Pale, barred light appeared down the passage, and a tension released in her throat. She hurried forward, clutching her coat tight. The grate opened on oiled hinges onto an empty cobbled path. The sky had eased into the cloud-dusted pink of early morning.

Linura’s city streets began their new-day bustle as she walked. It didn’t take long to find a wagon, even less so to convince its owner to let her on. She dropped a few Celdia into the old man’s callused hand and climbed in between bulging canvas bags. The cart rattled through the main gate, past a pair of constables leaning on their halberds. Anji watched the road lengthen as the wagon took her up the Roseway, blinking at the sun climbing higher over the city’s receding rooftops, shining red on the sea beyond the docks. Linura Castle’s thin spires dwindled as the bells began to ring.

Anji clutched her dagger’s hilt with cold fingers, felt her coin buzzing against her thigh. She settled against one of the canvas bags and a turnip tumbled into her lap. It was filthy, but she took a bite, smiling as she chewed.

Chapter 1

1

Anji was shitfaced, and likely about to get stabbed.

She’d made it two days on foot in the pounding wind and snow with an empty stomach and piss frozen to her shins by the time she’d found the town—whatever it was called. The old farmer had kicked her out of his cart after a day of travel, all for eating a few turnips. Bitter old fuck. Walking through the barren tundra had reduced her feet to stubby blocks of ice, numb and cumbersome and swollen in her ragged shoes. She’d thrown up the moss she’d eaten.

The town had sat in darkness as she’d approached—dead apart from a scattering of lit windows and a fat column of smoke rising from the thatched roof of a two-story building just off the main road. There’d been a sign swinging on rusted hinges over the building’s front door. A faded relief of a burly blacksmith, hammer raised high in one hand, beer stein in the other.

THE HAMMERED SMITH.

Four days past—before she’d become a murderer—she’d have heeded her father’s wisdom and avoided bars altogether. They were haunts for thieves and drug fiends, mercenaries for hire. The low places for downtrodden upstarts.

Hell, she’d thought, I’ll fit right in.

Regardless, by the time she’d stumbled up the main thoroughfare of this ramshackle village, lips flaking, fingers frozen to brittle twigs, she’d been too exhausted to care. She’d clattered into the cavernous space, ignoring a poster depicting a hazy likeness to the girl she’d once been tacked to the door. She hadn’t even stopped to check the bounty.