On occasion, I resorted to desperate acts of violence. Eating a plate of cabbage and rabbit with bloody hands was barely a step above the beasts of the forest. I had at first pitied my victims, but soon savored the taste of bursting cooked flesh or boiled mushrooms in spite of the screams necessary to acquire it all.

One night this led me to a scuffle right next to where Somyellia and I’s abandoned house met the graves.

The man squirmed, no more than an innkeeper who took the wrong turn. But this was the way of the world.

“Thirty silver—she just walked, from the mantel to the seating—I—my—” I had long ago picked up on the patterns in such pleas, all silenced with the butt of my knife.

The night now quiet, graveyard birds soon choired their calls. They seemed as if all around, though no matter how hard I tried, their perches remained hidden. As I gripped the fought-for purse, a hand caressed the back of my neck.

Every hair on my arms stood. I wheeled around to deliver a hard fate to the innkeeper’s brave friend, the same grizzly fate for so many of the brave and misguided. But when I turned fully, I gazed at a sight even more peculiar: a slender man wrapped in shining black. There was no outstretched hand, for both of this stranger’s were clapped together, no different than one of the many statues ornamenting the graves. The moon broke through the fog to radiate on his silk.

“Good evening,” the man said.

By some nighttime trickery, I couldn’t rise. For I surely tried, but all I could muster were a baffling series of slips, falls, and curses while the back of my neck burned and froze all at once.

“No need for such…barbarity,” the man said, unclasping his hands and depriving me of my knife. The man straightened, looking at my blade, turning it this way and that. A milky light, brighter than the moon’s clung to his cloak. “Do you always dispatch them?”

Odd, I know, but I felt whatever faculties had left me now making a slow return. The moment I was able, I rose to my feet and stood a clear head taller than this oddest of inquisitors. From this perspective, a far more familiar view, the stranger’s regality lessened, and my knife in his grip looked more like a woman’s hand fondling a Pelat machete.

“They call me Belot,” the man said.

In my frenzy, better sense had escaped me. A few years around a woman like Somyellia had left me keen to know when black magic brewed. This man was a grave-walking necromancer. But threat of being turned into a toad wasn’t my worry. In these queer years, dark practitioners were as liable to turn in lawbreakers at one of the many pavilions snapped together by confederacies made between the Ward and Ansul’s True than sicking hexes on someone. Rumor had it that the cash reward could be handsome, especially if the misfit had violated both the laws of Man and Nature all at once. This stranger had seen my face, and though I’d only been caught violating the laws of Man, he—