The crows had been there longer than Brennan could remember.
They roosted in the dead oak at the edge of Varen's Field — three of them, always three, as though the tree could only hold so much weight — and they watched the town of Ashfeld the way old men watch younger men make mistakes. Without surprise. Without pity.
Brennan watched them back.
He was crouched behind the granary wall at the field's western edge, fingers pressed flat against cold stone, breathing steadily despite the fact that the baker's son and two of his friends were somewhere behind him in the alley and they were not coming to talk. He'd lifted a heel of bread from the market stall. Not even good bread. The kind left out when the morning's real loaves were gone, hard enough to crack a tooth, dusted with ash from the baker's oven floor.
Still. A theft was a theft in Ashfeld.
He heard the first one round the corner — boots too loud, breathing too eagerly and he moved.
Not fast. Not dramatically. He simply wasn't where he'd been.
The baker's son, a wide boy named Holt with red knuckles and his father's mean squint, stumbled into empty air and nearly fell. His two friends pulled up short behind him. Brennan was already four steps away, walking, not running. Running drew eyes. Walking made you part of the street.
Stupid, he thought, not of himself but of them. You telegraphed every step.
He didn't know why he could read movement the way he did. He'd always been able to — the slight shift of weight before a swing, the tensing of a shoulder before a shove. In the alleys of Ashfeld, it had kept him alive and mostly unbeaten. He'd never questioned it. Survival didn't require explanation.
He bit into the bread as he walked. It tasted like charcoal and old flour, and he ate every piece of it.
Ashfeld was three days' ride south of the capital and approximately three hundred years behind it in every way that mattered. Its streets were mud and old cobblestone in equal measure. Its buildings leaned against each other like tired soldiers. The imperial banner — black eagle on gold — hung above the magistrate's hall at the town's center, but the fabric had faded to a sickly amber and no one had replaced it in years. The Emperor's reach was long, but it grew thin at the edges, and Ashfeld was very much an edge.
Brennan had grown up in its orphanage house until he was nine, when he'd decided the cold and the silence and Brother Aldous's belt were no longer worth the single meal a day they bought him. He'd been living in the margins ever since. Odd work when he could find it. Theft when he couldn't. He was sixteen now and had not gone hungry in three years, which he considered something close to success.
He had no last name. Orphans in Ashfeld rarely did.
He had a bedroll in the loft above a cooper's workshop whose owner, an old deaf man named Petyr, either didn't know or didn't care that Brennan slept there. He had three coins in a leather pouch stitched into the lining of his coat. He had quick hands and quicker eyes and the particular kind of stillness that came from learning very young that drawing attention was the same as drawing pain.
He had nothing else.
Or so he believed.
He found it near dusk.
He hadn't meant to go to Varen's Field. He'd been cutting across the eastern end of town to avoid Holt and his friends, taking the long way around through the dead grass and frost-cracked earth that bordered the field's edge, when the light caught it.
Just a glint. The kind of thing you'd miss if you were walking with purpose. Brennan rarely walked with purpose, so he saw it.
He stopped.
The field had been an execution ground once. Decades ago, before Ashfeld had even a magistrate's hall to hold a proper trial, judgments had been carried out here. The old iron post was still in the ground at the field's center, listing slightly to the left, stained a dark brown that wasn't rust. Children dared each other to touch it. Brennan had touched it at seven and felt nothing but cold metal, which had disappointed the other children and quietly relieved him.
The glint was coming from the earth near the post's base.
He crossed the field without thinking about it. The crows watched him from their oak. The sky above was the color of a bruise, purple and grey bleeding into each other at the horizon, and the air smelled like rain coming.
He crouched down.
A hilt. Dark iron, wrapped in leather so old it had nearly fused to the metal. He could see the faintest suggestion of markings along what little of the blade was visible — etchings, fine and deliberate, though the dirt obscured them almost entirely. Whoever had put it here had buried it with some care, at an angle, as though laying something to rest rather than discarding it.
He should have left it.
He pulled it free.
The earth gave it up easier than it should have, like it had been waiting for the right hand. The blade was short — more than a long knife, less than a proper sword, the kind of in-between weapon that the imperial knights called a bastard blade with contempt and Brennan thought was probably more honest than most things in Ashfeld. Dark iron. No shine. And along the flat of the blade, visible now in the dying light, those etchings — fine blue lines that seemed less engraved than present, as though they existed just beneath the surface of the metal.
He turned it over in his hands.
Something settled in his chest. A feeling he didn't have a name for. Not warmth exactly. More like recognition — the specific calm of seeing something familiar you didn't know you'd been looking for.
He told himself it was just a sword. A decent find. He could sell it.
He did not sell it.
He stood at the old execution ground while the light died around him and the crows watched in silence and he held the blade loosely at his side the way he'd seen soldiers hold weapons — not gripping, just carrying — and it felt exactly right in a way that unsettled him and that he decided immediately not to think about.
He wrapped it in his bedroll cloth and went home.
That night he lay in Petyr's loft and stared at the rafters and listened to the rain come in the way he'd known it would, and the sword was beside him in the dark, and he did not sleep for a long time.
He didn't know what it was.
He didn't know whose ground he'd pulled it from.
He didn't know that seventeen years ago, a knight had stood at that iron post — the greatest of his generation, a man who had served the Emperor directly, a man who had been given a name that the empire had since erased — and had been made to kneel.
He didn't know that the sword had been buried there by a woman who had loved that knight, placed beneath the earth at the foot of his death because she had nowhere else to put it and could not bear to let it be taken.
He didn't know any of this.
He was just a cold, sharp boy in a loft above a cooper's workshop, listening to rain, fingers resting lightly on dark iron.
Cinder lay quiet beside him and waited.