Read the First Chapters
Begin The Magnet of Marjon, Book One of the Gideon Irondell Trilogy — a new YA fantasy series about a thief from the Barrens, a ruler with two powers, and a legend of a boy who may wield all five.
From the Lessons of Karthune – The Age of the Excursion
The elder opened the book with both hands, careful not because the volume was fragile — though it was — but because every child in the room was watching how she handled it. The cover had been repaired twice. The spine had been wired along its cracked center. The pages had yellowed at the edges from years of fingers, lamp heat, and lessons repeated to children who were never quite ready for them. She let the silence gather before she read. Some histories entered more deeply when they looked old enough to have survived the thing they described. At last, she lowered her gaze to the first line and began to read.
“The world did not end. It flipped.” She paused there. She always did.
Calia had heard the sentence before — her mother had read to her from a version of this same account when she was very small. But it landed differently in this room, in front of this woman, with eight other children sitting cross-legged on stone around her. Like it weighed more when someone read it out loud in a place built for exactly this.
“The magnetic poles reversed in years rather than millennia, and the world spent centuries relearning what it was. Storms that behaved like nothing storms had ever done before. Radiation reaching through a shield that had briefly forgotten how to hold. Magnetic fault lines opening with energies that instruments could measure and no one could explain. We refer to this as the Great Excursion.”
The boy beside Calia raised his hand. The elder did not stop reading.
“Those with the means to survive it went underground. They built cities beneath the earth, sealed the gates, and told themselves they were preserving civilization. Most people were locked out and forced to stay above — billions of them, left to face the storms and the radiation and the breaking of everything they had known. Most of them did not survive it. The few who did called the ones who went underground the Uunders. The name stuck and is the term we use today.”
The boy raised his hand again. This time she pointed to him.
“Why did our people get locked out? Did they do something wrong?”
“No. The Uunders believed they could only hold a certain number and survive themselves. Whether that was the correct belief is a question for a different lesson and a different age.” She opened the book before he could follow up. “We continue.”
“The surface changed the survivors. Their children were born different. Across hundreds of years, five abilities emerged, each one distinct, each one named for the tribe that carried it. Stonewake — those who could move the physical world with unseen force. Twinform — those whose bodies could reshape themselves into new forms. Greyweave — those whose minds could bend the thoughts of others. Veilstep — those who could fold space and step through it. Heartward — those who could feel the emotional currents of others as clearly as spoken words.”
Calia knew all of this. She was Veilstep, like her mother. She had known since she was six, when she stepped sideways through a wall by accident and ended up in the neighbor’s kitchen, terrifying an elderly woman and a bowl of soup.
“These tribes would unite and become the Zetash. They formed the Aurorium to rule and a Council to manage it. All Zetash but one carries a single ability — Kull Kalijan, whose double inheritance makes him the most feared of any Zetash alive, is the only anomaly.”
Boos erupted around Calia. She didn’t join them. She never joined them. She had watched Kull Kalijan’s Shadows move through the lower markets twice in the past year, and booing felt like inviting something to look at you.
“Legends spoke of a rarer figure still,” the elder said. “One who carries all five. A convergence of forces the tribes called a Quint.”
The room went quiet.
Not the polite quiet of children remembering they’d be tested on this. Something different. The quiet of a sentence that had just changed the size of the room.
Calia leaned forward slightly without deciding to.
“All five?” she said. “My mom read to me about a Quint. She said they’re not real. She said Kull is the only one with two, so five isn’t possible.”
“Whether the legends are true or myth is not what matters. What matters is that it is possible.”
“But—” Calia stopped. Rebuilt. “Kull carries two, and he’s the most powerful person alive. If someone carried all five—”
“Unstoppable,” said the boy beside her.
“We don’t know that,” said another boy. “Maybe they wouldn’t be good at any of them.”
“Can it actually happen?” Calia asked.
The elder looked at her steadily. “The records show only Kull Kalijan with more than one. But many things were stories before they became real. The Excursion itself was considered impossible by the scholars who were alive when it began.”
“But if one existed,” a boy said slowly, working it out, “and they were on our side—” He stopped. Corrected himself. “On the Zetash side. That would change everything. Against Kull. Against anyone.”
Calia said it before she’d finished thinking it.
“But what if they weren’t on our side?”
Silence.
She felt the other eight turn toward her, and she kept her eyes on the elder, because the question had arrived fully formed and she needed to know the answer.
The elder looked at her for a long moment.
“Then it would also change everything,” the boy beside her said, very quietly.
They sat with that.
The elder opened the book again.
“Generations passed. The storms weakened. The Uunders opened their gates and found a world that had not waited for them. War came quickly and ended badly for everyone. We held Karthune and the green lands. The Uunders were driven into the Barrens — the broken territory on the western part of the continent. There, separated from the Zetash lands by the Fault Lines, they were ordered to stay. Kull Kalijan did not like this and fought against the Council — they banished him to the western edges of our lands. Kull Kalijan, however, entered the Barrens not as a cast-out man but as a conqueror arriving early to his next kingdom.”
The room held that in silence.
The elder closed the book.
“Tomorrow we discuss the Fault Lines. They sit between our lands and the Barrens. We will learn what they are. What they are not. Why the difference matters.” She rose. “You are dismissed.”
They filed out. Calia was last.
In the corridor, she caught up to the elder.
“Do you really believe a Quint could exist?”
The elder didn’t stop walking. She considered the question the way she considered all questions that deserved more than a quick answer — with the patience of someone who had learned that the best thing you could do with a question like that was not to answer it too soon.
“I believe,” she said finally, “that the world rarely produces only what we expect of it.”
She turned down the corridor and was gone.
Calia stood in the amber light of the passage, the lesson book’s last sentence still moving through her: one who carries all five.
She didn’t know why it felt less like myth than when her mom read her the story.
She turned and walked out into Karthune.
Chapter I – The Thief of Lowspire
Vetra came back before dawn with the quiet she carried when she had learned something she did not want to learn. Sly was already awake. He had been awake for an hour, which was not unusual. In the Barrens, sleeping past the moment the settlement stirred was something you had to train yourself out of early, because the settlement’s sounds were its news, and its news was rarely something you wanted to receive late. He lay on his side on the narrow mat and watched her set her water jug down and stand with her back to him for a moment longer than the setting-down required.
“Who?” he said.
Vetra turned. She looked at him the way she looked at things she had already decided how to carry — not surprised, not broken.
“Pell Morrow,” she said. “Sometime in the night. His daughter found him.”
Sly knew Pell Morrow. Everyone in the district knew Pell Morrow — a broad man who had once been broader, who had a laugh that arrived before he did and a habit of fixing things for neighbors without being asked. He had been getting thinner since the last ration reduction. They all had. But Pell had started looking thin in a different way — the way that meant the body had stopped arguing and started letting go.
“That’s three,” Sly said.
“That’s three,” Vetra said.
