Chapter I The Price of Curiosity
«Innocence does not die all at once. It bleeds out, slowly, like a wounded animal that does not yet know it is dead.»
The castle of Ignis rose against the leaden sky like a stone fist closed over the earth. Hundreds of hectares of massive construction —towers, walls, buttresses, jagged battlements that bit at the low clouds— made up that hulking mass of dark granite that had been growing for centuries, layer upon layer, like the crust of a wound the world refused to close. In its highest levels, where the wind whistled through the empire's tattered banners, nobles strolled through marble galleries without ever looking down.
Below was another world.
Beyond the main gates, where the polished granite roads gave way to damp, compacted earth, there existed an invisible frontier that no map acknowledged but everyone knew. It was the exact point where the smell changed: from the perfume of the merchants' spices to the sickly-sweet stench of decomposition, of animal and human waste that mixed with the mud to form a dark paste that clung to everything. To feet. To clothes. To the soul.
The empire's lower districts had no official name. The nobles called them "the margin" when forced to mention them, which was almost never. For those who lived there, it was simply "below": a place where houses leaned against one another like drunks propping each other up to keep from falling, where roofs were more hole than roof, and where rain was both blessing and curse. It washed the filth from the streets, but flooded homes that were already miserable.
In that place, in one of those houses that barely deserved the name, lived a boy. Or what the world had decided to make of a boy.
He knew no games. He knew no childhood songs, no stories told beside the fire by a loving mother. He knew the weight of a stolen coin pouch, the texture of the rope they tied to his wrist so he could not run, and the sound —that sound that would never leave his memory— of leather cutting the air an instant before the whip bit into his back. He also knew things children his age should not know: the exact way to move through the streets unseen, the precise instant when a man decides to attack before his body betrays him, the difference between the silence of an empty alley and the silence of one that is not. The streets of Ignis's lower districts taught fast. Those who did not learn did not reach twelve years old.
His parents had not always been this way. There had been a time, brief and almost unreal in his memory, when they had belonged to the lesser nobility. A time of warm meals and unpatched clothing. But the wheel of power turns without mercy, and when they fell —stripped of titles, of lands, of everything except their own bitterness— what remained of them was something twisted, something broken that in turn broke everything it touched.
The boy had a dream. A single dream, small and absurd for someone in his condition: to learn to read. It seemed such a small thing, so insignificant compared to the conquest dreams of kings and generals. But in a world where knowledge was a privilege reserved for those who could pay for it, where the empire's laws expressly forbade commoners from accessing education —because a peasant who thinks is a dangerous peasant— that dream was as impossible as tearing down the castle walls with bare hands.
And yet, his little brother had tried.
Frederik.
He had been six years old when Estus watched him born. He remembered that day with a clarity that time had not managed to erode: the sharp, furious cry of the newborn, as if he already knew what kind of world he had just arrived in. He held him in his arms before anyone else —even before the mother, who lay exhausted and bleeding on the straw pallet— and in that moment, with that tiny wrinkled creature pressed against his chest, Estus felt something he would not feel again for a long time.
Purpose.
He cared for him as one tends a flame in the middle of a storm: shielding it from the wind with his own body, feeding it with the little he managed to set aside from his own ration, telling invented stories about worlds where children did not go hungry and parents did not hit. Frederik would look at him with those enormous dark eyes, and smile, and that smile was the only clean thing in all that filth.
But Frederik had inherited the curiosity his older brother barely dared to dream of. One day, driven by that impulse the powerful call a crime, he stole some books from a merchant's cart passing through the lower district.
They were only books.
Pages with words the boy could not yet even read, but which he stroked with his fingers as if they were sacred objects, as if between those worn leather covers lay the key to a better world.
They caught him the next day.
⁂
The central plaza smelled of sweat and fear. The guillotine stood in the center like an obscene altar, its wood darkened by years of use, by overlapping layers of dried blood that no one bothered to clean because the blood was the message. Every stain was a reminder: this is how those who disobey end up.
The crowd pressed around it with that mixture of horror and fascination that spectacles of death awaken in multitudes. Some brought their children to watch. To learn. The lesson was simple: the empire punishes, the people obey, and curiosity —especially in those born below— is paid for with life.
Sobs. Small sobs lost among the murmur of the crowd. It was a child. A child who did not understand why they had tied him, why they had dragged him there, why the hooded man was pushing his head toward that wooden hollow that smelled of iron and death.
They were only books.
The sound was dry. Final. Like the period at the end of a sentence no one asked to be written.
The blade fell. Blood soaked the metal's edge and descended in a slow, obscene thread down the wood until it dripped onto the straw basket waiting below. The head rolled with a dull thud, and the crowd —that crowd that had brought its children to watch— celebrated.
They celebrated.
They rejoiced with applause and cheers, as if they had witnessed the victory of an army rather than the murder of a child who only wanted to learn to read.
Sixteen paces from the guillotine, head bowed and fists clenched so tightly that his nails were opening wounds in his palms, a young man of no more than sixteen years watched. He did not shout. He did not cry. He did not throw himself at the guards in a suicidal burst of rage, though every fiber of his body was demanding exactly that.
He stood still.
Because moving meant dying, and dying meant no one would remember Frederik. That no one would carry the weight of his name, the echo of his last smile, those words that now echoed in his head like a war drum:
—Brother, help me, please...
Estus clenched his fists until blood dripped from his palms and fell onto the plaza's mud, mixing with his brother's. No one noticed. No one ever noticed those who suffer in silence.
—God... —he whispered, so softly the words barely left his lips—. Why do you take the only thing I had left?
