Hoff kept his hand over Rolan’s mouth and growled threats into his ear as he marched him away.
But then, without so much as a whisper to mark his movement, the stranger stepped in front of them.
Rolan sucked in a breath. How on earth had the man moved so quickly? He stopped trying to chew his way through Hoff’s glove. The captain stood frozen, his face white as the stranger met his gaze.
“You’re taking that boy to prison?” the stranger asked softly, his voice as deep as despair, as rough as scraped oak.
“I-I am, sir,” stammered Hoff.
The sudden catch in Hoff’s voice surprised Rolan. He glanced between the two men, wondering why the guard captain was suddenly weak in the knees. The duke hovered nearby, looking annoyed that his day was being held up.
“He is young,” observed the stranger. “Have his people been given time to claim him?”
Hoff chuckled, but it was too nervous a sound to be convincing. “He hasn’t gotpeople, sir. None worth speaking of, anyway. Just another street scamp with rats for brains and sticky fingers. A bit of pondering in a cell will do him good.”
“I have found,” returned the stranger, “that a bit of pondering in a cell rarely doesanyonegood.”
“All the same,” Hoff replied, his voice gaining some strength now that his judgment had been insulted, “the law’s the law, and truth knows this lad has broken more’n his share of it.”
The stranger looked at Rolan again, turning his head to reveal more of his face. He had a full black beard with silver streaks in it, a nose like an axe-blade, and more scars than Rolan had ever seen on a face before. It was a hideous face. The face of a murderer or a warlord. Tattoos twisted up his trunk of a neck. Beneath his tattered cloak, his shoulders were thick and powerful. He loomed over Hoff like a mastiff over a lapdog, all shadow and muscle and cold, steely eyes.
“I’ll claim him,” he said.
Rolan started, too shocked to speak even when Hoff drew his hand away.
“Come again?” Hoff said.
“I’ll claim him,” repeated the stranger in a tone like rumbling earth. “The law’s the law. And it states a lad under sixteen has three days to be claimed before he’s imprisoned.”
Hoff looked around—at the other guards, at the duke—as if someone might step forward to interpret. No one did, but the duke grimaced, as if he were thinking of the fancy breakfast he was missing to be here.
“That’s not how it works!” Hoff protested. “You’d have to be his father or other relative, or his master. Not justanyonecan—”
The captain choked off his words as the stranger leaned in. Was it Rolan’s imagination, or did shadows spread around him as he loomed closer to Hoff? Did the air get a little colder? Did the sun dim?
Surely it was his imagination.
But even Hoff shuddered.
“Am I just anyone?” the stranger asked in a low, terrible voice that was somehow both a growl and whisper.
“O-of courseyou’renot just anyone,” stammered Hoff. “B-but the law—”
“Very well,” said the stranger, leaning back. The air seemed to relax when he did, the shadows Rolan had or had not imagined fading away. “I claim the boy as my apprentice. There. Does that satisfy your law?”
Hoff blinked. “Well. I suppose. If he reallyisyour apprentice.”
They all looked at Rolan—Hoff, the stranger, the duke.
“This delinquent pup?” said Duke Benhald to the stranger. “I know I’ve been hounding you to take an apprentice for years, but… surely you could do better.”
The man in black only gazed at Rolan, who both rankled at the duke’s rudeness and felt a spark of curiosity about a man who would so casually ignore a duke.
“What do you say, boy?” the stranger asked, his hand resting on the hilt of his huge sword.
Rolan shrank back. “I… I don’t…”
Hoff squeezed Rolan’s arm tighter. “I beg Your Grace, give me a moment with the lad.”
