Chapter 1: Don't Move

Ren Kagari woke because his left palm was burning.

It was not a vague ache. The pain sat exactly along the old scar, thin and even, as though someone had laid a heated wire on it and forgotten to take it off.

He did not open his eyes. Twelve years as a mercenary had left him with three rules, and the first one was that a man who wakes in an unknown place listens before he looks. So he listened.

There were no footsteps, and no clink of armor. Two people were breathing in the room, himself and someone else. The other person's breathing was slow and carefully controlled, the kind people practiced when they were trying not to show fear. The air smelled of smoke and candle wax, and beneath that there was a faint sweetness, like sugar left too long on the fire.

The second rule was never to move his hands first. The palm hurt too much for the rule to matter. He curled his fingers anyway.

"Don't move."

It was a woman's voice, low and steady. She said it the way a clerk reads out a price, without any decoration.

Ren opened his eyes.

The ceiling was high and vaulted, blackened by soot. Hundreds of candles had melted into puddles on the stone. He was lying on cold marble in what had been a chapel, judging by the broken pews and the white ribbons still hanging from them.

Ribbons. Wedding ribbons.

Right. He had been getting married.

"You are not yourself yet," the woman said. "Please stay where you are and let me finish speaking."

He turned only his head.

Seraphine Vale stood four paces away in a black gown that had lost most of its train. Her silver-white hair was slipping out of its pins. A thin line of blood ran down her left wrist and dripped from her fingertips onto the floor, steady as a leaking tap. Under her right arm, clamped tight, was a slim leather ledger. She had apparently rescued it before anything else.

Ren had known his wife for nine days. In that time she had corrected his grammar twice and his posture once, and she had never looked at him the way she was looking at him now.

She was looking at him like something that might go off.

"Lady Seraphine," he said carefully. His throat felt scrubbed with sand. "Before I obey, may I ask whose body that is?"

He did not need to point. It lay less than an arm's length from him, and it was very hard to miss.

It had the shape of a man, only taller, and it was black all over, like something pulled from a furnace and left to cool. Cracks ran through it, and inside the cracks a dull orange glow pulsed slowly. A crown of hardened slag sat on its head. Its chest had been crushed inward. The body ticked softly as it cooled.

"It is not a person's body," Seraphine said. She did not take her eyes off him. "It is an Avatar, the borrowed body of a god. This one belonged to Pyrrhos, Lord of the Ember Throne."

An Avatar... Ren repeated the word silently. He knew gods existed the same way he knew tax collectors existed. He paid both when he had to, and he had made a point of never meeting either in person. Apparently his wedding day had been the exception.

"It came during the vows and attacked the altar," Seraphine continued. Her tone was even, as if she were reading from a report she had written in advance. "I cut the link between it and its faith, which weakened it for a short time. You used that time to destroy it. Beyond that, I can only tell you what I saw, because I do not fully understand the rest myself."

Ren noticed the wording. She could simply have said "I don't know." Instead she had chosen a longer sentence, which meant she was choosing every word with care.

A woman who counted her words like coins was being careful with him. That was not a good sign. Or it was a very good sign, depending on what she was protecting.

"Then I will ask something more practical," he said. "The contract listed a fee of ten thousand Crowns, half paid in advance. Does killing a god's Avatar count as part of the job, or does it fall under additional risk?"

"It counts as part of the job. The second five thousand is due at the end of the year, provided you are alive to collect it." She paused. "You are being very calm."

"It is the only thing I'm good at. Everything else I do badly."

That was mostly true. His body was calm because it had been trained to be, and his mind was busy doing sums. Five thousand Crowns already paid. Five thousand more to come. It was enough to fix the orphan home's roof, buy three winters of coal, and get Kiri a pair of shoes she would outgrow by spring. Kiri always outgrew her shoes.

That was the whole reason he had signed. It was not a bad reason. He simply had not planned to sign it in a room containing a dead god's face.

Ren sat up.

"I said not to—"

The palm flared. He gritted his teeth and turned the hand over.

The scar across it was glowing. It was faint and orange, but unmistakable. As he watched, the light crawled outward and traced the outline of his whole hand, every finger, every crease. Then it faded and left the skin dark and warm.

He looked at the corpse again, and this time he looked properly.

The hole in its chest had melted, glassy edges. And its shape was not random. Five long grooves fanned out to one side, and a wide flat print sat at the center.

A left hand, fingers spread.

