Evie peered back at Aya, her blue eyes gleaming as her lips quirked into a smile.
“I have a gift for him.”
Part Two
An Ox for Slaughter
9
Will was seven years old when he realized his father was cruel.
He’d had three years to come to terms with it. Three years to learn that crying to his mother did him no good, and that the best way to avoid his father’s wrath was to obey.
It’s how he found himself here, dressed in a suit that any other ten-year-old would mock him for relentlessly, standing alongside one of his father’s most wretched attendants, Nial.
Technically, Will was supposed to be the one sharing the news. That’s what his father had ordered him to do. But he’d thrown up after their first house call, right there on the widower’s front stoop, her cries still ringing out from the other side of the door. Nial had taken the paper from his hands with a scoff, muttering something about softness and boys who would never become men.
Will hid his trembling hands in the pockets of his trousers and focused on keeping his chin raised and shoulders back as he followed Nial down the dusty path that wove throughout the farmlands. His mother said such postures were to make him look like a gentleman. But the shadow that loomed before him showed nothing but a gangly boy who hadn’tgrown into his limbs yet.
“You’re not going to vomit again, are you?” Nial’s gruff voice sounded from beside him.
“No,” Will muttered, his chin jutting out as he fixed his attention on the farmhouse in the distance.
“Good. One more, then I’m off to get a drink. Let your father know it’ll be on his copper. Payment for having to babysit his sniveling son.”
Will’s hands tightened into fists, his knuckles stretching against the fabric of his pockets. He could feel his affinity racing through his veins, answering the siren call of his anger.
Gentlemen do not throw around their power like beasts, his mother’s voice chided in his mind. It would be years before he learned the truth behind her words; before he recognized that power lay not in brute force, but in timing, and manipulation, and lies.
“Who is it?” Will asked as he forced his fingers to unclench.
“Callias Veliri. His wife, Eliza, was a Caeli on the passage.”
Veliri. Will knew that name. Aya Veliri was a Persi who went to school with him. He’d never spoken to her, but he’d seen her in the halls, often with a blond-haired Incend that he knew for a fact had set fire to Ms. Scheuler’s Conoscenza just the other month.
Aya was pretty, with long dark-brown hair and blue eyes that looked like the ice that froze over the creeks of the Malas. His stomach churned as he thought of those eyes filling with tears once they delivered their news.
Gods, he wanted to go home. Not to the town house, but somewhere else. Somewhere with a nice mother and a loving father and maybe even a dog whose fur he could bury his face in whenever he tried to hide his tears. Maybe he wouldn’t have to hide them in this new place. Not if he had a mother who’d hug him tight and a father who’d see it wasn’tweak to feel.
Feeling was, after all, what the gods had made him to do. Why couldn’t they see that?
These other parents would. They would see how emotions stirred in and around him and they would not think it weak that sometimes they overcame him. That sometimes, his own were too powerful to ignore.
He wanted parents like that so badly that he could feel his eyes burn with it. And didn’t that make him pathetic? Pathetic and selfish. Here he was, on his way to break the news to a girl that her mother was dead—at the hand of his own father’s greed, no less—and he was sulking in his own sorrow.
At least hehadhis mother and father.
Will tugged at the lapels of the jacket his father had forced him to wear. It was a stiff, uncomfortable thing, black with gold thread, the compass and arrow sigil of their house stitched over the right breast pocket.
He hated it.
The collar rubbed against the back of his neck, but he forced himself to ignore the way it made his skin itch as Nial led the way up the winding path. Aya’s home, a white farmhouse with a pale blue porch, sat in a large field, the property portioned off with a wooden fence that had seen better days. Nial grumbled something under his breath about dilapidation as he pushed through the rickety gate, and Will felt that stirring of his power once more as his jaw clenched.
He thought it was lovely. The chipped paint and the autumn-coordinated flower beds and the land stretching as far as the eye could see. He could breathe here in a way that he couldn’t in the Merchant Borough. He sucked in a lungful of fresh mountain air just to prove it. It calmed his racing heart and settled the dread that was roiling in his stomach as Nial’s heavy fist knocked on the Veliris’ door.
Maybe she’s not home. Please, gods, have her not be home.
His prayers went unanswered as Aya opened the door. She took in Nial first, then her gaze flicked to Will. It lingered on his jacket, something hardening in those ice-blue eyes as they traced the arrows and compass sigil. Her grip on the door tightened, the skin of her knuckles blanching white with the force of it.
