Page 1 of Heart of Chaos (Chaosborn #1)

Chapter one

Eisa

Henrik’s fist came down on the counter so hard, I thought the bar might splinter.

“Get up!” he snarled, grabbing a fistful of my hair and throwing me to the floor. “Those tables won’t clean themselves, Eisa!”

I winced, shoving myself off the cold stone ground. I’d only sat for a moment—of course, it was the moment Henrik chose to emerge from his study to check our progress.

The dirty rag in my hand barely pushed the grime around, but Henrik seemed satisfied enough. He gave a grunt of approval before stomping back to his office, the door slamming shut behind him.

I sighed and pressed my palms against the filthy table, steadying my breath.

“It could be worse.” Anders nudged my shoulder with the mop as he passed. “He could sell you to the brothel like Branka. Or try to bed you himself. At least you’re safe from that here.”

I swallowed hard, nausea clawing at my throat. Branka’s absence still cut deep, like an open wound that wouldn’t heal. But Anders didn’t need to know the truth—that the only reason I was safe from Henrik was the powdered nightshade hidden in my skirt.

Forcing a brittle smile, I lobbed the rag at him. He was only fifteen, and he didn’t need to know the sordid details of my dealings with Henrik. “Don’t be disgusting.”

He dodged with an impish grin. “You do a good job of making it seem unpleasant.”

“Wretch,” I muttered, pointing at a missed spot on the floor. “You missed a spot over there.”

“I did not,” Anders grumbled, glaring at the spot I’d indicated. Still, he moved to mop it, too wary of Henrik to risk another slip. Last week’s missed table had earned him a boxed ear and a bruised ego, even though the physical marks had already faded.

Marks that branded me for weeks or months when Henrik’s ire turned my way.

“Hey,” Anders said, frowning at me as he sloshed the mop over floors that would never be truly clean, no matter how much he tried. “You okay? You look pale.”

“I always look pale,” I sighed, retrieving the rag and moving onto another table. “Just a little dizzy.”

“Did you get enough to eat this morning?” he asked, looking concerned as he watched me out of the corner of his eye. “Are you sick?”

The answer to the first question was no, but I never got enough to eat, and Anders damn well knew that. The answer to the second was a resounding yes, but there was nothing Anders or anyone could do about it, as far as I knew, so there was little point in mentioning it to him.

“I’ll be fine,” I lied. “Stop fussing, you mother hen.”

Anders frowned, his face still rounded with youth and his blonde hair an unruly mess as usual. But he didn’t argue as he continued mopping. I finished the last table, the thin layer of ale that seemed to coat every surface only somewhat diminished by my efforts.

When he declared the floor officially spotless, which it wasn’t, we tucked our supplies back in the crowded closet under the tavern stairs, then began setting up the bar for the evening rush.

Henrik’s run-down little tavern was in the middle of nowhere, a waypoint between other places where people lived and worked and traveled. Most of the patrons who wandered in stayed out of necessity, leaving as soon as they’d warmed their hands or filled their bellies.

I often wondered what it would be like to stow away with one of them on a wagon and never have to see Henrik again. If not for Anders and Sigrid, I might have tried.

“Eisa!” Henrik’s booming voice practically shook the small building, and I fumbled the glass I was cleaning in surprise. His face was a mask of disgust as he took me in. “Elysia’s tits, you look like a banshee. How the fuck am I supposed to make money with a barmaid that’s barely more than a wraith?”

I grimaced internally, certain the Hearthmother wouldn’t love a man like Henrik invoking her breasts, but I didn’t reply. Reminding Henrik that he was responsible for my appearance would achieve nothing but a beating, and it worked to my advantage that he barely fed us or let us draw enough water for a proper bath.

After Henrik’s attempt to proposition me at only sixteen, I realized that I could no longer hide that my body, despite being malnourished and bruised, had become a woman’s. So I hid under layers of grime and filth, matted hair, and bruises. It was usually enough to dissuade any handsy travelers, and a pinch of the powdered nightshade in an unattended glass took care of the rest.

Bless Sigrid and her wicked, devious mind.

“I asked you a question,” Henrik growled, grabbing my chin in his meaty fingers and turning my face this way and that as if inspecting a mare for breeding. “I need the men who come in here to want to fuck you if I have any hope of them staying for more than one drink.”

Anders flinched next to me, his hands shaking in fear and rage as he wiped down the bar. He’d said once that he wished he had the courage to stand up to Henrik, but I didn’t blame him, nor did I want him to try. My battles with Henrik protected him and Sigrid, and I preferred it that way.

Henrik still held my chin, his greasy eyes boring into my icy blue ones. “Perhaps I should have kept Branka and sold you. She was far more fuckable.”

“I wish you had,” I snapped, my hands gripping the bar so tightly my knuckles blanched.

He struck, smacking me hard across the face. I crumpled, hitting my head on the bar as I went down with a crack.

“Eisa!” Anders cried. He reached for me and knocked over a glass that shattered all around me.

“Mind your place,” Henrik growled, spitting flecks of saliva at Anders as he held the boy in place so tightly I thought he might tear his arm from his socket. “Or are you looking to be sent to the stocks? Perhaps I’ll send Sigrid too. Perhaps seeing the old lady suffer will help Eisa remember how good she has it here.”

Henrik knew exactly where to strike me to bring me to my knees, and it wasn’t my face. It was the people I loved.

“No,” I pleaded, trembling as I stood. Blood dribbled down my chin and onto my dirty blouse, but I didn’t bother to wipe it away. “Please, Henrik. I’m sorry.”

