The Guild hall of Harrowgate smelled of ink, sweat, and old leather.
Mira stood in line behind a one-armed veteran and two boys no older than twelve, who were arguing about whether a Gravehound could be killed with a pitchfork. A long wooden counter stretched across the far wall, staffed by clerks with tired eyes and stamped ledgers. Above them hung a huge slate board scored in chalk with the ranks of the day's contracts.
She kept her face blank. Inside, she was counting heartbeats.
"Name?" the clerk asked when she reached the front.
"Mira." She hesitated. "Of the western hills."
"Family name?"
"None."
The clerk looked up for the first time. He was thin and bald, with ink on his sleeves, and his eyes sharpened. "A bloodline user with no family name?"
"My family didn't survive the winter."
It was the first lie she'd ever told that way, and it came out smoother than she expected. The clerk's expression softened by a degree. "Hand on the stone, then."
The Guild's ranking stone was smaller than the Cladrake crystal, a pale, polished sphere on an iron stand. Mira laid her palm against it and felt a faint tug. A breath of wind stirred around her ankles, and the stone glowed a steady green.
"B-rank," the clerk said, stamping a card. "Wind-bound. You're lucky; most guild registrants test C or lower." He slid it across. "Contracts are posted by tier. B-rank can take beast culls, caravan escorts, perimeter work. Don't take anything above your tier unless you've a partner."
"I have a partner."
"Registered?"
"Not yet."
"Then bring him tomorrow." He waved her on.
She turned to leave and nearly collided with a man in blue and gold. His crest was House Veyron's, and his smile was thin and polite and utterly empty.
"Pardon," he said. "Wind-bound, are you? Rare in these hills." His eyes rested on her blade. "That's an old family weapon."
"It's a hand-me-down."
"Hmm." He stepped aside, but she felt his gaze on her back all the way to the door.
---
In the inn room, Nathan read.
He was on the fourth page now, and the ancestor's handwriting had grown tighter, as though the writer had wanted to finish the letter before something stopped him.
*It does not only take memories.*
*That is what the family teaches you, and it is true as far as it goes. The first uses take small things: a song, a face, a summer. But the power does not stop at your own mind. It reaches outward. The more you spend, the more of you the world forgets.*
Nathan read the sentence three times.
*Your name will fade from the lips of those who loved you. Your face will slide from their memory like water. Letters you wrote will read as strangers' handwriting. In the end, you will not merely lose your past. The world will lose you.*
*I walked to the edge of that city knowing this. I did not do it out of madness. I did it because eleven thousand people stood behind me, and because I had already given everything else.*
He stopped. His throat ached.
*I am writing this letter now, in my last hours of being remembered. My daughter's face is already gone from me. My wife's name will go next. I tell you this not to frighten you, but because you deserve to know what you are choosing every time you reach for the hollow.*
*The names on the wall in the west chamber are not the family's dead. They are the Destroyers. Every one of them. The family carved them so that someone, somewhere, would remember. But names cut in stone mean nothing to a world that has forgotten what they stood for.*
*Do not trust the names. Do not trust what the family says of us, or what the world says. Trust only what you have seen with your own eyes.*
Nathan closed the book and sat motionless in the dim room, listening to the river outside the window.
The scratched-out names. The gouges that cut through the stone like claws. Orla had said *it was safer to forget them.* But the letter said the opposite: the family had carved them to be *remembered.* Someone else had scratched them out.
*Who?*
He opened the book again, but the next page was torn along its edge, as if someone had ripped it free in a hurry.
---
Mira found him still sitting there at dusk.
"Rank B," she said, tossing her card onto the bed. "I can take a cull contract tomorrow. And you should see the board, Nathan. There's a notice on the main wall."
He looked up slowly. "What kind of notice?"
She hesitated. Her face had gone strangely pale.
"A bounty. The Guild Council posted it three days ago, sealed with the Veyron crest." She reached into her coat and unfolded a copy she'd torn from the wall. "I think you need to read it."
He took the paper. The ink was bold and the language official, and it said, in careful block letters:
*WANTED FOR QUESTIONING. A male, age fifteen, of unknown family, believed to originate from the western hills. Carries a signature of the Hollow. Reward: ten thousand gold. Approach with extreme caution.*
At the bottom, a sketch had been drawn in charcoal. It wasn't a good likeness. But the eyes were his.