He sat up. The room held its dark — the cloth over the window keeping out the pre-dawn light, the walls doing what they always did, which was hold the cold at one remove from the morning. Maren Doss two weeks ago. Old Hendric the week before that. Now Pell.
Three people in one settlement in one month. All of them being the same kind of thin, and gone the same quiet way. The Commander’s ration reduction was announced six weeks ago as a temporary measure following a supply disruption on the eastern transit routes. The supply disruption had been resolved, but the rations had not been restored.
Vetra moved to the small table and sat, folding her hands on its surface the way she folded things when she was deciding how much of what she knew to put into words.
“Pell’s daughter is twelve,” she said.
Sly looked at the cloth over the window.
Outside, the neighborhood was beginning its morning sounds — people moving carefully through a place that had less in it than it had last week.
“I’m going out today,” he said.
Vetra looked at him for a long moment — the look that weighed things, that ran its hands along the edges of what he had just said and checked it for cracks.
“I know,” she said.
The two words sat between them. They contained everything the Barrens had taught them both: that the line between surviving and not surviving was frequently just whether someone in the neighborhood had decided to do the impossible thing today, and that the people who survived longest were the ones who noticed who was doing that and got out of their way.
He stood. He found his jacket on its hook and put it on. Then stopped — not from hesitation, from the thing that sometimes lived between deciding and doing.
“Pell’s daughter,” he said. “What’s her name?”
Vetra’s hands unfolded on the table. “Avra.”
He remembered her after Vetra said the name. He stood there with it for a moment — the name of a twelve-year-old girl whose father had gone quiet in the night because the Commander’s government had done arithmetic on people and arrived at an acceptable number of them dying. Avra. Who had found him? Who would go to a distribution line tomorrow and receive exactly what the system had calculated she deserved?
He picked up his jacket. He didn’t say anything else. There was nothing to say that the name hadn’t already said.
Nobody in the Barrens learned to walk without also learning to listen. Not just to footsteps or voices — though those mattered — but to how the air shifted when trouble was close.
In the capital city of the Barrens, listening was as essential as breathing. The city didn’t have a proper name anymore, not a single one that everyone agreed on. The Commander’s people called it Spinehold, because it clung to the jagged citadel above like a stubborn burr on a cloak. The Uunders called it Lowspire, because it lived in the citadel’s shadow and because Uunders liked to name things for exactly what they were.
Sly called it home, which didn’t mean he liked it. It meant he knew where the broken cobbles were, where the drain grates rattled, which alley dogs would bark at strangers and which would bark at anyone holding bread, and which rooftops were safest when you needed to move from one end of a block to the other without touching the street.
He needed that knowledge often. He stole things — not because it was exciting, though sometimes it was, and he would be lying if he said otherwise. Not because he wanted to be important, though he did feel something when he slipped past people who believed the world belonged to them.
He stole because the people in his settlement had eyes that looked too big in their faces, hands that shook when they tried to lift buckets, and bellies that made sounds at night like distant storms. He stole because the Commander’s government limited rations and distributed hunger with equal precision.
And Sly — who had no shimmer of telekinesis, no clever flicker of teleportation, none of the powers that made Kull Kalijan and his Zetash followers feel like they had been handed the future — had something else. A mind that could fold around problems in the manner other people folded blankets, along with three friends, without whom he did almost nothing.
Three, which was the right number for daring plans: one to worry, one to grin, and one to do the thing everyone else had decided was impossible.
Vetra’s place was not really a home. She was not Sly’s mother, either — though he had lived with her since before he could remember clearly enough to call it a beginning. She had found him on the streets and kept him, which in the Barrens was its own kind of love: practical, watchful, and harder to shake than sentiment.
Their place was two rooms, if you counted the space behind the hanging tarp where Vetra kept her buckets, her knife, and a box she never opened in front of him. The walls were patchwork — old metal panels bolted to salvaged beams, brick stacked from a ruined building two neighborhoods over, cloth hung in the gaps to keep the wind from arguing its way inside.
Vetra made the place warm. Not with fire — fire was greedy and drew attention — but with intelligence that had survived a long time in a place that didn’t want her to. Layered blankets. Cracks sealed with cloth and hardened clay. Soup made from whatever could be convinced to become soup, and eyes that never missed anything.
That was the thing about Vetra. You could sneak past guards, slip through shuttered windows, crawl across rooftops until your knees bled — and then walk through her door and hear, without her looking up from her sewing:
“Your left shoe is wet.”
And freeze, because you hadn’t noticed.
“How do you do that?” Sly had asked her once.
Vetra shrugged. “You think your feet don’t tell stories? Everyone’s feet tell stories.”
He viewed his feet differently after that — with a kind of suspicious respect, like they had been reporting on him his whole life and he was only now finding out.
On this morning, Vetra scrubbed a pot with sand while Sly worked through a piece of flatbread so thin you could almost see the air through it. He ate slowly, not from politeness — from calculation. Eat too fast, and your stomach registers nothing. Eat slowly, and you could almost believe it was enough.
Vetra set the pot down. “You’re going out.”
Not a question. Sly nearly choked anyway. “No.”
Vetra lifted one eyebrow.
“Maybe,” he tried. “Not far.”
“You say that every time.” She reached out and tapped his forehead with one finger — her tap, the one that meant I can see straight through you. “Your thoughts are loud. Like boots.”
“They are not.”
“They are.” She leaned back, arms folded. “What is it today? Bread? Powdered protein? The little sweet bricks they give the patrols when they want them to feel brave?”
Sly tried to look innocent. This was difficult. He had a face that seemed to have been born mid-smirk, and even in repose, people tended to assume he was smirking somewhere private.
“I’m going to check something,” he said.
Vetra snorted. “You always check something with a sack?”
He looked toward the corner where the sack lay, neatly folded. He hadn’t touched it. He was almost certain she hadn’t either.
“And you always pretend I can’t see it,” Vetra said.
He put on his most serious voice. “I’m being careful.”
Her expression softened — not fully, just at the edges, how old metal softens when it finally meets the right amount of heat. “I know.”
Then it closed again.
“Sly.” When she said his name first like that, it landed differently — less like speech, more like a hand on the shoulder. “If you get caught, it won’t just be you.”
His friends made jokes about getting caught. Loud, dramatic jokes involving not-to-be-repeated analogies and exaggerated gagging.
Vetra never joked about it.
“What do you mean?” he asked, quieter.
“The Commander’s people don’t punish only the thief.” She leaned forward, and he noticed how her hands had stilled completely — Vetra, who always had something moving, some small task ongoing, had gone still. “They punish the place the thief came from. It teaches the rest of you to turn on each other.”
His jaw tightened.
“If they catch you, they won’t say, Oh, that clever boy. They’ll say, Who fed him? Who hid him? Who cheered him on? And they will squeeze until someone points.” She let the rest of that sentence remain unspoken. In the Barrens, the endings of those sentences were known the way everyone knew how cold winter got — not by being told, but by surviving it.
