The silence in the cottage was absolute.
It was a thick, suffocating thing, broken only by the faint whistle of wind through the open door and the ragged, uneven sound of his own breathing. Kaden knelt on the hard-packed earth floor, his mother cradled against his chest. Her weight was a familiar anchor, yet the profound stillness of her, the utter absence of the quiet hum of energy that had always surrounded her, made her feel like a stranger carved from cold marble. The metallic scent of blood filled his nose, mingling with the homely smells of dried lavender from the hanging bunches and cold ashes.
He didn't know how long he sat there. Time had dissolved into the numbness spreading from his core. Grief, vast and annihilating, loomed on the horizon of his awareness, a storm he could not yet afford to face. Because beneath the numbness, another sensation flickered—a foreign, electric hum just beneath his skin, a reverberation of the power his mother had thrust upon him. It felt like a second heartbeat, erratic and alien.
His gaze, dry and unblinking, fell to his right hand. Still clenched in his fist was the lock of dark hair, the coarse strands biting into his palm. The red thread binding it was the same crimson now staining his mother's dress. Become them.
The words were a cold edict in his mind. A directive from a ghost.
A practical, desperate thought finally pierced the fog. He couldn't stay here. The assassin might return. Others might come. The cottage, their sanctuary, was now a crime scene, a tomb.
With a strength that felt borrowed, he gently laid his mother down. He moved mechanically, driven by a survival instinct he didn't know he possessed. He found a clean woolen blanket—the one she'd woven last winter—and wrapped her body with a tenderness that made his hands shake. He couldn't bury her, not here, not now. Not with wolves possibly still circling. He carried her to the root cellar, a small, cool space beneath the kitchen floor. It felt like a betrayal, hiding her away like a secret, but it was the only sanctuary he could offer.
Back in the main room, he worked quickly, his movements sharp with panic. He righted the table, gathered the scattered books, and wiped the worst of the blood from the floor with rags he then burned in the dead fireplace. He was erasing evidence, but of what? He didn't know who the enemy was, only the symbol they wore.
As dawn tinged the sky a sickly grey, he stood in the center of the scrubbed-clean room, a stranger in his own home. The hum under his skin had grown more insistent, a whisper that was not sound but intent. The hair in his hand felt alive with potential, a key to a terrible door.
His mother's final act had not been a gentle passing of knowledge. It had been a violent upload, an imprint. Fragments of understanding floated in the chaos of his mind: the need for a focus (the hair), a conduit (his own bloodline), and a target… the true name. He didn't have the name. But the memory-vision from the connection—the assassin's memory—flashed again: a sun-baked landscape, a muttered prayer to a foreign saint, the name Marco wrapped in fear and reverence.
Was it enough? A first name? The hair? The humming power within him seemed to lean towards the idea, hungry and curious.
He had no plan. Only a compulsion. To move. To act. To use this cursed gift.
He changed out of his bloodstained student robes into rough homespun trousers and a tunic. He pocketed the little money he had, the heavier purse from Professor von Heller feeling like a guilty secret against his thigh. He took the dagger the assassin had dropped—a plain, utilitarian thing with a worn leather grip. Finally, he carefully secured the lock of hair inside a small tin that had once held healing salve.
He left the cottage as the first birds began to chirp, a sound obscenely normal. He did not look back. The millstone, his father's legacy, stood silent and grey against the brightening sky. He was leaving it all behind. The boy who had struggled with basic flame-mending was gone, buried in that cellar with his mother.
---
The journey to Westminster on foot was a two-day trudge that felt like a passage through a dream. The world was too vivid, too loud. Every traveler on the road was a potential threat; every rustle in the hedge made his heart clench. The strange energy inside him alternated between a dormant chill and sudden, sharp surges that made his vision blur at the edges. He saw fleeting, ghostly overlays—a flash of a different road, the feel of a horse between his knees—memories that were not his own, leaking through.
He arrived at the college gates just as evening prayers were ending, the solemn chant of the choir filtering from the chapel. He was a ghost returning to the land of the living. His absence had been brief enough to be unremarkable; a sick mother was a common enough excuse. He slipped into the dim, cavernous dormitory he shared with three others. Only one boy was there—a lanky, ginger-haired student bent over a complex brass apparatus that smelled of sulphur and copper.
Leonhard Brenner looked up, his sharp green eyes missing nothing. He took in Kaden's pallor, the dirt on his boots, the hollow look in his eyes.
"Rose. Back so soon?" Leonhard's voice was neutral, his accent clipped from the Free Cities. "Your mother…?"
