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“It will take a lot more than this to fix Sanctuary,” Orpheus murmured. “But I suppose it’s a start.”

“It is.” For all the words Atticus seemed to love, now he possessed very few. “I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”

Orpheus swallowed, then dropped his gaze. “You haven’t left me much choice.”

Silence beat, once, twice. Then a delicate clatter rose over the pounding rain, his collar coming back around his throat, then clicking into place. But no blood. No vial. No spell.

“No, I suppose I haven’t,” Atticus murmured when Orpheus chewed his lip. All hells, he didn’t want to cry again, not now—not after this.

You did magic again.

Maybe it wasn’t his, and maybe it never would be again, but it didn’t change the fact that, for one moment, it felt real.

Tears fell down his cheeks when Atticus hauled him to his feet. “Fret not, Lamont’s leaving,” came out oddly stiff, like Atticus felt—fuck—like he felt bad.

If Orpheus could have punched him right then he would have. Instead, he grasped at his crutch when Atticus pushed it back into his hands, almost grateful when the hood came over his head and no one could see his tears.

Interlude

The Mine

The mine is nothing like the farm.

Despite the sun in the sky, dust clogs the air, different from the Rim but no less caustic, clogging Fenrir’s nose and creating phlegm in his chest. He learns quickly from the other children to mask his face with a piece of wet cloth. They’ve got barrels inside the tunnels to keep the fabric moist, air filtering better through a wet piece of fabric rather than the thin dry scraps the foreman provides them with.

Fenrir isn’t as small as the other children, but they start him off with the same tasks, climbing through the tiny naturally occurring veins to seek out the larger pockets hidden deep beneath the surface. What they’re looking for he doesn’t clearly understand. Coal is important but they’re searching for other precious metals too, silver or gold he thinks though the foreman never really says which. Mostly they’re looking for relics. Tech and weapons and something one of the foreman calls ammunition. He’s given instructions on what to look for and a small bottle of paint to mark the way back to what he finds.

One morning in early spring he gets wedged inside a jack-knife of a pocket and has to get dragged out by his feet by the senior foreman himself.

“Yer too big for scouting, boy,” the man says, and this should be a relief, Fenrir thinks, except the look on the man’s face is grim. “Gonna move you into hard labor.”

Hard labor is nothing like being a scout.

Each morning starts with a drink of a foul-tasting concoction Fenrir eventually learns is called beer. Then he works alongside men thrice his age, swinging pickaxes in tiny spaces, sometimes standing in knee-deep water, or breathing air that tastes bad, until the foreman would come collect them for an evening meal. He sleeps on a pallet perched atop a bunk that is already almost too small for him. He is as big as the men he works alongside despite his age, and with that brings a kind of animosity Fenrir has never experienced in his life.

He’d never known too many people outside his family. He’d played games with the neighbors’ kids before they’d fled the Rim, but here, his peers avoid him at best, sneer and snarl and spit at worst.

“Monster eyes,” some even call him, their dark stares and tight faces revealing that it isn’t Fenrir’s age that sets him apart. “Child of the Rim.”

He bathes when he can, staring down into his reflection and, for the first time, noting how pale his eyes are, the pinpricks of his pupils and the strangeness they beget. His mum’s eyes, he can’t help but admit.

Why did she send me here?

He could have helped at the farm. Plowed the fields, built more stairs. He could have cooked if that’s what they needed. Taken Alina for more walks or found a way to carry Elise and his baby brother on his back.

That’s not what heroes do. Heroes take care of their families. They do what needs to be done no matter the cost. And for the first time, Fenrir thinks…maybe he doesn’t actually want to be a hero. Not if it means losing everyone that he loves in the world.

Chapter XXV

The Forge

When Fenrir next returned to Mercer’s forge, he didn’t go alone.

“Heard you needed some hands.”

Mercer’s eyes were wide, locked on the eight soldiers Fenrir had brought with him, a mix of age and backgrounds who all had some kind of history or interest in learning how to work steel. There were more than enough forges. More than enough anvils. And what they lacked in steel ingots were already on their way up the mountain, thanks to the radio line Red had run up to the palace when they’d laid the conduit for electricity.

“First round of ingots should be here tomorrow. They’ll ramp up the shipments more over the next few days.”