Twelve years ago, Luskan

He didn't go to the Cuckoo's Nest for some weeks. The stabbing pain of watching the men with his sister did not lessen with time. He nursed the feeling, the same way he coaxed a fire from the glowing coals into a merry blaze, basking in the energy and heat that his anger gave him. When he was frustrated with his school work – a particularly difficult cypher or mathematical formula that didn't make sense, he conjured the image of the fat man, his chubby smooth fingers, fingers that had never lifted a hammer or heavy load, skittering over Kyla's pale skin like waterbugs over the glassy surface of a pond. The hatred swelled in his belly, and he attacked the problem in front of him with a renewed vigor.

He was sitting in the back of the classroom on a holiday morning, working on some problems that Schoolmaster had given him after he was done with the normal lesson. If he went to school, he did not have to exhaust his already dwindling supply of lamp oil, or strain his eyes trying to scratch out his answers by the sputtering light of the cheap tallow candles he bought by the dozen. Two other pupils were there too, being punished, Linca, the daughter of a kitchen girl at a slightly higher class pub than the Cuckoo's nest, and Rigard, a fat porker of a kid two years Kyrwan's senior who came from the nicer part of town, but whose father was too miserly to get him a private governess like other rich children. Rigard was in detention for grabbing Linca's bottom during their lunch break and trying to kiss her. Linca was there for stabbing him through the hand with her quill pen when he did. She'd done him the courtesy of putting the hole in his left hand, which hung, useless and bandaged under his desk, while he wrote, "I must respect others" over and over again with his good one. Linca had been instructed to write "I must not overreact" one hundred times but she sat defiantly, her arms crossed over her chest, glaring at Schoolmaster.

Kyrwan started as the door to the classroom opened with a bang, and in strode none other than Kyla's corpulent john, all done up in his holiday best.

"My wife tells me you've held Rigard here, and two days before the Spring Fair!" he bellowed.

Schoolmaster, who was grading tests at the front of the classroom, looked up mildly over his wire-rimmed spectacles, "And you are?"

"My name is Edrick Falringer!" the fat man bellowed. Kyrwan watched, feeling as though his heart had fallen right out of his chest and was sloshing around in his stomach, "Do you know who I work for?"

"Your boss, I would imagine," Schoolmaster said, "What can I help you with?"

"I work for none other than the Master of the Fifth Tower! And I hear you've punished my son," he roared.

"He violated the personal space of one of my students in quite an inappropriate way," Schoolmaster said, glancing at Linca, who had uncrossed her arms and was watching the exchange between the two men with interest.

"Perhaps if the little whore wouldn't tempt the boys, she wouldn't find herself in trouble of that sort!" Edrick replied, "None of this gives her the right to stab him. She assaulted him!"

The glowing embers of resentment roared to life in Kyrwan's chest. I am going to kill you one day, he thought, I don't know when, but I am going to be the last man to see you alive.

"That 'little whore' is ten years old," Schoolmaster said, "As you can see, she too is being punished for her actions. Please leave my classroom and refrain from using such language in front of my pupils."

"I don't see the harm in calling a duck a duck," Edrick said.

"Please leave my classroom," Schoolmaster said.

"Or what?"

The old man rose from his desk, putting his quill pen down. Kyrwan saw him stand so rarely that he was impressed by how tall the old man actually was, towering over Edrick. His eyes blazed blue under his bushy white eyebrows and round spectacles. He raised his hand and Kyrwan saw electricity spark between his fingers.

"Do you think your master is the only person in this town who can call upon the power of the Weave?" Schoolmaster asked, his voice suddenly deep and powerful.

Edrick made a sound then, a cross between the peep of a spring frog and the squeak of a rusty door hinge, and scuttled from the room like a crab. Schoolmaster smiled and snapped his fingers, extinguishing the sparks between his fingers, and looked benevolently out over the three students in the classroom. "There," he said, "Now that that unpleasantness is done, what say we call detention over and all go home for a cup of tea?"

Kyrwan looked back down at his work. He was nearly done anyway, and now he was much too agitated to concentrate on math problems. He put away his inks and quills in the compartment under his desk and picked up his bookbag. Linca looked less defiant now as she sheepishly handed her blank page to Schoolmaster, embarrassed that she had not taken his punishment standing up when it was clear he had been on her side the whole time. She mumbled an apology, and the old man ruffled her blond hair and told her it was quite all right, but that she would be better served by keeping her temper in check. She slunk to the back of the room and approached Kyrwan.

