ONE
IVALYS
The stairs groan beneath my boots. Third floor. Twelve steps to go. My arms ache from the bag I’ve been carrying since the market closed, and irritation prickles under my skin like a rash I can’t scratch.
Gror missed our dinner. Again.
Third time this month. Third time he’s sent some half-formed excuse through a street runner—something came up, Ivy, next week for certain—and left me standing in my cramped kitchen with enough food for two and no one to eat it.
I tell myself it’s gambling. Has to be. He’s been jumpy lately, flinching at shadows, making excuses I don’t believe. The gambling dens in the Inkwell are ruthless, but at least debts to them don’t come with sigils and soul-claims. At least those debts can be worked off with time and sweat.
It’s nothing worse than that.
The words feel hollow even in my own head.
I reach his landing. The Inkwright’s Rest lists sideways, all warped wood and crumbling brick, the external stairs zigzagging up its face. Laundry hangs between his window and the neighbor’s, flapping in the perpetual gray dusk that passes fordaylight in Gravebind. The air tastes of cabbage and cheap ink and something sour beneath—desperation, maybe. Fear.
Same as it’s tasted since I was old enough to notice.
I shift the grocery bag to my hip and reach for his door.
It swings open before I touch it.
Unlocked. Not just unlocked—ajar. The wood doesn’t even resist my push, just drifts inward on hinges that whine.
Bad sign.
The grocery bag hits the floor. Onions roll. I don’t notice.
Inside, Gror’s apartment has been stripped. Not ransacked—stripped. His battered table is gone. The chairs. The threadbare rug he bought secondhand from a peddler in the Bone Market. The cooking pot he inherited from our mother. Everything of value has vanished as if it never existed, leaving behind only bare floorboards and walls stained with?—
My breath stops.
The walls are bleeding.
Black liquid seeps from the plaster in slow rivulets, pooling on the floor in spreading stains. Ink. I know what it is even before my mind catches up to my senses—the sharp chemical tang of it, the way it moves with purpose instead of obeying gravity. Contract ink. Debt magic. The stuff that built this city and feeds on everyone who lives in it.
The ink gathers. Flows. Forms letters on the wall in front of me, spelling out words that rearrange themselves even as I read them:
DEBT.
DEFAULTED.
CLAIMED.
My stomach drops through the floor.
Everyone in Gravebind knows what those words mean. Everyone. Even the children who beg in the gutters understand what happens when the Ledger claims its due. I’ve spent yearson the edges of it—debtors dragged screaming from their homes, enforcers prowling the streets with their bone tokens and dead stares, people I knew vanishing overnight as if they’d never existed.
Gror signed a blood contract.
Grordefaulted.
Gror is gone.
“No.” The word comes out hoarse, cracked. “No, no, no?—”
I’m moving before I decide to move. Searching. Tearing through the empty space for any sign of him, any trace, anything that might tell me this isn’t real. The hidden spot behind the loose floorboard where he used to stash emergency coin—empty. The crack in the wall where he kept important papers—nothing but dust and spider silk. The bedroom, barely large enough for a bed that isn’t there anymore, stripped to bare bones.
