Even at ten, Liam was cold and remote. He went off to boarding school less than a year after we left the estate, but rumors about him continued to travel through his family’s lands. Everless servants on errands in Crofton said that his quiet exterior could turn to rage in the span of a heartbeat, that his parents feared him and sent him away. But it wasn’t rage that made Liam push his brother toward the fire in the forge, or chase us to Rodshire. It was cruelty. I can’t imagine how his malice might have grown in the years since.
Now, as I shrink back into the nearest doorway, I wonder how I ever mistook him for Roan. The boys share the same height, the same strong frame, the black curls—but where Roan’s hair is unruly, Liam’s has been wrangled and slicked back from his face. His mouth is a thin, humorless slash; his eyes hooded, impossible to read. Rising above the crowd on his horse, he looks like a statue, sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle—proud, unyielding, and eternal. He surveys us, the line of people waiting to see Duade.
Too late, I reach up to raise my hood, but his gaze has already landed on me. Do I imagine that he pauses for an instant, his eyes lingering on my face? Fear has lodged in my throat, and my hands tremble as I pull my hood over my hair. I want to turn away, to flee from the line, but that would only make me more conspicuous.
Thankfully, lowly townspeople don’t seem to catch Liam’s interest. His eyes scan past me, and he looks down to where his guards hold Duade between them.
The old time lender looks terrified. Roan would have called off his men, but Liam has none of his kindness.
“Please . . .” The quiet is such that I can hear Duade plead from where I stand. “My lord, it was an honest mistake, nothing more.”
“You broke the law. You bled time from a child.” Liam’s voice is deeper now, but just as cold as when he was a boy. “Do you deny it?”
All around me, shadows of remembered pain flit across faces, and I know these are the parents in the line. Children’s time is unpredictable, hard to measure and hard to bind, and it’s easy to take too much and accidentally kill the giver. Yet many have had no choice, and I imagine that watching your child bleed is its own punishment, crueler than anything the Gerlings could dream up.
“How was I to know she was a child?” Duade stares up wildly at Liam, excuse after useless excuse tumbling from his lips. “I believe only what I’m told, my lord, I am nothing more than a servant—”
Liam’s voice cuts through the air as cold and sharp as a knife. “Take him back to Everless. Bleed a year.”
This stops Duade short. “A year?” For a moment, he just seems stunned. Then panic fills his face. “Lord Gerling, please—”
The collectors haul Duade toward a waiting horsecar. Liam twitches his leg, as if to dismount, and my stomach churns with nausea. I suddenly feel in danger of fainting. While Liam is distracted, I duck my head and hurry from the line, toward an alley I can take as a shortcut home.
At the edge of the market, I glance back. Immediately, I wish I hadn’t. People are drifting away from the time lender’s shop, but Liam is still there, looking straight at me. My heart stutters, and for a moment that lasts entirely too long, I’m frozen, trapped in his piercing gaze. If he recognizes me . . .
Run. My father’s voice.
But he digs his heels into his horse and turns it away, back toward the main road, as if he can’t wait to be quit of so contemptible a place as our village. My breathing is ragged in my own ears as I turn, too, and hurry homeward.
When I emerge from the village into our barren wheat field, the panic clouding my mind fades a little, leaving only the deep, inescapable dread in my stomach that Liam put there with his look. I’ve had nightmares since the night we were banished from Everless—smoke-filled night terrors of the fire grew into dreams of being pursued by a faceless killer. Dreams of fire and terror and the acrid smell of hot metal and burning straw, which fills my nostrils again as I picture Liam’s eyes.
Ten years have passed since he last saw me, I remind myself again and again. Papa and I were only servants, me a knobby-kneed seven-year-old girl in a servant’s cap. He might recognize Papa, but there is no reason he would know me.
It’s not until the cottage comes into view, a paltry wisp of smoke drifting from the chimney, that I remember I meant to bring home our dinner. Amma’s strip of dried venison will have to do for tonight. For Papa’s sake, I hope the hour-coin I fetched for the trout will be worth the empty belly.
The sun sinks lower. I look west, toward the horizon, where the sky is laced with gray and golden red. Another day spent.
A wilting evergreen wreath hangs on our back door, and a fox ornament, which I twisted together as a child with wire and nails, sits crouched in the window. My mother apparently believed in these talismans. Papa says she would spend hours tying pine boughs together with thread or polishing her ancient wooden figurine of the Sorceress—a graceful figure with a clock in one hand and a knife in the other—that sits in the windowsill for protection, longevity. A similar statue, though much larger and less beautiful, stands near Crofton’s west wall, where the devout—or desperate—ask for blessings. Even though he doesn’t say so, I know my father keeps these things around to honor Mother’s memory. He doesn’t believe in them any more than I do. If the Sorceress exists, she’s not listening to our prayers.
