Ashford was a wound that refused to heal.
A border town caught between the Valdorian Empire's southern reach and the lawless
expanse of the Ashen Moors, it had been burned, sacked, and rebuilt so many times that its
architecture was a chaotic patchwork of conflicting influences. Imperial stone walls circled
orcish timber halls. Elven spires rose beside human tenements, their elegant curves marred
by decades of soot and neglect. The streets were mud in the rainy season, dust in the dry,
and always, always crowded with the desperate, the dangerous, and the drifters.
Roen had been born here. Or near enough. His mother had stumbled into town half-dead
from exposure, belly swollen with him, and died giving birth on the floor of a tannery. No one
knew her name. No one knew where she'd come from. She was just another body in a town
full of them.
The tanner had raised him for six years before drinking himself to death. A mean drunk
who'd taken out his failures on the boy with backhand slaps and muttered curses. But he'd
also taught Roen to read, to count, to recognize value in things others discarded. After that,
Roen had belonged to the streets.
Now seventeen, he'd survived by being useful. Running messages through neighborhoods
where the city watch wouldn't go. Finding things that were lost—sometimes because he'd
found them, sometimes because he'd taken them in the first place. Making problems
disappear for people who couldn't afford to be connected to solutions.
He had quick hands, quicker feet, and a mouth that could talk a priest out of his vestments.
Most importantly, he'd learned to read people. To see what they wanted, what they feared,
what they'd pay to avoid.
What he didn't have was the Sight.
No shimmering threads of the Weave. No ability to pull at the fabric of reality like the
Weavers who made and unmade the world. He was thread-blind, one of the nine in ten who
would never know the taste of magic, never feel the Weave's song in their blood, never be
anything more than meat for the grinder.
In Ashford, thread-blind meant you were nothing. Less than nothing. It meant you'd never
rise above your station, never earn real coin, never matter to anyone with power.
Thread-blind was a sentence. A label. A brand that marked you as one of the forgotten.
Roen had stopped caring about it years ago. Mostly.
"Roen!"
He turned to see a girl pushing through the market crowd. Mirelle was fifteen, rail-thin, with a
shock of copper hair and a face full of freckles that made her look younger than her years.
She'd attached herself to him two years ago after he'd pulled her out of a canal where three
older boys had been holding her under.
Not a rescue, he'd insisted at the time. He'd just wanted to see what the commotion was
about. She'd followed him ever since, a shadow he couldn't shake.
"You're alive," she said, skidding to a halt in front of him. Her eyes were wide, searching his
face for damage. "Dren said Gravel-Tooth's men found you. He said they were going to cut
your throat."
"They found me," Roen admitted. "We had a conversation."
"What kind of conversation?" Her eyes dropped to his neck, where the thin line of blood had
dried to a brown crust. "Roen."
"The kind where I convinced them I'm worth more alive." He started walking, not wanting to
stand still. Movement was safety. Staying in one place too long made you a target. "I need to
find fifty crowns by sundown."
"Fifty?" Mirelle's voice squeaked. "Your debt was thirty."
"I negotiated upward." He kept his face neutral. "Don't ask."
Mirelle chewed her lip, a habit she'd had since childhood. "We could ask Tob. He sometimes
has work."
"Tob would sell us to a work camp if the price was right." Roen had known Tob for years,
which meant he knew exactly how far the man could be trusted. Which was not far at all.
"Then what?"
Roen didn't answer. He didn't have an answer. Fifty crowns was more money than he'd seen
in a year. In Ashford, there were only a few ways to make that kind of coin quickly: kill
someone, steal something valuable, or sell yourself to someone who'd use you until you
broke.
He was considering option three when the screaming started.
It came from the direction of the town square, high and sharp. Not pain. Fear. Roen had
heard enough of both to know the difference. Pain screams were guttural, desperate things.
Fear screams were higher, cleaner, the sound of someone who'd just seen something their
mind couldn't process.
He moved before thinking, weaving through the crowd toward the sound. Behind him,
Mirelle's footsteps followed. She'd learned early that when Roen ran toward trouble, there
was usually profit in it.
The square was a broad, open space dominated by a crumbling fountain that hadn't worked
in decades. Market stalls lined the edges, their vendors hawking everything from fresh fish to
questionable cures. But the usual chaos had frozen. People stood in clusters, staring toward
the center.
Where two figures circled each other, and the air shimmered with visible threads.
Weavers.
Roen's stomach dropped. He'd seen Weavers before, of course. They passed through
Ashford regularly enough. But something about this felt different. Dangerous. The kind of
dangerous that didn't care about bystanders.
He should leave. He should grab Mirelle and disappear into the crowd while he still could.
But for some reason he stood there , watching.