And Ezer had always been a victim of the cruelty of fate.
She sighed deeply, blowing a bit of hair from her tired eyes. Ervos had never even told herwherehe’d been stationed.
She’d written to the garrison in Tomar, and then Stervist. Then Regalia, and Peddler’s Gate, and the troupe at Highgarden. Each camp, spread evenly across the north, holding the line against the dark.
The list went on and on, and not a single godsdamned garrison had word of Ervos.
She supposed silence was better than a confirmed death, for it was Ezer’s job, as it was all the Ravenminders like her, to receive the lists of the fallen. To send those names out of her tower, onward to the doorsteps of those who would discover their loved ones dead and gone.
Two years of receiving those lists, names hastily scribbled upon parchment, and Ervos had never been on one.
He hadn’t defected, for she knew he’d die before he ever turned to the enemy’s side.
Sowhyhadn’t he written more? And why couldn’t she find him?
With another sigh, Ezer wiped the drool from her face, and did her best to smooth her wild curls.
Ervos wasn’t hertrueuncle, not by blood. Anyone could take one look at the giant and see that. He’d discovered Ezer as a babe, the sole survivor of her village after a shadow wolf attack. There was no oneleft to claim her. Nor was there anyone to give her a name, so he had done it himself.
Ezer,he’d chosen. Because she was found beneath the light of the full moon.
Ervos was once the Ravenminder here, just like his father before him. A talented one at that, for he was a gentle giant that loved the ravens. But he had a betting problem. He drank too much, and practiced his card-play too little, to the point that even Ezer could beat him by the time she turned ten.
Ervos had gotten in way too deep with borrowing coin from the prison master. He hadn’t paid any of it back before he’d been whisked away to the warfront, drafted like so many others.
She’d never forget the day the summons came.
All able-bodied men and women were to go and serve, fighting against the Acolyte’s dark army in the north.
She was abandoned.
Like so many other underaged children. Left to face the world without a guide.
‘I don’t supposeyoubrought word from my uncle?’ Ezer asked the raven. ‘A giant of a man, crop of bright red hair?’
The raven only cocked its dark head left and right, as if wondering why she still hadn’t removed the tiny scroll from its leg.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you would have.’
She wiped her hands on her leather apron and stood from her worn stool. Chains clinked between her ankles as she walked, kicking up shavings and the smell of dust.
The shackles had long ago rubbed her ankles raw and covered them in scars, despite the pieces of worn fabric she’d managed to wrap beneath them in hopes of saving her skin. She’d requested salve –for the poor birds’ feet,an easy lie – and managed to use it on herself enough times to heal the skin.
But the scars beneath would remain.
The ones that went soul-deep, covering the pain of Ervos’s abandonment. And now someone had to pay off allhis debts.
Of course it fell to his ward to do it.
Ezer would have been boarded upon a wagon heading to one of the gods’ temples in Tovar. It was there that she’d be crammed into a room overflowing with other young girls to be watched over by elderly maidens with rapping canes and constant orders to bow her head and pray for mercy to the five gods above, and to the countless demigods beneath them, while they sewed uniforms and gathered baskets of food to be sent to the warfront.
Ezer was no good with a sewing needle.
She wasn’t much for prayers.
And she was even worse with following rules.
She supposed having to take Ervos’s place wasn’t all bad – the only gift fate had ever given her – because Ezerlovedthe midnight birds.
