Page 74 of Steel Heart Iron Claws

“And I thought good, old-fashioned mortal horses were stubborn,” I murmur as I stuff the pot back in my bag. “I don’t know how Sabine put up with you.”

I pull off my boot and grimace at the bruised second toe.

As I bandage it, I think more about Sabine. If we’re truly fated to be together, I guess I’d better get good with animals real damn quick.

Horses. Monoceroses. Anything that crawls or flutters or fucking slithers. The gossip about her in Hekkelveld Castle was allchipmunks-thisandbutterflies-that.

It isn’t that I dislike animals. Not at all. It’s just that I’ve spent years avoiding them.

It started with Onno.

I loved that damn scruffy dog with every tiny bone in my ten-year-old body. He was the only joy I found in the abandoned stables where Jocki kept boys and dogs locked up when we weren’t in the fight ring.

And when Jocki got jealous of my bond with Onno…

And forced us, boy and dog, into the ring as opponents…

Well.

Strangling your only friend at ten years old sets a remarkably solid foundation for a lifetime of psychological scars.

After Onno died, I ran away. Hating Jocki. Hating myself. Hating the gods-damned world. My godkiss made it easy to survive on the streets, though I was painfully alone.

Once, I wandered into a nicer part of town and saw a teenage girl leave a perfume shop with a beautifully wrapped package. The package was bathed in the smell of jasmine, but the odor of the bottle within made me stop in my tracks.

Thorn Apple is commonly known as an odorless poison, but that’s only to the ungodkissed nose. Jocki kept a supply of it to use on his enemies, and to me, it always carried the faintest scent of grass. It can be easily confused with burdock root, a fixative for stabilizing volatile compounds like perfumes.

I snatched the package from the girl’s arms and threw it into the North Innis River, causing a carriage to screech to a stop and dozens of onlookers to gawp.

“That perfume was made wrong,” I explained to the girl. “It’s poisonous. One spray would have killed you.”

The girl swooned, falling all over me to thank me for saving her. “Let me repay your kindness with a meal, you poor starving boy,” she said. She insisted I follow her to a tavern.

As soon as we were down an alley, away from prying eyes, she spun on me with a knife to my throat. “You idiot—you nearly ruined everything!”

It turned out that the girl, Annabella, worked for the perfume maker, a portly woman named Madame Caleau, whose real business was poison. I’d nearly exposed their operation and probably would have lost my head for it, if Annabella hadn’t paused long enough with her knife pressed to my throat to ask:

“How did you know it was poison, boy?”

Luckily for me, a godkissed boy able to sniff out any scent was worth something to a poison manufacturer.

Madame Caleau and Annabella gave me three squaremeals and a cot in the perfumery’s stock room, and more importantly, evenings filled with laughter as we would mix poisons and speculate about our clients’ gambling debts. Annabella teased me mercilessly for my cracking preteen voice, at the same time that she would stay up until dawn sewing me new pants to fit my growing legs. Madame Caleau mothered me like a hen, always trying to tame my unruly hair, chiding me about putting more meat on my small bones, worrying herself when I didn’t make it home from a delivery until dawn.

Their vocation was to take lives—but theygaveme one.

My happy life with them came crashing down when a crime lord decided to take over the poison market for himself. While I was on a delivery, his men burned the perfumery with Madame Caleau and Annabella inside. They caught me when I returned, beat me within an inch of my life, and sold me back to Jocki.

And the Golden Sentinels? They looked the other way. Crime ran every aspect of Duren’s economy from the Sin Streets to Sorsha Hall. And all of it was permitted, even promoted, by the Valvere family.

Who, of course, took a cut.

Suddenly, a snarl from a small copse of trees near the stream pulls me out of the past.

Immediately, the musty scent of fur hits my nose.

A huge gray wolf is crouched on the other streambank with his sights set on Myst while she munches grass, unaware.

Alarm shoots through me as I scramble for my bow. “Myst!”

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