Sly stared at the bread. It tasted like ash now.
“I’m not stupid,” he said.
Vetra reached out and covered his hand with hers — not the tap this time, but a full covering, like placing something important somewhere safe.
“No,” she said. “You’re not. That’s what scares me.”
He swallowed. “I’m doing it for them.”
Her eyes moved to the window — the hole in the wall covered by cloth — toward the neighborhood outside where neighbors moved like people who had learned to take up less space than they needed.
“I know,” she said. Then, as if the words cost her something: “That’s why I don’t stop you.”
“You don’t?”
“If I stop you, they starve faster. If you get caught, they starve and suffer.” She leaned close enough that he could see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, each one a separate proof of what the Barrens had taken from her. “So here is the rule. Once. Listen.”
He nodded.
“You take only what you can carry. You never go alone. You never hit the same place twice in a row, and if you feel —” she paused, searching, and Vetra searching for words was rare enough to pay attention to — “like the air is watching. Like your skin is prickling. Like something invisible is pressing against your chest.” Her eyes held his. “You run. You drop everything, and you run.”
“That sounds —”
“Dramatic,” she said. “Yes. That’s why you’ll remember it.”
He gave a small nod, and part of his mind was already cataloging the loopholes. Vetra saw them forming on his face — she always could — and pointed one finger at him.
“No hero nonsense. You are not a story. You are a boy.”
He tried to smile. It came out sideways. “Yes, Vetra.”
Her expression softened again, just at the edges. She reached into her pocket and set something on the table between them: a small flat disc of metal, dull gray, with a hole punched through its center.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A washer. From an old machine — before the world went strange.” She slid it toward him. “Put it in your pocket.”
He picked it up. It was heavier than it looked.
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“That’s not a —”
“And,” she said, cutting him off with the precision of someone who has been doing this for years, “because it reminds me of you.”
He frowned at the washer.
“Small,” Vetra said. “Looks useless. Nobody notices it.” She tapped its edge with one finger. “But it keeps things from coming apart.”
Something tightened in his throat. He shoved the washer into his pocket.
Then he went still.
The flatbread on the table — the last quarter of it, sitting where he had left it — had moved. Not far. Three fingers’ width, toward him, as if the table had tilted. But the table hadn’t tilted. He would have felt it.
He looked at it.
The flatbread sat in its new position with the complete indifference of an object that had no awareness of having done anything unusual.
Sly looked at Vetra. Her back was to him. She was already standing, already moving toward the corner, already onto whatever the next task was.
He looked at the bread again.
He reached out and picked it up and ate the last of it in one bite, because there was no sense leaving it. His heart was doing something he chose not to examine. The bread tasted like dust, same as it always did.
He said nothing. He didn’t have words for it yet — and in the Barrens, a person didn’t speak things you couldn’t defend.
But he noticed it. He filed it the way he filed everything: information, weight unknown, save for later.
Then he glanced at his own hand and immediately wished he hadn’t, because staring at your hand after something impossible happened was exactly the sort of thing that made you look like an idiot. He flexed his fingers once under the table, trying to make it casual. It was not casual. Nothing about his hand felt casual anymore.
He almost wanted Vetra to turn around and ask what had happened. He also wanted, with equal force, for her never to notice anything at all.
Vetra turned. “Now finish that, and if you’re going to check something, check it fast.”
Sly grinned — the wide, involuntary grin that manifested when his feelings got too large for his face to manage any other.
He met his friends at the Tilted Wall, which had been a wall and was now tilted, and which the Barrens had used as a lesson in what happened to straight things that didn’t adapt.
It marked the edge of their settlement, where patrol eyes grew more frequent.
Thea was already there, sitting on top with her legs swinging, a scrap of paper balanced on her knee. Her hair was pulled back in a knot so tight it could have held a bridge together. Her eyes were dark, already cataloging.
“You’re late,” she said.
Sly hopped up beside her. “No.”
Thea held up the paper. “Two minutes —”
“Do you time me?”
“If I don’t, you get us arrested.”
“That’s sweet,” he said. “In a genuinely frightening way.”
“It’s accurate,” she said.
Below, Bram stood grinning as he always did — as if someone had told him a joke four seconds ago and he was still deciding whether it was appropriate to share it. Average height, hair combed up, drawn with too much enthusiasm and not enough second thoughts.
“We’re going to be legends,” Bram announced.
Thea didn’t look up. “We’re going to be dead.”
“Either way,” Bram said cheerfully, “we’ll be memorable.”
Toma was leaning against the wall with his arms folded, occupying the amount of space he needed and no more. He was the quietest of them, which was different from being the stillest — Toma was always moving in the ways that mattered, eyes sweeping and cataloging. He was taller than Bram and narrower, but he had the posture of someone who had been underestimated enough times to have turned it into a strategy.
“You brought the map?” Sly asked.
Toma reached inside his shirt and produced a square of old cloth covered in uneven lines, warm from being carried against his skin.
Thea sighed. “It’s not a map. It’s a guess.” Toma’s mouth twitched — fractionally, as it always did when he was as close to amused as he allowed himself to get. “All maps are guesses. Some are just more confident.”
Sly dropped off the wall and crouched in the alley’s shadow. The others followed without being asked — Bram with a thud, Thea surely, Toma soundlessly.
“Tell me,” Sly said.
Toma unfolded the cloth. The lower districts of the Barrens capital were scratched into it in rough lines — settlements, supply yards, fences, patrol routes marked in charcoal. A circle in red ink sat near the western edge, close to the old access points. Sly’s eyes went straight to it. “The supply depot.”
“We’ve never gone that close,” Thea said.
“Which is why we should,” Bram said.
Thea turned to look at him. “That is not logic.”
“It’s adventure.”
“Adventure,” Thea said, “is what people call disasters when they survive them.”
“What’s the schedule?” Sly asked, his eyes still on the circle.
Toma tapped the cloth twice. “Shift change at midday. Two patrol units overlap.”
“Bad,” Thea said.
“There’s also a delivery,” Toma continued. “New ration crates. If they’re unloading, attention goes inward.”
Bram leaned in. “Distracted guards are my absolute favorite kind of guards.”
“Do not say that where people can hear you,” Thea said.
Sly looked up, scanning the street beyond. A patrol moved at the far end — two Zetash enforcers, one Uunder clerk with a slate, all moving with the briskness of people who wanted to appear busier than they were.
“Why today?” Sly asked Toma. Toma’s eyes tracked the patrol until it turned the corner. “Vetra asked the distribution clerk for extra meal powder yesterday.” A pause. “The clerk laughed.”
Sly’s jaw set. He didn’t speak for a moment. He didn’t need to.
“We could do something smaller,” Thea said carefully. “Less risk —”
“No.” The word came out flat and certain, not loud. “I don’t want to do smaller.”
Bram straightened. “Big raid.”
“Big jail,” Thea countered.
“We do it smart,” Sly said.