Inside, I linger in the unlit kitchen, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark, dreading the moment when I will face my father empty-handed. It’s not that Papa will be upset with me—he never is—but I am ever painfully conscious of his spindly frame, the tremors in his hands. What will he have forgotten while I was gone—my name? My face? In my panic over Liam Gerling and the commotion he caused, I forgot all about the rent. And now, with Duade taken to Everless to be bled by the Gerlings’ time lender, what hope do I have of selling him more before the collector arrives?
An unfamiliar voice floats in from the other room, and I freeze. The words are muffled by the crackling fire, but I can tell the voice is male. Fear lances through me again. Did Liam recognize me after all? Did he send someone to come after me?
I move to the threshold and pull back the curtain. And stop.
It takes me a moment to make sense of the scene before me. The rent collector, a Crofton man who travels from cottage to cottage every month like illness, sits across from my father near the hearth. He’s early, at least earlier than normal. Between them on a rough wood table is a line of objects: a small brass bowl, a glass vial, a silver knife. The same tools that litter the time lender’s counter in his glass-fronted shop. The tools to withdraw time.
Papa looks up at me. His cloudy eyes widen. “Jules,” he says, struggling up from the table. “I didn’t expect you back until dark.”
My heart hitches; it’s already dark.
“What’s going on?” I ask, voice shot through with tears, even though I know. The collector glances my way, seeming much too large for our small home.
My father sinks back into his chair. “I’m paying our rent,” he says calmly. “Why don’t you wait outside, enjoy the warm day?”
Before I can reply, the collector cuts in. “Four months, then.” His tone is businesslike, slightly bored. “For this month’s rent and the last.”
“Four months?” I take a step toward the table, my voice rising. “Papa, you can’t.”
The Gerling man looks briefly at me, then shrugs. “That’s the penalty for being late.” His eyes sweep over me once more before he turns back to his tools. “Time is for burning, girl.”
It’s a familiar expression in the village—why hoard time when every day is dully brutal, the same as the one before and the one that will come after? To hear it from a man who’s never known hunger or cold makes my fingers twitch toward a fist. Instead, I take the hour-coin from my pocket and hold it out to him. “Take this, and I’ll—”
The collector cuts me off with a short, humorless laugh.
“Save your hour, girl,” he says. “And don’t look so upset. After your father’s time runs out, you’ll inherit these debts. I’d hate to be on bad terms.”
The curse I’d been about to spit at him freezes in my throat. After Papa’s time runs out. As if he expects it to happen soon. Has he measured my father’s blood?
My father looks away, his jaw working, as the man reaches for the knife, but Papa seizes it first.
He draws a line neatly across his own palm, as calmly as if it were charcoal on paper instead of knife on skin. Blood wells. “Four months, yes,” he echoes as he picks up a glass vial and holds it against his palm, catching the small stream of blood. “I have plenty to spare.”
But I don’t think I’m imagining the way his face gets paler and paler by the second, the lines seeming to become more deeply etched; or the way he sags a little when the filled vial leaves his hand, corked, and disappears back into the Gerling man’s purse. I reach out and grab his wrist before he can pick up a second vial.
“No.” With my other hand, I sweep away the knife until it’s out of my father’s reach. The collector watches me with eyebrows raised, and I address myself to him now. “Four months for two months’ rent? There has to be another way.”
“Jules.”
I ignore my father’s soft admonition and turn to the collector. He looks bored, which infuriates me almost as much as the fact of his taking my father’s time. But I push the anger down and make my voice as honey-sweet as I can, hoisting on a smile to match. “Let me sell my time, sir. You can have five months.”
Interest sparks for a moment in the man’s eyes, and I can imagine what he’s thinking—he could pass the rent along to the Gerlings, pocket the extra month for himself. But then my father cuts in. “She’s sixteen.”
“I’m seventeen,” I say, hating myself for how my words make Papa’s brow crease in confusion. “Papa, today is the eleventh day of the month. I’m seventeen.”
The collector looks back and forth between us, unsure who to believe, and then grunts and shakes his head. “No. I won’t bring the Sorceress’s wrath down on my head for bleeding a child.”
The Sorceress’s, or Liam Gerling’s?
“Please.” I turn halfway toward Papa, addressing both men at the same time. “I’ve never given time. I can earn it back later.”
“Easy to say you’ll earn it back,” Papa says stubbornly. “Harder to actually earn it. Collector, hand me another vial.”
“I’m to work at Everless.” The words leave my mouth before the idea has even fully formed in my mind. My father’s head snaps toward me, and he stares at me with a warning in his eyes.