"Would you walk me home?" she asked, her voice barely audible.

Kyrwan was struck dumb. He'd barely exchanged two words with the girl in the two years they'd gone to school together.

"Why?" he asked.

Her eyes slid over to Rigard, who had handed his sheets in to Schoolmaster, who told him to be his own man and not worry about his father.

"He said he'd get me," Linca said, "I don't know what he meant by that, but it can't be good."

"Well, all right," Kyrwan said, "My mates are waiting for me outside, I think we can keep you safe."

"Thank you!" she exclaimed. She threw her arms around him and planted a kiss on his cheek. He felt his face go hot and he looked down sheepishly, suddenly very interested making sure his books were arranged neatly in his bag.

Indeed, his friends were waiting downstairs for him. Kita, the daughter of the butcher from downstairs. Lankin, an orphan from the docks who had been taken in by Kath, the proprietress of the Cuckoo's nest. Lankin was scrawny and wiry, with a perpetual smudge of dirt on his left cheek. Kita looked old for her age, which was twelve, and had gotten in the habit of carrying a knife under her skirts to ward off unwanted attention from the men of the docks. Though both were older than Kyrwan, for whatever reason they listened to him, letting him play the ringleader.

"He let you out early!" Lankin exclaimed.

"Yeah," Kyrwan said.

"But he didn't let you out, you weren't being punish-" Linca started.

"Yeah," he said, glaring at her, "He let me off easy." The last thing he needed was Lankin and Kita knowing that he'd gone to school on a day when there was no class of his own accord to work on problems that weren't even assigned. He had them convinced that most of the time, when he stayed after class or went in on a day off, it was because of some transgression or another, "This is Linca. We're walking her home so's if that fat fuck Rigard Falringer gets any ideas he'll wind up at the bottom of the river."

"Oh, so you're the one who put a pen through that little pig's hand," Lankin said, "He's been begging for it for years!"

"Should make him into a pork pie," Kita said, "Hardly anyone would be able to tell the difference."

"Yeah," Linca chuckled, enjoying the sudden celebrity that her action had gotten her with the urchins from the docks, "Yeah I stuck him."

They wandered through the alleyways and out into the main road. Linca lived with her mother in a flat above the Barnacled Bark, the bar where she worked. It was further inland than the Cuckoo's nest, and there were no prostitutes allowed. Her dad had been hanged for thievery some years before, something that everyone knew but nobody talked about. There was no sign of Rigard or any of his cronies on the way, and they delivered Linca safely to her flat.

There had always been some tension between the kids from the docks and the kids whose parents could afford to live in the ritzy district, but not a better school, but it had not become a full out war yet. The school where Schoolmaster taught took students in groups, one year taking all of the kids from eight to ten, and kept them in the same class until they oldest were eighteen and the youngest sixteen. There were four other teachers who worked for him that taught the other age groups, and while they sometimes mixed on the playground, and Kyrwan had seen them tangle, teeth getting knocked out and blood running down the cobblestones. Once a girl from the docks had stuck a boy from inland with a pen knife. She was in jail, though she claimed that she was just defending herself. That was what happened when kids got older, Kyrwan surmised, when the girls started looking like women and the boys started getting aggressive like men. And no matter what had actually happened, it seemed, it was the kids from docks who wound up expelled or in jail, while the rich kids got off easy with nothing but a missing tooth or broken arm as consequences. The best strategy, he'd surmised, was to enforce the rules like Dayven the Assassin did. In secret, without anyone seeing, not in fisticuffs in the schoolyard where parents and guards could enforce the greater social order where the poor paid the consequences and the rich got off easy.

"Get Fray and Arky," he told Jaxy, "We need to take care of Rigard now."

"What are you going to do?" Lankin asked quietly.

"I'm going to make sure he never touches a girl as doesn't want him touching her again," Kyrwan said, "And that he tells his friends the same."

"Yeah," Lankin sighed, "Are you gonna hurt him?"

"Not if he doesn't make me," Kyrwan said. He reached into his pocket where he kept the knife Kyla had gotten him for his tenth birthday. It was a folding knife, as long as the distance from his wrist to the tip of his middle finger, and he kept it sharp, "Gotta teach him that his da can't protect him from everything."

"Yeah," Kita agreed, "Teach that fat fuck a lesson."