Thea opened her notebook with the solemnity of a judge. “Define smart.”
He studied the three of them — Thea with her lists, Bram with his grin, Toma with his quiet, surveilling patience. His team. His trouble. His family in every way that the word actually meant something.
He grinned. “Smart is why they call me Sly.”
The plan, in Bram’s assessment, was beautifully ridiculous. In Thea’s, a spiraling staircase of terrible decisions. In Toma’s, possible.
They moved through the lower districts at the pace Sly had learned to hold — not too fast, not too slow. The city’s lower sound surrounded them: a baby crying behind a tarp, someone coughing in a stairwell, a pot scraping stone, the layered murmur of people practicing the art of not being noticed.
Sly knew those sounds as well as he knew his own heartbeat.
The western depot zone announced itself by tidiness. The buildings grew more uniform, more repaired — the Commander’s government expressing its preference for straight lines and predictable things through architecture. It didn’t always win that argument. But in the depot zone, it was trying very hard.
Thea peeked around a corner and came back. “Two Zetash enforcers. Compliance clerk.”
“They look bored,” Bram said, having peeked as well.
“That’s because they’re waiting to catch someone,” Thea said.
Sly put a hand on Bram’s shoulder. “No grinning. You look guilty.”
Bram touched his own face with something approaching offense. “This is just my face.”
Toma pulled Bram’s sleeve and pointed upward. Old scaffolding climbed the side of a building — collapsed, climbable for anyone willing to be optimistic about structural integrity.
“Roof route,” Sly said.
Thea closed her eyes briefly. “Roof routes are why my hair is turning gray.”
“Your hair is blond,” Bram said.
“It’s doing it on the inside, Bram.”
They climbed. The scaffolding expressed its feelings through a series of creaks that Sly noted as he went: which bolts held weight, which shifted, and where to redistribute his feet. By the time he reached the top, he had mapped the structure’s complaints well enough to come back down more quickly if needed.
Thea came last, voice barely audible: step where the bolts are, avoid the rust, why do we do this, we’re going to get caught —
Sly lay flat on the roof and looked out over the depot yard. Larger than the map suggested. A fenced square with stacked crates, a loading platform, a wide gate where a heavy carrier had just rumbled in, its armored sides dull with old use. Two patrol units at the gate. An officer with a slate, shouting inventory numbers at a guard who clearly found them personally offensive.
Thea crawled up beside him. “Too many.”
Bram crawled up. “Perfect.”
Toma said nothing, which meant he was counting. Sly’s mind moved through the yard in pieces — patrol positions, sightlines, the carrier’s angle blocking the officer’s view of the east wall, the drainage pipe he’d already spotted running down the storage building on the left, the argument at the gate that would either intensify or resolve in the next few minutes, and he needed to know which. He held it all at once, turning it, looking for the seam.
They had to get the supplies. His mind drifted to old Dama Rell boiling water and two carrots. Little Aven crying in the night because he had dreamed of bread. The neighborhood desperately needed them to be successful.
The seam was there, he decided as he refocused on the yard.
“We do the ladder trick,” Sly said softly. Thea’s eyes went wide. “The ladder trick is not a thing.”
“It is now.” Bram’s grin returned at full power. “I love when things become things.”
Toma pointed. The carrier’s rear doors swung open, revealing crates stacked floor to ceiling. The officer’s voice rose, directing the unload. All eyes went to the inventory.
“Timing,” Sly murmured.
“Bad,” Thea whispered.
“Excellent,” Bram whispered.
“Now,” Toma whispered.
A guard shouted. A crate caught an edge wrong and slipped. The officer’s cursing was loud enough to reach the lower districts. The yard’s attention collapsed inward toward the mess.
Sly moved.
He slid off the roof’s far side, caught the lower ledge, dropped into the shadow of a ventilation tower without sound — knees absorbing it, weight distributed, no clatter. His heart was hammering. He let it hammer. Fear was just information, and right now it was telling him exactly how much this mattered. Thea’s voice hissed from above: Sly —
Bram caught her sleeve. Toma watched.
He worked along the building’s wall toward the drainage pipe, pressed himself flat, tested the pipe — wobble, hold — and went up it the way he’d gone up a dozen like it. His boots found the top of the fence. He crossed it and came down the other side in one movement, landing without sound.
He moved inside.
The depot smelled of dust and metal, and the place had an explicit, sterile order, managed by people who believed in counting things. He pressed against the wall and read the yard from a shadow — guard angle, clerk position, the carrier blocking the sightline from the gate.
He waited. This was the part most people got wrong — they moved too soon, driven by the urgency hammering in their chests.
The guard turned to argue with the officer.
Sly went.
He crossed to the crates in three steps, hugged the shadow of the nearest stack, and moved between two piles in the silence between one guard’s sentence and the next. The crate in front of him bore a stamped symbol — three triangles in a circle. Supplies. His fingers found the clasp: no tools, just his hands and a mind that liked puzzles. He pressed, listened to the resistance, found the angle the mechanism wanted, and the clasp opened with a sound like a thought.
Inside: sealed packets, flat and square, stacked with the indifferent neatness of things that didn’t know what they were worth.
His throat tightened.
He took six packets — three, then three more — and pressed them against his ribs under his shirt. Then a small sack from the crate’s edge: dried beans, heavy, dense, good for soup. He could have taken more. He knew how much more he could take.
You take only what you can carry. Vetra’s voice, in his memory.
He closed the crate. He moved back toward the wall. His escape route was the pipe, and the pipe required the guard to keep arguing, and the argument showed no signs of resolving, which meant he had approximately forty seconds.
He was twenty seconds in when the pipe creaked.
Small sound. In a busy yard, nobody should hear a small sound.
But a guard turned his head.
Sly pressed himself against the wall and stopped — not froze, which was panic, but stopped, which was a decision. Every detail sharpened: the guard’s angle, the distance, how the man’s squint moved across the yard without quite landing. The food packets dug into his ribs. He breathed once, and did not move.
The guard’s gaze tracked toward him with the patient inevitability of being taught to look until they found something.
Sly felt something happen behind his eyes — not pain, not dizziness. A pressure, like the sensation of leaning far over a ledge while remaining absolutely still. His thoughts scattered and then, strange and sudden, organized themselves around a single direction: Don’t look here. There’s nothing here. Go somewhere else.
It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t a decision, exactly.
The guard’s gaze drifted. His squint went unfocused — not distracted, something different. He turned his head sharply toward the far end of the yard. Frowned at nothing.
Then a clang across the yard rang out. Bram had tossed a stone across the way. The guard pivoted on his heel and hustled toward the noise, cloak swinging as he moved.
Sly climbed.
At the top, Toma’s hand found his wrist and pulled him up without ceremony. Thea’s face was pale with fury. Bram was incandescent.
“You’re welcome,” Bram whispered.
“You could have killed us,” Thea hissed.
“We didn’t die,” Bram said, with the serenity delivered as if it were the main metric.