Ren held up his own left hand. He did not need to compare them for long.

"That would be mine," he said slowly.

"Yes."

"I would like to point out that I don't remember doing it."

"I know." Seraphine's gaze followed his hand. "That is the reason I told you not to move. Please do not touch the corpse."

"I wasn't planning to."

"You were looking at it as though you wished to."

He had been. That was the strange part. It was not fear or disgust he felt when he looked at the dead thing. It was something closer to recognition, the way a man feels when he sees his own coat on a stranger.

Ren reached for his coin. It was an old habit. When he was nervous, he flipped a coin, and he was nervous now for the first time in years. His wedding trousers had no pockets, but his sleeve did, and the coin was still inside. It was warm.

He flipped it. It spun and caught the last of the candlelight, and it landed on his knuckles tails-up. A smear of black soot came off onto his skin.

The coin had not been hot when he put it in his sleeve. He was certain of that. He was very good with money.

So the heat came from him. His hand was warm enough to scorch a coin and cool enough not to burn his own skin. Either the scar was doing it, or whatever had killed the Avatar was still inside him and waiting.

He did not like either explanation.

Ren tried to remember. He went back to the beginning and walked forward, like walking through a house he knew. The morning. The rented suit. The carriage ride. The chapel doors and the smell of wax. The priest who talked too long. Seraphine's cold hand sliding into his, her fingers laced through his as if she were signing a document. The ring. The words. Then a door opening somewhere behind them.

Then nothing.

It was not darkness. He knew darkness well. This was cleaner. It was a page cut out of a book with a knife, and the two neighboring pages fit together as if nothing had ever been written between them.

Under his ribs, something else was happening.

A second heartbeat. It was faster than his and slightly out of step, and it beat against his chest from the inside as though it were not his. He counted without meaning to. It ran at about two hundred beats a minute.

Ren raised his eyes.

Seraphine's face was perfectly composed. Every hair was in place where it mattered. Her free hand, the one without the ledger, was clenched so hard her knuckles had gone white.

"Lady Seraphine," he said, as gently as he could manage, "I think there is a second heartbeat in my chest, and it is not mine. It is running at about two hundred a minute."

"That would be mine." Her voice did not shake, but she answered a little too fast. "It is the Bond. It is one of the terms you agreed to on page four of the contract."

"I read the numbers, not the terms."

"Then you will learn the terms as we go." She lifted her chin. "I ask you, as your wife and as your employer, to ignore it."

Wife and employer in one sentence... Ren thought. It was a cheap combination, and he felt oddly sorry for her. A frightened person did not need to be told she was frightened. She needed a task to hold on to.

"I will try," he said. "But it is difficult to ignore something that is happening inside my own body. May I at least know why you are afraid?"

"I am composed."

"Your heart disagrees with you."

Seraphine went very still. When she spoke again, her voice was cold enough to frost the candles. "That is a private matter, Mr. Kagari."

"Understood," Ren said. He stopped counting. It was not easy.

...

Seraphine Vale had been counting, too.

Eleven seconds. That was how long Pyrrhos's Avatar had stood over her husband with its hand full of divine fire. She had watched every one of them, sure she was about to lose the only man alive who could hold what she needed him to hold.

The fire had reached his face. It had licked his hair. It had touched his eyes.

And it had not burned him. Not one strand.

She had known this might happen. She had read her mother's notes a hundred times, and every version of them pointed the same way. But knowing a thing on paper and watching it happen in front of the altar were very different, and she had not expected him to stand up inside the flames and push his hand through a god.

Now he sat on the marble floor, five thousand Crowns richer and one memory poorer, asking sensible questions about the fee.

She looked down at the ledger under her arm. She did not open it. She did not need to. The first line on the first page was in her own handwriting, written thirteen years ago, and she had never crossed it out.

Keep him alive.

And beneath it, in smaller writing, added the night before the wedding:

Do not tell him why.

Across the floor, Ren was staring at his palm again. The Bond pulled tight in her chest, a slow wrongness like a stitch sewn in the wrong place.

Not yet, she thought. Not yet. Please.

...

"Seraphine."

He had stopped being polite. It made his face look older.

"Yes?"

"You said you cut the link and I finished it. I don't remember any of it, and I would like to know what I looked like while I was doing it."

For the first time since he had woken, his wife hesitated.

It was very short, half a breath. But Ren made his living by reading liars, and he caught it anyway.