The collector hasn’t moved. “And?”
“And . . .” I blink, trying to remember what Amma told me in the marketplace. “They’re paying a year on the month. If you forgive us a little this time, I’ll pay double what we owe you. And I’ll pay two more months in advance,” I add, trying to hide the desperation in my voice.
A bribe. I’ve caught the man’s interest. He looks me up and down, evaluating me in a way that makes my skin seethe, but I hold my chin high and bear his eyes on my body. I know how the Gerlings value youth and beauty. I’m no Ina Gold, but at least I inherited my mother’s long legs and shining hair. In different clothes, I could pass for an Everless girl.
“Jules!” My father struggles up from the table, grabbing his cane. Standing, he towers over us, and for a painful second I see the man he used to be—proud and strong enough to give pause to any Gerling crony. I look down at the tabletop. It hurts me to ignore him like this. But I don’t know how much time he’s sold, how much he has left.
“Absolutely not. I forbid you to—”
“Sit down,” the collector says impatiently. “I’ve better things to do than listen to peasants bicker.”
Slowly, my father sinks back into his seat, anger and fear clouding his brow.
“I’ll let the two of you sort this out,” the collector says, condescension thick in his voice as he pushes back from the table. “If you plan on going to Everless, I’ll see you at the market tomorrow at dawn. We’ll see if you’re fit. Otherwise, I’ll come back tomorrow to collect the rest of the rent.”
“Thank you for your patience,” I reply. Papa’s eyes are trained on me. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The collector grunts noncommittally. Silence rings in his wake as he walks out, the door slamming behind him.
“How much time do you have left?” The question seems to burst from my lips of its own accord.
He either doesn’t hear me or chooses to ignore me. He looks down at the table, blotting the cut on his palm with a cloth. “Jules—”
“How much time?” I press.
“Enough.” I can’t tell if this is an answer or a rebuke. He takes a deep breath. “You’re a child. You should be going back to school.”
“You should have told me we were behind on the rent. I could have paid. I have the time.”
“No,” my father says, and for the first time his voice is sharp. “I won’t let that happen.”
“But work is scarce.” The anger I’ve pushed down, the rage I couldn’t show the rent collector, twists and churns inside me. “Where does that leave us—leave you? I need you, Papa.” To my dismay, I can feel tears springing to my eyes. “Did you think of that before you let the collector bleed you?”
“There are things you don’t know about the world, Jules.” The confrontation has left him worn-out, slumping in his seat. Guilt pricks at me—he did just have a month bled from him, and he must be exhausted. “The Gerlings are evil, greed-driven people,” he fumes. “That boy, Liam, would have seen us executed before he told the truth about the fire—”
His words are lost in an onset of coughing. The next words are so soft, so weak, that I almost think I imagine them. “I won’t let them have you.”
“They won’t have me. They won’t even notice me,” I say, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. I’m tired of hiding, of waiting. “And if I make enough time, I can go back to school.”
“No.” Steel runs below the surface of his voice. “You will not go back to Everless. I forbid you.”
“Papa, please. No one will recognize me.” I can hear how I sound—wheedling, childish. Papa’s outburst has shaken me. I know he hates the Gerlings—I do too—but it’s not worth bleeding his life out to keep me away from them. Has fear come to dominate his mind so much?
“I’m still your father,” he says. “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll do what I say.”
I’ve opened my mouth to argue when an ugly thought skitters across the surface of my mind.
He can’t stop me.
After Papa had chased Liam off that night when I was twelve, he decided to shed our past. The villagers’ knowing that the Gerlings’ disgraced blacksmith had landed in their midst would raise eyebrows, questions: Why had Papa left such a high station for a hardscrabble life in the village? Worse—what if Liam found us again, to enact some petty revenge? Easier, Papa said, to create a dull, typical history. A farmer and his daughter, abandoning the fields after a blight. He taught me how to lie, so no one would look too closely at us.
He doesn’t realize it, but he’s taught me too well.
I sigh heavily. “Amma is leaving for Everless,” I say. “Maybe the butcher will give me her job.”
Papa’s gaze softens. “Maybe.” He reaches out, puts a hand over mine. “I hate that you have to work at all. But at least here, we’re together.”
I smile at him, wishing I could tell the truth—that the idea of returning to Everless sickens me and fills me with dread, but I’m going to do it anyway. He’s smiling, relieved, and I know he doesn’t see through me. I stand, kiss him on the brow, and make for the kitchen to go about dinner.
When Papa’s not looking, I take the figurine of the Sorceress from the window—the one that belonged to my mother—and slip it into my dress pocket. Maybe the Sorceress can give me luck. Maybe the thought of her will give me strength.
At dawn, I’ll need both.