There was no answer. The gods, if they had ever existed, had stopped listening long ago.
Memories assaulted him like an ambush. He saw him born. He saw him take his first unsteady steps, with that sharp laugh that filled the room like a tiny bell. He saw him grow at his side, until their parents fell from grace and the world turned the color of mud. Even then, even at the worst of it, Estus protected him. He covered him with his own body when the father brandished the whip. He set aside food from his own plate when there was not enough. He cared for him like something precious and fragile, as if he had always known —as if he had always known— that the world would try to take him.
And the world had succeeded.
When the crowd began to disperse —some with the obscene satisfaction of those who believe they have witnessed justice, others with the guilty haste of those who do not want to think too much about what they just applauded— Estus approached the scaffold. He knelt. He touched the soaked wood with his fingertips, where Frederik's blood was still warm.
—Only for some books —he whispered—. Only for that...
It was then that he saw it. Engraved in the metal of the guillotine's blade, almost hidden beneath stains of rust and dried blood, was a symbol. It was not the empire's insignia. It was something else: a lion pierced by a sword. Estus stared at it longer than he would have liked, with a feeling he could not name, something between recognition and unease, like hearing a melody you do not remember learning but that your fingers already know. He did not understand what it meant. He did not know where it came from. But something in him refused to dismiss it entirely, though that was exactly what he did: store it in some nameless corner of his memory and keep walking.
He stood. He wiped his hands on the rags he wore for clothing. And he walked.
⁂
The walk back was short in distance but infinite inside his head. Every step was a memory. Every mud puddle reflected a face that no longer existed. He passed people sleeping in the streets, huddled against walls that offered no warmth, wrapped in blankets that were nothing but rags. No one looked at him. In the lower districts, people learn quickly not to look.
He reached the house. He went in.
His father was sitting at the table, devouring food scraps with the animal voracity of one who has forgotten he once had manners. Beside him, his mother stared with the vacant gaze of someone who long ago stopped being present.
Neither of them asked about Frederik.
—Well, my coin purse is home —the man said without looking up from his plate—. Give me the money.
Estus stood in the doorway. Something moved inside him. Something dark and heavy that had been growing for years, feeding on every blow, every scar, every night he had heard his brother cry and could do nothing but hold him and lie to him that everything would be all right.
—Estus. The coin pouch.
The father stood. His hand went to his belt, where the whip hung. That automatic gesture, repeated hundreds of times, that threat as natural as breathing. But that day something was different. Something in his son's eyes had changed. If the man had been more perceptive, if he had not been so dulled by years of resentment and cheap alcohol, he might have noticed. He might have recognized in that gaze the same expression animals have when they stop fleeing and decide to attack.
But he did not notice.
Estus did not take a coin pouch from inside his threadbare clothes.
He took a shard of glass.
A long, sharp fragment he had picked up from the road. He had taken it without thinking, or perhaps thinking too much. Perhaps his hand already knew what his mind had not yet dared to formulate.
The first blow was to the neck.
The glass sank into flesh with an ease that did not surprise him as much as it should have. The father made a sound —not a scream, but something more primitive, a wet and confused gurgle— as his hands rose clumsily toward the wound. Blood gushed in torrents, hot, soaking Estus's fingers, spattering the table, the floor, the walls of that miserable house.
He stabbed again. And again. And again.
It was not hate, or not exactly. It was something more complex, more profound: the need to destroy what had destroyed him, to erase the source of the pain even though the pain itself was already indelible. Every stab was a memory —the whip, the nights of hunger, Frederik's hands clutching his shirt as he begged not to be left behind.
The man fell. His eyes searched for his son's, and in them —in that last flash of consciousness before the darkness swallowed him— Estus thought he saw something resembling remorse. Or perhaps it was only fear. At that point, the difference no longer mattered.
His mother did not scream. She sat motionless in her chair, paralyzed by a terror so absolute it would not even allow her to tremble. A puddle formed beneath her. The smell of urine mixed with the smell of blood.
—You... —said Estus, and his voice sounded strangely calm, like the surface of a lake beneath which deadly currents churn—. ...are filth that does not deserve to live.
What followed was worse. Slower. More deliberate. And when it was over, when the silence came to reclaim that house that was now nothing but a slaughterhouse, Estus stood in the middle of the carnage, his hands dripping and his breathing inexplicably steady.
He felt nothing.
And that, he would understand much later, was the most terrifying thing of all.
⁂
Hours passed. Or perhaps minutes. Time had stopped functioning normally inside his head.
He found himself sitting beneath a small stone bridge, far from the house, far from what he had done. He stared at his hands. The blood had dried in the creases of his knuckles, in the lines of his palms, under his nails. He observed them as if they belonged to someone else, as if those hands were a stranger's that had been sewn to his wrists while he slept.
Outside, beyond the bridge, shouts could be heard. A riot, perhaps. There were always riots in the lower districts, small bursts of rage that died as quickly as they started because people were too hungry to sustain a revolution.
The symbol from the guillotine returned to his mind. The lion with the sword through it. It came back the way things you try not to think about always do: without warning, with an insistence that asked no permission.
—It's strange... —he murmured, more to himself than to anyone, because there was no one left to talk to—. Where does it come from? It's not the empire's symbol...
He sighed. He leaned back against the damp bridge wall. In front of him, a puddle of dirty water returned his reflection: a young face stained red, with eyes that seemed far older than the body that held them.
He stared for a long time.
And then, with the same calm with which he had killed, with the same flat and empty voice, he spoke the words that would seal the next years of his life:
—I'll become a mercenary.