Prologue
When Martin was fifteen, he'd pulled the ember red metal of one of his first real projects from the forge. Then he'd lowered it into a bucket of oil, to harden the metal into its final form, to quench it.
There'd been a long hissing sound. Silence. Then, ting.
The knife he'd spent all that time crafting emerged from the oil cracked.
Master Darroch had made him place the failure on an anvil. Then he was instructed to hammer it. One strike was all it took. Brittle metal burst, leaving only crunched remains on the anvil's unyielding surface.
Martin was that blade. He'd been made to be whole. Pieces were all that remained.
He could identify the moment he'd broken with the same precision he knew a failed forge by the sound of its snap. It'd been sitting in the clinic's waiting room, his tiny hands folded dead inside themselves while he heard Simone's hushed conversation in the laboratory.
"I don't want another abandoned house in Rigbarth. It's been hard enough."
The other voice, teacherlike, steady, belonging to some government official. "The children can't stay here without a guardian. The estate will pay for their accommodations at an orphanage in part. Once they're of age there won't be any inheritance."
Simone's tone was frightening. "I will not let Camilla's children end up on the streets."
"So you'll take custody?"
There was a thump upstairs. Martin wasn't the only one listening in. Guilty footsteps trailed down to the first floor.
"Lucy, go outside with Martin to play. And see if you can find Cecil, will you? He's gone into hiding again."
He and Lucy found Cecil up on Seaside Hill, staring at the horizon. Waiting.
Martin never learned exactly what Simone had done to wrest control of his parents' estate out of the justice system, but, in the end, he and Cecil had been allowed to stay in their house.
Since that day at the clinic he had never been the same. The steel of his young heart didn't survive the pressure; it'd shattered, the separate pieces all tempered with a fierce need to protect Cecil, be the hero and take the place of the parents that weren't there.
But that's all Martin was—individual hardened pieces. Not a fine weapon, or even a simple kitchen knife. Just bits of a dream left behind.
On his sixteenth birthday Simone brought him the deed to the house. He kept it stashed under the stone floor in his room.
Even now, all these years later, he sometimes wondered where he and Cecil would be if not for Rigbarth. In his mind it was never anywhere good.
