized. He was particularly grateful for the fog today.

The well soon emerged from the fog. It was little more than a hole in the ground with a stone rim surrounding it. Grim wondered how many careless people had stumbled to their deaths in there on a day like today. Then he wondered how many of them were still in there. He shook those thoughts from his head as he tied the bucket to a small rope staked into the ground.

He and Edgar set to filling the buckets in silence, punctuated by the occasional padding of feet past them. Grim broke the silence. “I didn’t know you were from the Outwalls.”

Edgar grunted. “It’s not exactly something you advertise proudly.” He hauled at the rope, pulling the full bucket out of the well. “I make enough to get her a place in the inner city, but the old bat refuses to leave this shithole. Says her bones are too old to move.” He shrugged. “She’s probably safer here anyways, far away from the Greencloaks.”

“Strange to think of this place as safe when I can’t seem to visit without getting my face beat in.”

Edgar grinned. “Maybe if you stopped picking fights with everyone you come across, that would happen less often. I gotta say, I enjoy not having a black eye.”

Grim narrowed his eyes at the Captain, but it came out as more of a wince. “I’m just glad I don’t have to see Longreen today.”

Edgar nodded. “Yeah, he might have some questions about what you were doing in the Outwalls last night and why you were beat within an inch of your life.” He stared pointedly at Grim.

Grim hesitated as he met Edgar’s eyes.

Edgar spoke, “If this is something that could affect my safety and that of my men I deserve to know about it.”

Grim nodded slowly. He considered lying but thought better of it. It would only piss Edgar off. “The Sons contacted me last night. I came to try and see what they wanted. As you can imagine It didn’t go as planned.”

Edgar raised an eyebrow. “There was a plan?” Grim glared at him. The Captain continued. “You should have gone straight to the Earl.”

Grim threw the second bucket into the well. “I didn’t want to involve him. He’d only hold me back.”

“Did you ever stop to consider that might be a good thing?”

Grim grimaced. He had. “I’m supposed to see him this morning,” he said, “I’ll tell him everything then.”

Edgar nodded, seeming satisfied with that. Grim finished hauling up the second bucket and the men walked back to the house through the fog. the bucket at Grim’s side sloshed as he pushed open the door to Melna’s house.

James and Lissa had awakened while they were away. The two now sat at the dining table, plates of food set before them. They shoveled food into their mouths while Melna watched with a look of satisfaction. Her attention turned to Grim and Edgar as they walked inside.

“You two can put those in that corner there,” she said, gesturing to their right.

They obeyed her direction as Kryll padded toward them. They’d barely set the buckets down before he stuck his face into one and slurped the water. Grim watched in fascination as the Keeper drained one of the large buckets within seconds. Grim shook his head and took a seat at the table.

Conversation over breakfast was sparse. Each person had far too much on their minds to indulge in small talk. Time whittled away along with the food until James and Lissa rose to their feet and bid them farewell. Lissa gave Kryll a kiss on his snout before she left, and the Keeper trilled in pleasure.

Then it was Grim and Edgar’s turn to leave. The two men rose to their feet and Melna followed them to the door. She caught Edgar’s arm as he was about to leave and pulled him into a tight hug. “Be careful out there, you lummox. I’ve only got one son and you have yet to give me any grandchildren.”

Edgar smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. “Someday mom.”

Melna pinched Edgar’s cheek and he shook her off. She turned her attention to Grim. “Be more careful out there, boy. The world’s a dangerous place.”

Grim nodded. Why was everyone always telling him to be careful? “Of course.”