A Hunger Most Dark novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Hunger Market

Davren drinks a bought vial in front of her and it tastes of ash; Ysmay says only one blood will do.

At dawn she was already in my study, and the ledgers were open on the desk.

She had not slept in the cellar bed.

The blanket was still folded on it when Gerrick went down at six.

"The Hendry shipping column is wrong," Lenore said, without looking up. "Your clerk carried a seven twice."

"Then fix it."

"I did. It cost you four hundred crowns in the wrong direction."

She turned the page and kept writing, and her coat was buttoned to the chin.

I stood at the window with my hands behind my back and hated how much I wanted her to look at me.

"Get your cloak," I said. "You're coming to the market."

"Which market?"

"The one where I buy what I eat."

That made her look up.

The Hunger Market ran along the river wall after dark, forty stalls under paper lanterns.

Humans sat at them on low stools with their sleeves pushed up.

They sold blood by the vial, fresh drawn, and the Urekai lords of Halvarrow bought it by the dozen.

It was legal, and it was well paid, and no one who sold there was forced.

Gerrick walked two paces behind us with his hand on his sword.

Lenore walked beside me and looked at everything.

She looked at the vials racked in straw, and the seller's arms with their rows of small pale scars.

She looked at the price board at the first stall.

"Three crowns a vial?" she said.

The seller was a broad woman in her fifties with flour on her apron and a needle-pricked forearm.

"That's the going rate, miss."

"That's less than a day's wage at the docks, and she loses a week of strength for it." Lenore turned to me. "My lord, you'll pay six."

"I'll pay what the board says."

"Then you'll be buying bad blood from a woman who can't afford to eat." She laid a hand flat on the counter. "Six crowns, or I'm not carrying your purse tonight."

I stared at her.

Gerrick made a short noise behind us that turned into a cough.

"Six," I said.

The seller looked from her to me with her mouth a little open.

"Bless you, miss," she said, and she meant it.

I took the vial from her hand and pulled the stopper and drank it where I stood.

I did it every month, and I did it fast.

I knew that taste.

It was salt and iron and warmth, and the hunger in my chest sat back down and went quiet.

Tonight the hunger did not move.

The vial tasted of ash.

It coated my tongue and the back of my throat, and I got half of it down before my body refused the rest.

I turned my head away and spat on the cobbles.

"My lord?" the seller said.

"It's nothing. Another."

She handed me another, and I drank that too.

It was the same, and my stomach rolled.

"Is it always like that?" Lenore asked.

Her voice was very quiet.

"It's fine."

"You've gone grey."

"I said it's fine."

I put coins in the seller's hand and walked away from the stall, and I did not let myself look back at the one person standing there in a grey coat in the lantern light.

I could hear her walking behind me, and I could smell her.

Warm rain on stone.

The hunger turned over in my chest and opened its eyes.

Ysmay was waiting for me in the kitchen when I came in.

She had a pot of broth on the stove and a clean cup set out, and she took one look at my face and sent Gerrick out with a flick of her fingers.

"How many did you drink?"

"Two."

"And?"

"Ash."

She was quiet for a while.

She had held a basin under my chin in the worst months after I left the Rooke house, when I was fourteen and the first hunger nearly killed me.

She knew every way my body could turn on me.

"Since when?" Ysmay said.

"Since the hall."

"The blood on the page."

"It's nothing."

"It's hers." She set the cup down in front of me. "Davren, how long since you last fed?"

"Four days."

"Then you have five weeks. Perhaps six if you eat well and sleep. After that the sickness takes your mind, and nothing in this house can hold you."

I looked at the steam rising from the broth.

"I'll buy from another market. A different seller."

"It won't matter."

"Why?"

"Because the hunger has chosen, my lord." She said it gently. "It wants the Rooke girl. Nothing else will do."

My hands went flat on the table.

Under the contract, under the seal I had signed with my own name, I could not touch one drop of her blood until Midwinter.

Midwinter was six months away.

I had five weeks.

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