Sly held his shirt open slightly — the bulge of packets, the weight of the bean sack. Thea’s fury paused. “How much?”
“Enough,” he said.
They didn’t return the same path they came. That was basic. Toma led them across rooftops along routes that looked arbitrary and weren’t — each turn calculated to stay out of sightlines from patrol towers, each crossing timed to the movement patterns below.
From up here, the capital looked different. The auroras drifted in the daylight sky — pale ribbons, barely visible, the lingering signature of the magnetic catastrophe that had remade the world. Bram decided they were cheering. Thea said they were evidence of ongoing magnetic instability and should not be personified. Sly said nothing, focused on the jump ahead and the weight of beans against his chest.
They reached the gap. Bram went first — immediately, without looking. Toma followed, which was the sound of nothing landing on stone.
Sly crouched.
Thea grabbed his sleeve. “If you fall, you’ll crush the food.”
He looked to her.
“I’m concerned about both,” she said, without inflection. “The food is harder to replace.”
He snorted — and jumped — and landed with boots scraping stone, which was louder than he wanted but within acceptable range. Then Thea jumped and landed with bent knees, no wobble, no sound, and brushed the dust from her sleeves.
He stared.
“I practice,” Thea said.
“Jumping off rooftops?”
“Not dying.” She was already moving. “Keep up.”
They were almost through the district — almost was the word that always invited disaster to prove a point — when Thea stopped so suddenly that Bram nearly walked through her.
“Don’t move,” she barked.
At the far end of the neighborhood stood a Zetash guard. Not pacing or distracted. Helmet off, pale skin with the faint shimmer of a surface-born Zetash, cloak hanging. His eyes moved across the roof lines with the focused patience of looking, not waiting.
They pressed into the shallow doorway of a shuttered shop — four bodies, one breath between them, wood rough against their backs. Bram’s grin was gone. Toma’s breath went silent. Thea’s fingers crushed the scrap paper into a ball. Sly felt the cold bloom in his stomach and noted it with the same attention he’d given the pipe creak — information, just information, telling him how much this moment cost.
There was nowhere to go. Neighborhood behind them: open space, no cover. Rooftops: too high, too smooth. One exit, and the guard was standing in it.
The guard’s gaze moved toward them, picking up their last movements. Sly’s heart hit the inside of his ribs so hard he was certain it was audible.
And then the pressure came again — the same sensation as in the yard, behind his eyes, that strange interior lean forward. His thoughts scattered and then, without him directing it, reassembled around the same direction as before: Look somewhere else. Turn the other way.
The guard’s gaze slipped. Not past them — away from them. He turned his head sharply toward the other end of the neighborhood, frowned at something that wasn’t there, and walked away. Unhurried. Certain.
Gone.
None of them moved. They waited for the shout, the boots, the hand on a collar. Nothing came.
Bram exhaled in a long, unsteady rush. “Did he just —”
“Walk away,” Thea said, barely audible.
Toma stared at the empty neighborhood. “That makes no sense. I know he saw us.”
The pressure behind Sly’s eyes was fading — already retreating, leaving a residue of confusion and something else he couldn’t name.
“I agree,” Bram said. “He was looking straight at us.”
“He was,” Thea confirmed.
Toma eyed Sly. Said nothing. But the look asked a question without committing to it.
Sly opened his mouth. Closed it. He had no explanation to offer. Only the fact of what had happened, and the fact of the strange sensation that had preceded it, and the uneasy recognition that the two things had not been unrelated.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Zetash don’t make mistakes,” Thea said — not accusatory, more the style she noted a calculation that didn’t resolve.
Bram looked down the neighborhood once more and then, calmly, without any of his usual performance: “Something happened.”
Nobody answered him. The neighborhood held the silence of a thing that had just occurred and hadn’t yet been named.
“Before luck reconsiders,” Toma said. “We should move.”
They went.
The neighborhood received them as it always did — with tired faces, cautious eyes, and the collective practiced art of not reacting to things that could get someone hurt if they reacted. Sly lifted two fingers and folded them away. A woman in a doorway exhaled and went inside, carrying the news.
Three soft knocks at Vetra’s door — soft, soft, hard. The tarp moved.
Vetra peered at him in the same manner she always did, with eyes that were already halfway through the accounting before he opened his mouth.
“You did it,” she said.
“I told you I was going to check something.”
Her gaze moved over him — the lumpy shirt, the scraped knuckles, the expression he hadn’t fully put away yet.
“You checked something,” she said again, in the same tone.
He grinned. She held firm until she registered Thea and Bram and Toma behind him, all of them breathing too carefully, and then her face shifted by the smallest possible amount.
“Inside.”
The packets came out. Thea counted them because that was what she always did. Bram held up the beans with the gravity of a man presenting evidence of something significant. Toma stood against the wall, watchful and silent.
Vetra studied the food for a long moment. Her mouth tightened — not disapproval, more the expression of understanding the exact shape of both the good thing and the cost it carries.
“This will feed people,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And it will make patrols angry,” she added, not begrudgingly.
“Yes.”
She brought her face level with his — close enough that he could see the flecks of gray at her temples, new since last winter. “Tell me you weren’t seen.”
“I wasn’t seen.”
She studied him with the intensity she reserved for truths she suspected were more complicated than they’d been delivered.
“Your heart is too fast,” she said.
“I ran.”
“You were scared.”
He didn’t deny it. Denying things to Vetra was a project that had never once succeeded.
Her expression shifted into something that cost her — tired, underneath the firmness, in a way he rarely let himself see. “I’m proud of what you’re doing for the people,” she said. “But hear me. If you’re caught, we don’t just suffer. These people will suffer worse.” Bram’s grin was gone. Thea had stopped counting. Toma’s eyes sharpened.
“They will use you,” Vetra said, voice very soft, which somehow carried further than volume would have, “to break everyone around you.”
Sly felt the anger move through him — hot, the kind that comes from understanding something true that you cannot fix. “I won’t get caught.”
Her fingers touched his cheek — brief, light, as if checking that he was still there. “That’s what every caught person says before they get caught.”
He held her gaze. Then nodded once.
“I’ll be careful.”
“Careful is not a promise,” she said. “It’s a practice.”
Thea said, “We practiced.”
Bram said, in a whisper, “A lot.” Vetra’s mouth moved — not quite a smile, the precursor to one.
“Good.” She turned to the supplies. “Tonight. Silently. The ones who need it most, and then it looks like nothing happened.”
“Something did happen,” Bram said, with restrained grief.
Vetra glared at him. He went quiet.
“Nothing happened,” she said, because in the Barrens, the line between surviving and not surviving was frequently just whether the world could be convinced that nothing had.
That evening, the neighborhood became a whisper network, which was the only kind of network the Barrens allowed. Vetra moved through it as she moved through everything — not hiding, blending, carrying a basket covered with cloth.
