A Hunger Most Dark novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Reckoning
Corwin pledges his sister before four hundred merchants, Lenore names her own terms, and one drop of her blood on the contract wakes a hunger Davren cannot hide.
Corwin Rooke pledged his sister at noon, in the guild hall, and kept one hand gently on her arm.
Four hundred merchants watched him do it.
It was the Midsummer Reckoning, the one day each year when every unpaid debt in the city was called aloud.
I sat in the third row with a leather case at my feet.
Inside it were forty thousand crowns of House Rooke's notes, and every one of them was mine.
"House Rooke has no coin to meet its notes," Corwin told the hall. His voice was warm and easy.
"So under Reckoning law, it pledges a person as surety. My sister."
A murmur went along the benches.
Corwin turned to the woman standing beside him and lowered his voice, though everyone could hear him.
"It's only a formality, Len. Lord Ashkarr is a reasonable man. You'll keep his books and sleep in a proper bed."
She didn't look at him.
She was looking at me.
I had not seen her face in fifteen years, and it took me one breath to know it.
She was twenty-nine now, tall, with dark red-brown hair pinned flat and grey eyes.
The hall was hot enough that the men fanned themselves with their ledgers.
She wore a heavy grey coat buttoned to her chin.
A steward stepped up to take it from her shoulders, as the custom was before a pledge was read.
Her hand shot out and closed on his wrist.
"Leave it," she said.
He left it.
She let go of him and turned her face back to me.
"You got tall," Lenore said.
She said it across forty feet of silent hall, in the voice she had used when I was nine.
My hands stayed still on my knees.
I had spent ten years buying this room, one note at a time, so that I could sit in it and watch her come to me with nothing.
I had planned for her to cry.
I had planned for her to beg.
The auctioneer cleared his throat and read the law. "The pledged may name terms before the hall. Any term the guilds witness will bind the holder of the pledge."
Corwin patted his sister's arm. "Len, there's no need."
"Take your hand off me, Corwin."
He took it off, still smiling.
She stepped to the front of the dais, and the hall went quiet.
"I name three terms," she said. "First, Lord Ashkarr has my work and my company until the Midwinter Reckoning, and not one day more."
A few people laughed, and she waited for them to stop.
"Second, he may not drink my blood before then."
The laughter died.
Nobody in that hall could remember a pledged person naming a term like that to an Urekai lord.
My jaw went tight.
"Third, he may not sell me on to anyone, for any price."
She looked right at me.
"Those are my terms. I'm told you're a man who keeps contracts, Dav."
I could have refused.
Under the law, I could have taken the pledge as it stood.
But four hundred merchants were watching me, and every one of them knew the story of a Rooke house boy who had come up from nothing.
If I refused, they would say I was afraid of her.
"Granted," I said.
The auctioneer wrote out the terms on the contract in a quick, scratching hand.
"The seal," he said.
A clerk carried the page across the hall and held it out to her.
The auctioneer took her hand and turned it over, palm up, and pricked her thumb with a silver pin.
She didn't pull away.
A single bead of blood swelled on her thumb.
The clerk pressed it to the page.
I smelled it from three rows away.
It was nothing like the vials I bought at the market each month and swallowed down for the hunger.
It smelled like rain on hot stone, and it went through me.
Every tooth in my mouth ached.
My hands closed on my knees until the knuckles went white.
Lenore turned her head, very slowly, and saw my face.
She didn't smile.
The clerk set a pen in my hand, and I signed under her drop of blood: Davren Ashkarr, Merchant Lord of House Ashkarr.
Across the hall, my hunger woke up, and it knew exactly who she was.
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