Fray and Arky Trovo were twins, the son and daughter of a longshoreman and a whore from Amn. Fray was tall for his age, and already had to shave his face once a week at the age of eleven, while Arky was small and wiry, often mistaken for a boy depending on what she wore. Fray was charming and would certainly grow up to be handsome, while Arky was her brother's shadow, with a shrill voice and a sadistic sense of humor. They found them where they always found them, hiding out in an alley near the schoolyard, smoking pilfered pipeweed from a pipe that Arky had carved herself.

"Oy! Trovo!" Kyrwan called. Both Trovos looked up. Arky blew a smoke ring his way, "We need you."

"What's the game?" Fray asked.

"Rigard Falringer," Kyrwan said, "He's crossed one too many boundaries and we need to put him back in his place."

"I've been wanting to make that little piggy squeal for a long time," Arky said.

"Well you'll get your wish," Kyrwan said, "Come on, I know where he hangs out."

They found Rigard without too much trouble. He was sitting outside the baker's shop with two of his friends, two boys from inland. Boys whose fathers had pocket money so they could sit their stuffing their faces with sweet rolls while some of the kids from the docks went hungry or cold.

"Come on out of there, little pig," Kyrwan said, "The big bad wolf needs a word with you."

Rigard looked up from his snack, and to his friends, both of whom were older boys, probably fourteen or more, and as tall as men. '

"You can bring your friends," he said, "We're not afraid of them. Are you afraid of us?"

"I'm not scared of any wharf rat," Rigard said. He stuffed the rest of his roll into his mouth and wiped the crumbs from his shirt, pushing out from the table and swaggering towards them, "And anything you say to me you can say to my cousins."

The older boys looked at each other nervously. Rigard didn't have the good sense to be intimidated by the ragtag and of children, but the older boys had been around the block enough times to know not to mess with a group of people whose most salient feature was their desperation.

"Let's take a walk," Kyrwan said.

Rigard fell into formation. His cousins followed them, but hung back. They got to the alley behind Kita's father's shop and Kyrwan's flat. It was still broad daylight, but the buildings leaned in over the alley, making it dim indeed.

"I welcome your cousins to stay for his," Kyrwan said, "But you know, with all of the lowlifes from the docks off work today, this might not be the best part of town for them to wind up in when the bars close."

Rigard's cousins, took once look at the neighborhood – the ramshackle building that housed the Cuckoo's nest down the street, the garbage in the alleyways, the packs of feral dogs that ate the garbage, and sometimes took down a child left alone.

"Cowards!" Rigard called as they took off.

"You're on you're own with this one," the bigger of the two boys said, "We didn't grab that girls arse."

"I see they got all of the brains of the family," Kyrwan observed, turning his attention back to Rigard, "Kita, could you kindly escort them back up the hill to their own territory? And make sure they stay there?"

"No need," one of them said.

"Please, it would only be polite," Kyrwan said. They left, followed by the two kids. Kita had begun to learn the rudiments of magic from books. He'd seen her fry bacon in a pan by shooting flames from her fingers at it. Either way, he knew that no ill would befall them.

"Let's just make this perfectly clear," he said, "You ain't better than any of us. You ain't better than me, and you certainly ain't better Linca."

"I don't see why you're so obsessed with protecting that slut," Rigard growled.

"Stick him!" Arky exclaimed.

Kyrwan did indeed take his knife from his pocket, testing the edge while he did. Sharp as always. He ran the cool steel along Rigard's fat little cheek, "What, you too fat and nasty for a girl to actually want yer hands on her?"

"Fuck you!" Rigard spat, "Everyone knows your sister's a whore! Maybe I should collect the three coppers she costs and have her for the night!"

Kyrwan felt as though he'd been knocked back, and actually fell back away from where he had Rigard pinned against the outside of the building. Of course everyone knew Kyla was a whore, but nobody was actually impolite enough to say it out loud to him. Arky had the presence of mind to step in and block the kid's escape.

"Now I dunno why you're being so impolite to a man with a knife at your throat," she hissed, "That seems like a very, very bad move for a person in your place."

"Well you don't have knife anywhere," Rigard said, "Why should I be polite to you? I hear your own mother spreads her legs for coppers on the docks."

"Why yes she does," Arky said, "But you're wrong about one thing. I do have a knife. And I don't think you'd like where it's aimed right now." Kyrwan made out the shape of a hunting knife in her pocket, her scrawny hand clenched around it, aimed right where no man would want it stuck. He saw her thrust it forward a bit, so Rigard could just feel the pressure.