Sly and his friends followed at a distance, keeping watch. Bram wanted to distribute things with a kind of theatrical generosity. Thea informed him she would use the notebook as a weapon if he so much as gestured dramatically. Toma read the street using the same approach he always did — not for danger specifically, but for pattern.
They went to Dama Rell first. Old bones, hard eyes, pride worn smooth and sharp like river stone.
Dama took the packet. Glanced up at Vetra. “I didn’t ask.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I don’t take pity.”
“No, this isn’t pity,” Vetra said. “It’s strategy. You’re useful alive, as is everyone here.”
Dama grumbled something that might have been gratitude if you were generous with your interpretation.
A family with five children. The youngest clapped once, was shushed by three siblings simultaneously, and looked chastened. A man whose hands shook too badly to lift a pot stared at the meal powder packet.
All night like that — quiet, careful, no speeches, no performances. Food moving from hand to hand in the silence of people who understood that the gift was only safe if it was invisible.
When they came back to Vetra’s room, Sly felt something in his chest ease.
“Can we sleep here again?” Thea asked, yawning widely.
“As long as you keep quiet,” Vetra answered. “Tomorrow comes early.”
Bram lay on the floor like he’d been dropped there. “We did it.”
Thea was already halfway asleep, sitting up. “We did not die.”
Toma, against the wall, allowed himself the smallest possible expression of satisfaction.
Sly peeked at Vetra. She was watching him as she sometimes did — not at what he’d done, but just past it, at something she could see coming that he couldn’t yet.
“You were daring,” she said.
“But careful.”
“Careful enough. This time.”
She reached into her pocket — remembered — and her gaze dropped to his pocket instead. He touched the washer through the cloth without thinking about it. Her eyes softened in the way they did when he did something that confirmed a belief she had been holding for a long time.
Then she pointed at him.
“Tomorrow, the Commander’s people tighten everything. They will look for the reason supplies are missing.”
“We’ll adapt.”
“Yes. But you won’t let confidence become arrogance. They’re not the same thing.”
“I know.”
“If you’re caught,” she said, for the third time, because she believed in repetition like engineers believed in redundancy — the important things needed to be load-bearing in more than one place — “it will not just hurt you. It will hurt everyone you know and love.”
He nodded.
Outside, the auroras drifted over the capital — pale, faint, the sky’s quiet record of the magnetic catastrophe that had remade everything.
He lay on his blanket in the dark, exhaustion in his legs and his arms and the places where the food packets had dug into his ribs. He thought about Dama Rell turning away so no one would see. The youngest child shushed mid-clap. The guard whose eyes had moved away from the doorway where Sly stood, as though something had reached into the man’s attention and redirected it.
He didn’t understand that part yet.
But he noticed it — the pressure, the direction, the sense of power moving through him that didn’t quite have a name. He turned it over once in his mind, then exhaustion took it from him.
Careful is not a promise. It’s a practice.
Sleep found him before he could decide what to call the rest.
Chapter II – The Child of Five Powers
The Seer came at night. He always did. First Regent Fitzlin Barmosis had learned that truths capable of tipping civilizations never materialized in daylight. They crept in under darkness, slipped past guards whose boredom had made them porous, and insisted on being heard when the rest of the world was meant to be sleeping.
The Aurorium’s Council slept. Or pretended to sleep, which in Karthune amounted to the same thing.
Fitzlin stood alone at the crystal wall of his private chamber, hands clasped behind his back, watching the distant glow of the Fault Lines bleed against the horizon. Even from this height, the broken earth never fully darkened. It carried its own glow, unsteady, the luminescence of a wound that had never properly closed. The auroral haze drifted above it, neither storm nor weather.
He had been standing here for an hour — not by habit, or any deliberate vigilance. A waiting he had not chosen.
The soft chime sounded behind him.
He didn’t turn. “Enter.”
The doors did not open.
Instead, the air changed — not the temperature, not the light, something underneath both of those. The candles along the walls bent their flames inward, all of them, toward a point at the chamber’s center, as needles bend toward a magnet without anyone asking them to.
Fitzlin felt the pressure arrive at the edge of his thoughts — not invasion, not the sharpness of a mind-bender working against him. Proximity.
He turned.
The Seer stood at the chamber’s center as if he had always been there. He was older than Fitzlin remembered — considerably older. He carried his staff loosely, almost carelessly, which was the first wrong thing. The Seer’s staff was never loose. Its sigils were never designed to be decoration, Fitzlin had always known they were restraints, but these were dimmer than they should have been. Two of them had gone dark entirely.
The scent reached him: burned copper and old rain, impossible in a city that hadn’t seen a real storm in forty years.
“Your wards,” Fitzlin said, nodding at the staff, “are failing.”
The Seer’s lips moved before the sound came. “They’ve been failing for months.” A pause in which Fitzlin heard what the man did not say: and tonight they stop mattering. Fitzlin’s spine tightened.
He had spent a long career maintaining the useful fiction that Seers were more symbol than substance. But there was a significant distance between not fully believing that and watching one unravel in a sealed chamber.
“I have kept your order safe,” Fitzlin said. “Even when the Council demanded accountability for misreads.”
“You kept us useful,” the Seer said softly, “because you know the truth and choose not to share it.”
The irritation moved through Fitzlin and passed. Tonight had no room for old arguments.
The Seer’s eyes had begun to change — not the full gold of active sight, but lighter. Fitzlin felt the pressure at the edge of his thoughts intensify: still not intrusion, still just proximity, but closer now.
“Say it,” Fitzlin said. “Before you lose the strength for it.”
The Seer nodded and followed him.
The inner sanctum was smaller and colder and built with the paranoia of a man who had spent forty years watching what happened to unguarded rooms. Warded against empathic listening. Warded against mind-bending. A room where a truth could sit down and not be overheard.
The Seer lowered himself into the single chair. His staff clattered to the floor, and he did not retrieve it, which told Fitzlin more about the man’s condition than anything else could have. His hands shook — not the occasional tremor of age but a continuous vibration.
Fitzlin remained standing. “You were not summoned,” he said.
“No.” Each word arrived carefully, as if it had to clear a sharp edge on its exit. “I was sent.”
“By whom?”
The Seer’s eyes found his. “By what comes next.”
Fitzlin stored the answer and its frustration and moved past both. “You have broken the covenant before. You know what that costs.”
“I do. That is why I am here.”
He inhaled — careful, controlled, a man rationing what remained. “I looked beyond the permitted thresholds.”
Fitzlin felt the cold move through him, which had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. “Not forward.”
“Through,” the Seer corrected.
“That path is forbidden.”
“Yes.” He met Fitzlin’s eyes. “Because it reveals what cannot be unlearned.”
The silence that followed had weight. Not the ordinary silence of a quiet room but the kind that precedes things — the silence of air before lightning, of water before it finds the crack.
“There is a child,” the Seer said. Fitzlin’s mind tried to absorb this into a manageable form. Children were everywhere. Children were a constant. Half the Ministry’s ongoing concerns were children of various ages and complications. He was already composing the ordinary interpretation of that sentence when the Seer continued.
