A Strange Way to Start

Market days always have a particular smell to them — sweat and animal and fresh bread and something underneath that he'd never been able to name. Human density, maybe. You can't quantify it. But once you've spent enough years in the quiet of the woods, you feel when there are too many people in one place.

That was Vath, that afternoon, leaning on Jarin Colley's counter and not quite pretending he wasn't counting the minutes until he could leave. Colley had three exceptional bottles he'd been wanting for months — the kind with thick bases that don't tip in a saddlebag. Worth the noise, he'd told himself.

Around four, he noticed the wagon coming in from the West. Prison wagon. Iron-barred, heavy-wheeled, the kind they use when they're serious about keeping someone inside. Cain was nearby — Vath knew him by then, not well, but enough to recognize the careful way he watched things. He'd just paid nine gold pieces for a donkey that looked like it had opinions about the arrangement. He named it Deathbringer. That tracked.

Beau was farther along the row. Vath caught his eye briefly — both of them in the middle of something, nobody going anywhere yet.

The redheaded woman in the wagon — Vath saw her too. She looked straight at Cain and winked. That should have told him something. It didn't.

The masked children ran out first. Four of them, darting into the middle of the street, tossing coins in the air like a festival trick. People stopped to look. That's how it works. You make something interesting happen where you want the eyes to go.

Then the driver went down. Arrow through the eye — from somewhere in the crowd, or above it, or behind it. He never found the angle. He never would. The wagon lurched to a stop.

After that, everything moved at once. Screaming. The wagon door didn't open — it came off. Out came the big one first, holding his shield like a battering ram, the kind of man who uses it as a weapon because he doesn't need anything else. The halfling behind him was faster — he had a dagger in someone before the echo had reached the far end of the market. The redheaded woman came out last, shortsword already in hand.

Vath moved toward the trouble. Something in him went toward the noise instead of away from it, even when the sensible thing would be to hold. He was trying to get to the archer — whoever had put an arrow through the driver's eye and vanished back into the chaos.

He didn't find them.

He put the Faerie Fire on the big one instead. Gold lit the man up from all sides. If you can see them, you can hit them. Concentrate.

The halfling he caught with Entangle. The roots came up fast and tight. He didn't get out of them. Cain moved on the woman. Fast. But she had already rehearsed this.

The big one — Vath lost track of him somewhere in the screaming crowd. One moment he was there, lit up, and then the fight pulled in three directions and he was just gone. He never found out what became of him. He wasn't sure he ever asked.

The woman — Tylsa, he found out her name later — got away clean. The archer too. She was already moving before he understood how well this had all been arranged. The coins, the masks, the timing, the door. Someone had thought this through. She'd walked out of it like she'd rehearsed it.

Eslin found them afterward. Plain clothes, no insignia — the kind of man everyone in his district nods to without knowing why. He led them to the Silverwatch HQ and told them the three were nefarious individuals. Congratulations on apprehending two of them, he said.

Two. The halfling dead, someone in custody — Vath still wasn't entirely sure which — and Tylsa somewhere out ahead of them.

He stood outside that building afterward. That's a strange way to start something.

He didn't know yet that it was the start of anything. But looking back now — the noise of that market day, the coins thrown in the air, the way Cain stood there holding the donkey's lead like he'd bought it for a reason he hadn't figured out yet — it felt like the first page of something that was already written.

Remember to breathe.

He'd been saying that to himself a lot, since.