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I could think of only one.

I planted my feet more firmly and made a show of closing my eyes inconcentration. I could feel Sam watching me through the crack in the door as I raised my hands from my sides like some storybook sorceress. I drew every grain of dust and dirt from the room until it swirled in a storm in front of me, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Sam watching it in horror, as though granules were more than just dust.

“S-stop!” he said. Then louder, more panicked. I made the dust storm spin faster. “Damn it! I said stop!”

“Are you going to walk with me, Sam?”

“Yes! Yes, all right! You don’t need to—”

“Perfect,” I said, and my hands dropped. The dirt rained down onto the floorboards. “Someone should sweep up in here.”

CHAPTER 20PATRICK

The inn had never been his mother’s dream, but his father’s.

It was his pa’s before him, named Colson & Sons for close to a century, and for most of Patrick’s childhood, it was a source of constant strain between his parents—a slowly fraying string holding them over boiling water.

Patrick imagined John Colson had painted quite the pretty picture for his mother when they first married. A thriving inn—the staple of the town, resurrected from dilapidation back to its original state. He likely spun tales of the profits it would reap, the status it would grant, to be the proprietors of such a large establishment in a shrunken town. Tess Colson said she had been stupid in her youth, but Patrick thought she had probably just been in love.

The inn had been a sad, rotting shell when the newlyweds inherited it. Patrick’s grandfather had fancied himself a gambler. Before he’d died, collectors had strolled in and taken what moth-eaten furniture remained. The walls were impregnated with mites; the town chancellor had cordoned it off with paper notices that readDANGER. UNSTABLE FOUNDATION.

But John Colson was a dreamer. What he envisioned tended to come to life between his hands. He could whittle dry root into game pieces. He could fix all that was broken: shoes, windowpanes, creaking doors, axles,wheel spokes, and saddles. He had enough ideas to fill three men’s skulls and they’d still overflow.

But he was a Craftsman of Kenton Hill, so he went to the mines.

They mined coal in Kenton Hill. Always had. The low-bearing hills hid the largest coal seam on the continent. Patrick had seen miners slam their pints together and salute the enduring role this town had played in the great mechanism of the Trench since he could walk.But do those fuckin’ swanks deign to thank us? To share any of the profit of our labor?

No!the rest would shout, and resentment would brew among them until it was thick enough to turn a softer man violent. Those men, blackened by soot, addled by liquor, would take that violence home to their families.

In the brink, nary a Crafter town differed.

John Colson had been determined to set a different course. His miner’s pay funneled into the refurbishing of the inn, and he spent his nights working instead of drinking. Eventually, the inn reopened, and it fell to his wife to manage its books and fill its rooms, serve its patrons and stock the bar. Eventually, it became the establishment John Colson dreamed it would be, though he barely saw the inside of it. His days were spent down the shafts, in the dark, earning the wage necessary to keep Colson & Sons open despite Tess’s protests.

The inn is bleedin’ us dry, John. The repairs, the heatin’. We’ve barely turned a profit since it opened. It’s been years, John. Years! And you’re still down that blasted mine every bloody day.

It’ll turn around yet, love, you’ll see, John would say. For years he said it. By the time Patrick returned from his siphoning, he’d stopped believing it.

By then, Patrick knew the truth. He and his brothers would all mine coal with their father until they keeled over. He knew his mother would climb that fucking staircase every hour of the day until her legs gave out, and he knew that the money his father had promised would never arrive. Even with the addition of his wage and Gunner’s, there was always a bill to pay, always a repair to be made, always a shift the next day, the bell for the nightmen ringing out at dusk.

And yet, it had been a future Patrick was willing to bear. There was nothing else for him if there was not that staircase, that bell, the obstinate resolution of John Colson’s dream. Patrick’s life then was a warm accumulation of smoke and his mother’s rare smiles and the bedroom he shared with his brothers. There was nothing else to miss as much as home.

That was what he’d told himself when he returned from Belavere City, all the way down the platform, right to the back door he now stood before, wiping his boots on the same straw mat he had back then.

The house was hidden behind the pub. Three rooms for five people, turned four. John’s portrait still sat in its silver frame on a sideboard. The kitchen smelled, as it always did, of pastry and onions and rendering fat.

The oldest Colson brother sat at a round table with mismatched legs, leaning back on a chair their father had once occupied in a time before his capture. It still rankled Patrick to see someone else in his place.

Gunner turned his weary head to Patrick and watched him remove his coat. The two brothers were alike in many ways. Both dressed in a fashion that did not match their surroundings: finely tailored pants, a brass-buttoned waistcoat, a starched shirt, shoes shined like a lord’s. But the contrast between them was stark. Gunner’s beard now reached his chest and was streaked in early grays. On a reddened visage, his dark eyes floated, unable to anchor themselves. He slumped in the chair, hair in disarray, one hand shaking on their mother’s kitchen table, the other holding a bottleneck in his lap.

“The boss man is here,” Gunner muttered darkly. His eyes rolled to the counter where Tess slapped pastry onto a butcher block. “Better hide your sherry, Ma, ’fore he confiscates it.”

“Shut up, Gunner,” Tess said, taking a rolling pin to the pastry with unspent fury.

“You here to lecture me, Patty?” Gunner said now, leering over the tabletop. He pointed to a place on his chin. “Come to smack some sense into me?”

Tess slammed the rolling pin on the counter. “I said, shut up!” Sheturned to Gunner with all the fierceness of a warden. “Do you want a place to sleep off that fuckin’ bottle you took from my shelf, son? Or should I send your sorry arse home to Emily? Eh? Which will it be?”

At the mention of his wife, Gunner sobered, relaxing back into his chair, averting his eyes like a petulant child.