“Born under fractured sky and wounded field. Born where the magnetic scars still sing.”
The ordinary interpretation dissolved.
“The child carries all five expressions.” The Seer’s voice was quiet but careful. “A Quint.”
He raised one trembling finger. “Teleportation.” Another. “Mind-bending.” A third. “Empathic sight.” A fourth. “Telekinesis.” Then the fifth, held for a moment before he spoke it. “Shapeshifting.”
His hand closed into a fist.
“All five. Together.”
Fitzlin heard himself say “That is impossible” and recognized even as the words left him that they were the wrong response — not wrong morally, wrong structurally, the response of a mind reaching for a handhold that wasn’t there.
“So was surviving the Great Excursion,” the Seer said. “Yet here we stand.” Fitzlin’s mind moved quickly through the implications. If such a child existed among the Zetash, the Ministry would have found it. They tracked births. They logged power emergence. They had registries and mentors, seventeen different forms filled in triplicate, and filed in three separate locations.
“Where among the Zetash could this child hide?” he asked, and heard the relief trying to get into his voice before he’d confirmed it was warranted.
The Seer shook his head.
Fitzlin stilled. “No?”
“Not among your people,” the Seer said. “Not raised in towers or trained in your halls.”
“Then where?”
“Among the Uunders.”
The word landed, unexpectedly. Fitzlin’s mind resisted it on reflex. “They hid from the Excursion. They weren’t changed.”
“So we believed.” The Seer’s dimming eyes held a quality that was neither pity nor apology. “But the future is fond of exceptions.”
He leaned forward, the gold light in his eyes strengthening for a moment with the effort of a lamp turned up before it goes out. “Kull Kalijan rises along every viable future,” he said.
Fitzlin felt the name like cold water moving through him. He had not spoken that name aloud in more than a year, though he had thought it often.
He remembered the last time he had seen Kalijan. Standing at the outer edges of the Zetash lands, banished with a group of his followers, mostly from his military forces. No ceremony. The look on his face as he turned back to look at the man who signed his sentence. Just the quiet certainty of a man who believed the world would eventually arrange itself to his requirements.
“Except one,” the Seer said, snapping Fitzlin from his thoughts.
The two words landed in the silence like a key turning.
Fitzlin whispered, “The child figures into that one?”
“The child is the only answer to what is coming,” the Seer confirmed. His voice was fraying now at its edges, thinning in the manner fabric thins before it tears. “But only if trained. Only if hidden. Only if found before Kull’s reach completes its circle — or before something simpler ends it.”
“Where do we find him?” Fitzlin asked.
The Seer’s mouth moved into both a smile and an expression of grief. “The Barrens. Beside his people.”
Fitzlin closed his eyes. Of course. The Barrens, which were not a place but a sustained argument between the earth and the concept of predictability. Compasses went wrong there. Maps behaved strangely. The magnetic field twitched like an old injury that had never quite healed, and the auroras came down too close and too bright, as if the sky there had never been fully informed that the catastrophe was over.
Fitzlin had never been to the Barrens. This was a confession he had never made aloud. A man in his position was assumed to know every territory under the Aurorium’s influence — but the Barrens resisted influence.
“If the Tribes learn the child exists,” the Seer said, voice dropping to barely above breath, “they will tear the world apart trying to own what comes next. If Kalijan learns—” He stopped. Started again. “He will not wait for war. He will find the child and either claim him as his own or remove the variable.”
Fitzlin felt it settle into his bones. Not a mission. A race and the other side had a head start; they didn’t yet know they had.
“Trust no one else with this,” the Seer said. His hands had stopped shaking — not because they had steadied, but because he had run out of the energy that shaking required. “Not the Council. Not the Tribes. The future fractures every time another hand reaches for it.”
The Seer swallowed once. “I have foreseen whom you trust.”
“I trust no one with this,” Fitzlin said.
The Seer smiled with the patience of a man who has observed the future and knows how hollow that sentence is.
Then his eyes dimmed. His body convulsed — once, sharply, like a string pulled too tight — and went still. Fitzlin stood without moving until he was certain the man still breathed. Then the Seer was gone, using the same method he had appeared, the air closing behind him without ceremony.
Fitzlin stood alone.
The comm-sigil was in his hand before he had consciously decided to reach for it. The name was already in his mind, had been since before the Seer claimed to know it — he understood that now. He had been waiting at the window tonight because some part of him already knew.
“Summon Atticus Litzgad,” he said into the sigil.
Atticus was halfway through a bottle of bitter rootwine when his sigil flared.
He stared at it for a moment without moving. The mark glowed against the rough-hewn table — private, untraceable, unmistakable as only one kind of message could be: the kind you had been expecting for years and had spent considerable energy pretending you hadn’t.
He closed his eyes. Eleven years since the war and the subsequent Uunder banishment. Less than that since his name had been struck from Aurorium rolls and had become a word people used carefully in rooms where they weren’t sure who was listening. Somehow, he knew this day would come.
Knowing hadn’t made it easier to wait for.
The journey back was quiet, a walk through a place where every face knew him. Guards who recognized him looked away — not from indifference but from the discomfort of men who had been told what to think about someone and were now thinking it in that person’s presence. Others stared with the open curiosity of people who had heard the story and wanted to take a measurement. Atticus felt all of it — especially the empathic current of the Aurorium watchers buzzing under his skin, probing to see the intentions of those that chose to enter.
He had learned to walk through it without showing that he felt it. This had taken years and cost more than he dared calculate.
Fitzlin met him alone in the outer chamber.
“You should not have called me,” Atticus said as he approached.
“I know,” Fitzlin replied. “That is why I did.”
Atticus studied him — the posture, the set of the jaw, the stillness in a man who was normally in motion. Fitzlin at rest looked like someone holding a heavy object. “The Council will object.”
“I am not asking their permission.”
“You always ask their permission,” Atticus said. “Your devotion to consensus has brought us to the edge of a place where we may not walk back from.”
“Yes,” Fitzlin said. “And now consensus can go sulk in a corner. What is upon us is far more grave.”
Something shifted in Atticus’s chest — barely, but enough. He had not expected that.
They moved to the sealed chamber. Fitzlin spoke about the Seer, the child, the Barrens, and the name that Atticus had been carrying his own uneasy relationship with for years. Atticus listened without interrupting, which was not his natural inclination. When Fitzlin finished, Atticus was silent for a long time.
“A Quint,” he said finally. The word sat in his mouth, hard to swallow. “If it’s true, every faction will try to curry favor with this child. Some to protect the future. Others to possess it.”
“And Kalijan may kill the child,” Fitzlin said flatly, “because he will not risk the existence of a person that might exceed him. Or worse, he may take him as his own and use him in his plans to bring war to our lands.”
Atticus flinched — small, controlled, but there. He peered at the middle distance as if revisiting a memory he had hoped not to revisit. “You barred me because I pushed too far,” he said angrily. “Because I believed the outcome justified the cost of getting there.”