"Gone," Kaden said, the word ash in his mouth. It was the truth, if not the whole truth.
Leonhard was silent for a moment, then gave a short, solemn nod. No false sympathy. "Bad business." He returned to his apparatus, but his posture had shifted. "You missed the announcement. Practical Alchemy field trip tomorrow. Blackwater Marshes. Collecting glow-moss and bog-iron. A day out of these walls." He glanced at Kaden again. "Might do you good. Or kill you. The marsh gases are unpredictable."
It was as close to an offer of distraction as Kaden was likely to get. He just nodded, unpacking his meager bag with trembling hands. The tin with the hair felt like it was burning a hole in his pocket.
Sleep was impossible. The humming was worse in the dark. It was a pull, a tide drawing him out. Sometime past midnight, when the dormitory was steeped in the deep silence of youth exhausted by study, he rose. He moved like a shadow, the assassin's dagger a cold comfort in his belt.
He knew where he needed to go. The memory-fragment was clear: a particular inn on the seedier side of the river, The Gilded Tankard, where men who asked no questions drank. Where a man named Marco might have lodged, or might still.
The streets of Westminster at night were a different creature. The grandeur of the college district gave way to cramped, timber-framed houses leaning conspiratorially over muddy lanes. The air smelled of offal, stale beer, and damp stone. He found the inn, its signboard creaking in the river mist. Light and rough laughter spilled from its windows.
His heart hammered against his ribs. This was madness. He was a student, a boy from a mill, not a spy. But the hum in his blood was a constant, urging whisper. He touched the tin in his pocket.
He didn't go inside. Instead, he lurked in a foul-smelling alley opposite, watching. He saw sailors, mercenaries, hard-faced women. Hours bled away, the cold seeping into his bones. Just as despair began to curdle his resolve, the door swung open.
A man stepped out, stretching. He was of average height, muscular, with a close-cropped beard. He wore a traveller's cloak, but as he turned to say something to someone inside, the faint light from the doorway glinted on his right hand.
On a silver ring.
Kaden's breath caught. The world narrowed to that single point of light. It was him. The assassin. Marco.
The man—Marco—pulled his hood up and began walking briskly away from the river, towards the labyrinth of the old city.
Kaden followed. His fear was a crystalline thing, sharp and clear. He tailed the man at a distance, his student's soft shoes silent on the cobbles. Marco moved with purpose, turning down ever-darker alleys, moving away from the taverns and towards the abandoned warehouses near the city walls.
Then, Marco stopped. He was standing before a derelict tannery, its vats long dry. He seemed to be waiting.
Kaden pressed himself into a doorway, his pulse roaring in his ears. What was he doing? He had found him. Now what? The hair in his pocket seemed to grow heavier.
He saw Marco tilt his head, as if listening. Then, the assassin turned slowly, his gaze sweeping the dark alley. It passed over Kaden's hiding place, lingered for a heart-stopping second… and moved on. Marco muttered something, a curse in a language Kaden didn't know, then spat on the ground. He looked agitated, uneasy. He kept flexing the hand with the ring.
Suddenly, Marco's head snapped around. Not towards Kaden, but further down the alley. A new figure had emerged from the shadows—taller, cloaked in finer, darker wool. The figure's face was hidden, but authority radiated from him. Marco immediately stiffened, then bowed his head slightly, the picture of tense deference.
They were too far for Kaden to hear the words, but the taller figure spoke in low, measured tones. Marco responded, his gestures sharp, defensive. He held up his hands, as if demonstrating they were empty. He shook his head vehemently.
Kaden watched, frozen. This was the killer's master. The one who had given the order.
The cloaked figure listened, then said one final, short phrase. Marco flinched as if struck. The figure turned to leave, then paused. He half-turned back towards Marco, and a sliver of moonlight caught the side of his face for just an instant—the strong line of a jaw, the unmistakable, careful elegance of a profile Kaden had seen bent over a shared book in a sunlit study.
The world tilted.
No. It was a trick of the light. A shadow. A desperate mind seeing patterns in the chaos.
The tall figure melted back into the darkness. Marco stood alone for a long minute, shoulders slumped, before he too turned and walked away in the opposite direction, disappearing into the night.
Kaden slid down the wall of the doorway until he was sitting in the damp filth. The hum under his skin had become a deafening buzz. The hair was a brand. And in his mind, clear as a bell, overlaid on the retreating figure of his mentor, was the final, whispered word the assassin had uttered to the night, a word of terrified recognition:
"Master."