"You wouldn't dare," Rigard said, his voice hoarse, but Kyrwan saw a wet stain form in the front of his pants. Arky'd gotten him to piss himself with fear. He chuckled inwardly, feeling better about the insult that Rigard had used.

"Little lord ain't so high and mighty," Kyrwan said, his bravado renewed. He leaned in, put his own blade against the boy's throat again, "Why don't you insult my sister again? Maybe Arky can get you to shit yourself too."

"Just let me be," Rigard said, his voice quiet and desperate, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't think it was a big deal..."

"What in the hells is going on here?" a woman's voice echoed in the alleyway. Arky stepped off right away, but Kyrwan kept his knife there for a moment more before stepping back and looking to see. At first he thought Kyla had come home early, but when he looked, he saw that it was the little black-haired barmaid that had chased him away from the Cuckoo's nest several weeks before. Dayven's girl.

Rigard took the opportunity to scuttle off as fast as his little legs would carry him, leaving a trail of piss as he ran.

"What business is it of yours, lady?" Kyrwan asked. The girl raised her eyebrows. In the daylight, without any paint on her face, he could see that she was younger than he thought she'd been, probably fourteen or fifteen. She could have passed for twelve if she hadn't been dressed like a grown woman. The tone of voice she used, though, indicated that she did not in any way consider him a peer.

"You must be Kyrwan," she said.

"That's my name," he said. He closed the blade of his knife and put it back in his pocket. He looked her over again. She had dark skin, though it was the end of winter so it wasn't from working out in the sun, and pale brown eyes that looked almost yellow. Her gaze was direct, and rather unnerving. "What in the hells do you want?"

"I'm a friend of Kyla's," she said.

Arky and Fray looked at each other and Lankin chuckled. "Are you a whore too?" asked Lankin.

"Shut up, Lankin," Kyrwan said, "We all know your mother did it with all the sailors, and for free." He didn't like bringing up his friend's dead mother, but he'd had quite enough of people insulting Kyla for the day. He turned his attention back to Dayven's girl, "So what do you want?"

"I brought the rent money," she said, "I'd give it to you but something is telling me that perhaps I ought to turn it directly over to the landlord."

He was silent a moment. Usually Kyla paid the landlord, or left him the money herself. The only times she did not come home, she would show up a week or so later, the bruises healing, the cuts fading. He let her believe she was fooling him. He tried to gauge the barmaid, maybe she would tell him something. Something, anything. He was already riled up from the incident with Rigard, maybe this time he might have the courage to do something...

"Why didn't she bring it?" he asked.

"She's not feeling well," the barmaid replied.

He glanced at Arky and Fray. They knew well what it meant when a prostitute 'wasn't feeling well.'

"One of her johns roughed her up, didn't he," he said. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks, "Who was it? Let me at him, I'll kill him!"

The barmaid said something very odd then. Her expression softened and she spoke to him as an equal, not as a grown-up speaking to a child, "I don't know who," she said, and he could see in her eyes that she wasn't lying, "Believe me, I'd like to kill him too." She was quiet a moment, and he could see that the anger seethed beneath the surface in her, just as it did in him. Then she snapped out of it, and said, "But murder's not going to get the rent paid."

"All right," he said, holding his hand out for the money. She put a purse in his hand. It was the right weight. Kita's father would take it gladly, "Thanks..."

"Addie," she said.

"Thanks, Addie," he said. He turned, and saw Arky smirking at him.

"Ooooh," she taunted, "Looks like someone's in loooove..."

"Oh shut up," he said, his cheeks hot with embarrassment. Nobody teased him like that, least of all skinny little Arky Trovo. He turned, and called out, "Hey, how much gorgeous?"

He saw Addie freeze. All in a rush she had turned around, come up to him, and slapped him soundly across the face. Arky, Lankin, and Fray all howled with laughter as she turned and walked off down the alleyway.

"The lot of you can fuck right off," he said.

"Pretty defensive for a man with nothing to hide!" Fray exclaimed, "So do you like it when girls slap you? I heard Mum say some men like that."

"Shut up!" he growled angrily, "Her young man's an assassin, you know."

That sobered the three of them up right quick. The only thing that the ruffians of the docks feared more than the long and biased arm of the law was the black cloaks and poisoned daggers of the Circle of Blades. Even joking about a little boy being sweet on one of their women was just asking for trouble. The four of them wandered down to where the river grew flat and placid, and spent the rest of the day skipping stones until their families called them home for dinner.

Spring was coming. That was a good thing.