“Yes.”
“And now you need someone willing to cross lines.”
“I need someone who understands where the lines actually are,” Fitzlin said. “Which is different.”
Atticus let out a short, humorless sound. “A generous reframe.”
“I’m going to give you a small team to enter the Barrens and find the boy,” Fitzlin said.
“Going to the Barrens is a death sentence,” Atticus said — not afraid, stating a variable.
“You don’t fear Kalijan. That much I know.”
“I didn’t say Kalijan.” Atticus’s voice carried an edge. “I said the Barrens.”
“And you fear it even less than you fear him.”
Atticus said nothing.
“Then let me tell you why I’m asking you specifically,” Fitzlin said. He paused. “You owe me nothing. You owe the Council nothing. I am asking because you are the only person I am certain can do this.” Another pause, shorter. “I never told you I was wrong. I should have, and there is something else I avoided saying because it has been uncomfortable to carry.” He met Atticus’s eyes. “You were right. In what you believed. In what you did, and I am sorry.”
The silence after that had a different intensity. Atticus’s posture did not relax — he was not a man who relaxed. “What do you want?” he asked. Still guarded. But listening in a different way than before.
“I want you to take the team into the Barrens,” Fitzlin said. “People not bound by doctrine. Loyal to the mission above all else, and I want you to find the child.” He set a piece of cloth down that he planned to burn later between them, as if it were fragile. The cloth carried the name. “Gideon Irondell is the boy’s name. A Quint, according to the Seer. Find him, bring him back, and train him.”
“Born below?” Atticus asked.
“Unclear, but you would expect so given he is an Uunder.”
“How do we find him?”
“Also unclear,” Fitzlin admitted, with the directness of a man who has decided that pretending to certainty would insult the person he was talking to.
Atticus looked toward the window. The Barrens glow was barely visible from here — a suggestion at the horizon, less light than the absence of dark. He studied it for a moment. “This will not be simple.”
“No,” Fitzlin agreed. “But you are the person I trust to navigate what isn’t.”
Atticus turned back. There was something new in his expression — not enthusiasm, not relief. The look of a man who has located a problem whose size matches what he is capable of. “Who is on the team?”
Fitzlin crossed to the locked cabinet. Old stone, old mechanisms — archaic, in a world where mind-benders existed, because paper was the only record that couldn’t be read without touching it, and didn’t forget itself unless you burned it. His palm found the slit. The cabinet opened with a sound like it had been holding its breath.
He set three folders on the table.
“You’ve been preparing,” Atticus said.
“Since the day I watched Kalijan walk into the Barrens and didn’t stop him,” Fitzlin said. “I hoped you were wrong about what that would mean. I am no longer hoping.”
He pushed the first folder forward.
Atticus opened it. “Nargos Vey. Veilstep Tribe.” A pause. “One of the only teleporters who can cross real distance.”
“Three crossings into the Barrens during the war,” Fitzlin said. “He moved as a courier. He knows how to travel without leaving a signature. He is either exceptionally skilled or extraordinarily lucky. I believe the former.”
“In the Barrens,” Atticus said, “lucky stops working at the border.”
“He admires what you tried to do,” Fitzlin added. “That’s a troubling basis for a hiring decision.”
“It’s an honest one.”
The second folder. Atticus’s hand stilled on it before he opened it — a small hesitation, the Twinform crest on it imparted an identity he already felt before he read the name.
“A shapeshifter,” Fitzlin said. “Someone who can move among the Uunders without raising an alarm and get you past any Zetash checkpoint when necessary.”
“Shifters are complicated,” Atticus said.
“Because their inner state is difficult to read?” Fitzlin asked.
Atticus opened the folder. Stared. “Drenn Kova.” A long pause. “You’re sending me chaos.”
“She has some nervous energy,” Fitzlin admitted.
“Nervous energy,” Atticus repeated the phrase with the flat affect of a man removing it from any possible positive context. “She will get us killed before we reach the border.”
“She is the finest shapeshifter alive,” Fitzlin said. “She has operated inside Kalijan’s territory without detection. What she can do, no one else can approach. Her story is more complicated than most know.”
“Under no circumstances,” Atticus said.
“I am not asking,” Fitzlin said, and used the tone — measured, absolute, without heat — that Atticus had heard from him perhaps twice in twenty years.
Atticus went quiet. Not agreement, but the recognition that the argument was over.
“That’s two,” he said, after a moment. “You said small.”
Fitzlin placed the third folder on the table but did not push it forward. The gesture let Atticus know he wasn’t going to like it.
Atticus stared at the folder, seeing the Greyweave emblem, then he looked at Fitzlin’s face. “Why?”
“The child is unstable,” Fitzlin said. “The Seer called it a convergence — five powers in a single untrained vessel will not coexist without trouble. They will interfere with each other. Without a mind-bending anchor, the child may be impossible to reach and dangerous to everyone near.”
“I’m a Greyweave,” Atticus said. “I don’t need a secondary.”
“Against a large controlled force, it may take two of you,” Fitzlin said. “And what I’m giving you is not a handler. It is a contingency.”
“It’s a handler,” Atticus said.
Fitzlin pushed the folder forward.
Atticus opened it. He did not move for a moment. The color left his face.
“You cannot be serious.”
“I am,” the First Regent responded.
The name in the folder was connected to the incident that had ended Atticus’s career — not as a cause, but as a witness, a complication, a piece of a story Atticus had spent years wanting to revise. The man was also, by any objective measurement, the most difficult human being Atticus had encountered in life. What made it far more difficult was that the man was from his own Tribe.
“You’re forcing my hand,” Atticus said.
“I’m giving you the choice I denied you before,” Fitzlin said. “Which is different.”
Atticus closed the folder. Slowly. He did not like the choice. He recognized its necessity. Which was worse. “We also need a telekinetic trainer?” he asked.
“Yes, one who is disciplined,” Fitzlin said. “Not owned by Kalijan. The selection is limited because so many followed him into the Barrens. I’m promising you the best of the best.”
“Understood,” Atticus said. He stood, looked once more at the three folders, and said the thing he had been deciding since Fitzlin spoke the child’s name. “If this child is real, training won’t be enough. He’ll need grounding and a reason not to become Kalijan.”
Atticus turned and left.
The chamber was quiet.
Fitzlin stood for a moment longer, then crossed to the crystal wall and looked out toward the Barrens’ glow at the horizon. The same window. The same distant light.
Far beyond the Fault Lines, in the low districts of a desolate city that couldn’t agree on its own name, a boy lay on a thin blanket in the dark — exhausted, fed, turning thoughts over in his mind that he didn’t yet have the words for. The air around him moved in a way that air in closed rooms does not move.
Continue the journey.
The Magnet of Marjon is Book One of the Gideon Irondell Trilogy.
A thief from the Barrens.
A ruler with two powers.
A legend of five.