Chapter 1 — The Streaking Summoner
Introvert!? Me!? The hell am I an introvert? I stay indoors all day because I'm afraid of getting my butt kicked. There's a difference. It's called strategy.
That was Kael Vance's honest defense, and he'd been rehearsing it for eighteen years, mostly to himself, mostly in the shower, which was — and he'd like this on the record — exactly where the universe chose to ruin his life.
It happened on a Tuesday.
He was standing under the water, arguing with no one about whether he was a coward or merely 'risk-efficient,' when his left shoulder caught fire.
Not literally. That would have been kinder.
It started as an itch. Then a burn. Then a feeling like someone was carving into his skin with a penknife from the inside, and Kael Vance — brave, risk-efficient Kael Vance — screamed like a kettle and slipped on the soap.
CRASH!
He hit the floor of the tub, elbow first, still screaming, and the water rained down on him while the burn chewed deeper into his shoulder, and his very first coherent thought was:
'Mom is going to kill me for screaming in the shower.'
His second thought was worse, because his second thought came after he twisted his neck and looked at his shoulder.
There was a brand on it.
A circle of black lines, ink-dark and sharp, curled into a shape like a coiled thing with too many horns. It sat on his skin like it had always been there. Like it had been waiting.
Kael stopped screaming.
The bathroom went very quiet except for the water.
'No,' he thought.
'No no no. I've seen the broadcasts. I know what brands look like. Drab is dirt-coloured. Talent is orange. Prime is red. That---'
He stared at it.
'---that is CURSE.'
Curse. The brand that didn't happen. The brand that happened once in a millennium, to someone else, in a history book, in a country far away. The brand where you walked into the Rite of Binding and the Rite of Binding walked back out alone.
The survival rate for a Curse-brand contract was zero point five percent.
Kael knew that statistic. Everyone knew that statistic. It was the kind of statistic they put in schoolbooks specifically to scare children, and it had worked beautifully on him, because he had spent eighteen years being scared of absolutely everything and this was the one thing he'd never thought to be scared of, because it was supposed to be impossible.
The bathroom door banged open.
"Kael!" His mother burst in, flour on her hands, fear on her face. "I heard screaming, what happened, are you---"
She saw the shoulder.
She froze.
"...Mom," Kael said, sitting naked in the bathtub, wet hair in his eyes, holding out his shoulder like evidence at a trial. "I think I'm going to die."
His mother did not say don't be silly. His mother did not say everything will be fine. His mother put one flour-white hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled up, and that was how Kael knew it was real.
---
The settlement found out in four minutes.
This was not an exaggeration. Kael timed it. His mother ran to get his father, his father ran to get Dr. Krell, Dr. Krell ran to get his spectacles, and somewhere in that chain of responsible adults, somebody's mouth ran ahead of everybody, and by the time Kael had actual clothes on, there were forty people outside his house.
"Curse, they said."
"Vance boy. The indoor one."
"Poor kid. Poor, poor kid."
"Oi, isn't he the one who---"
And then, of course, because the universe had decided subtlety was for other families, somebody's kid pointed at him through the window and announced, at the top of his lungs:
"HE GOT IT IN THE SHOWER! MA! HE WAS STREAKIN' WHEN THE BRAND CAME!"
The crowd lost its mind.
'I'm going to die in the Rite,' Kael thought, standing at his own window, watching his own neighbours cry-laugh at his own tragedy, 'and my legacy is going to be a shower joke.'
"Streaking Summoner!" someone shouted.
"The Streaking Summoner!" Half the settlement was chanting it now. Half the settlement that was supposed to be mourning him.
His father — a good man, a round man, a man whose pot belly entered rooms a full second before the rest of him — came to stand beside him at the window. They watched the crowd together.
"Son," his father said gravely.
"Yeah, Dad?"
"If you're going to die in the Rite," his father said, "you might as well die famous."
Kael looked at him.
His father looked back, and his eyes were wet, and his mouth was smiling, and somehow that was the worst thing that had happened all day.
'He's terrified,' Kael realised. 'He's making jokes because if he stops making jokes he'll fall down.'
So Kael did what any loving son would do.
He opened the window, stuck his head out, and yelled at forty of his neighbours:
"IT'S NOT FUNNY! I'M GOING TO DIE AND YOU'RE ALL GOING TO FEEL TERRIBLE!"
"STREAKING SUMMONER!" they roared back.
He closed the window.
'Fine,' he thought, with the grim dignity of a condemned man. 'Laugh it up. In a week you'll all be carving that nickname on my memorial stone.'
He had no idea, standing there in his towel, that in a week the entire planet would know his name.
He had no idea the name wouldn't be the funny one.
---