Henrik paused, a gleam in his eye that meant he knew he won. While I might be willing to trade this life for prison, I couldn’t risk Sigrid. She’d wither away in prison, and he knew it. And Anders was only a boy. Only five years from paying off the debt he was sold for, if Henrik didn’t cheat him like he had me.

“Better.” He glared down at me with a barely disguised grimace. “I own you, girl. I own all of you. Don’t forget it.”

I nodded, clenching my jaw to keep my mouth shut lest I say something else I’d regret. I flicked my tongue over my split lip and winced at the sharp agony.

Henrik grunted, releasing Anders who scrambled away. “Clean that up.” He nodded behind me to the broken glass on the floor, then wrinkled his nose. “And yourself. I can’t have you bleeding all over the customers.”

As soon as Henrik was gone, I sank to the ground, my knees no longer able to keep me standing. Anders crouched and slung my arm over his shoulder. “Gods, Eisa, I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I rasped, letting him help me toward the kitchens. Toward the closest thing I had to home and family. “Sigrid will patch me up.”

“Mormor!” Anders cried as we pushed through the wooden door. “Eisa needs you.”

The old woman whirled from the pot of soup she was stirring. She frowned as she took in my split lip and the shaking boy, the deep lines in her face creasing as she waved to the little stool by the hearth.

“Gods, child, what did that great oaf do to you?” She shuffled off to retrieve her sewing kit from her rocking chair in the corner, a pile of Henrik’s shirts falling to the ground where loose buttons bounced over the stone floor.

“I’ll go clean up the glass,” Anders murmured as he deposited me on the stool. “I’m so sorry, Eisa. I should have—”

“Anders,” I cut in, speaking as soothingly as I could with a mouthful of blood and a rapidly swelling lip. “It wasn’t your fault.”

I squeezed his hand, and he nodded, his face close to crumbling into tears.

The worst thing to happen to a fifteen-year-old boy.

“Away with you, imp!” Sigrid commanded, nudging him out of the way so she could assess the damage to my face. “Go be useful!”

He glared, Sigrid’s stern command enough to forestall the imminent tears as he stomped from the room.

“Oh, my Eisa,” Sigrid murmured, pulling another stool close and examining my lip. “What happened?”

“I forgot myself,” I mumbled thickly, hissing as Sigrid pressed into the wound.

She sighed, dabbing up the blood and frowning over the split. “This needs stitching.”

I shivered as she threaded a needle, bracing for more pain.

“You should run away,” Sigrid said, raising the needle to my lip. “You’re young. You could hide somewhere. Get Henrik so drunk he wouldn’t be able to follow you if he tried.”

“You know I can’t do that,” I replied, wincing as Sigrid pierced my lip and began stitching. Another warm gush down my chin told me the wound had begun to bleed afresh with her attention. “He’d punish me by letting you starve. Or freeze. Or worse.”

“Not much worse than starving or freezing,” Sigrid commented wryly, giving me a small smile as she finished stitching my lip. “That will be swollen for the Hearthmother knows how long,” she sighed, taking in my appearance. “And look at this bruise.” She traced a finger over the edge of a purpling lump on my arm I hadn’t even noticed. “What was this from?”

“Table edge.” I shrugged, pulling down my sleeve. I was always covered with bruises. Some were from Henrik, but others were a combination of clumsiness and whatever illness plagued my blood.

My mother had been sick too. When my father had been killed in a tavern brawl that forced her to sell herself to Henrik to pay off his debt, she had already been dying, her headaches and nosebleeds more and more frequent as she neared the end.

Henrik had been furious when she passed. He’d forced me to sign away my life in her place before her body was even cold.

Sigrid scowled as she returned her sewing kit to the haphazard pile of shirts before shuffling back to her soup. “Something needs to change.”

“Nothing will ever change.” I stood to join her and groaned. Everything hurt. “I have at least ten years left on my contract.”

“Henrik will make sure it’s more, the old bastard,” Sigrid grumbled.

“Mormor!” I hissed, glancing at the door.

“I’m not afraid of him,” she snapped, waving her wooden spoon at me. “Let him beat me black and blue. I’m too old and leathery for him to hurt me much.”

I laughed despite myself and the growing throb in my lip. “Don’t say such things,” I scolded, beginning to chop potatoes to add to the soup. “What would I do without you here?”

“I have plenty of nightshade to get my revenge,” she replied, waving me off with her spoon.

I sighed at the old lady as she ladled soup into a wooden bowl. “Exactly how many people have you poisoned, Mormor?”

“More than a few, but less than a village,” she replied humorlessly as she pushed the bowl toward me. “Here. This will fix you right up.”

I tried not to grimace, accepting the bowl of watery broth and poking at a carrot that floated on its surface. “I doubt soup is enough to fix me, Mormor.”

Sigrid waited, looking pointedly down at the soup, then back up at me. I sighed and took a bite of a too-hard carrot, hissing as the hot, tasteless broth stung my split lip.

She smiled a satisfied, wrinkled smile, her white hair sticking out from under her tattered cap. I would never tell Sigrid that her soup was basically vegetable-flavored water.

“Delicious,” I lied, attempting to smile down at her over my fat lip. I wasn’t particularly tall, but Sigrid barely cleared my shoulder. She claimed she had some dwarf blood in her, but I thought perhaps she said it out of vanity more than truth. The dwarves in the north might trade with humans, but they didn’t take human lovers as far as I knew.

“Customers are arriving,” Anders hissed as he poked his head through the wooden door. “Are you ready, Eisa?”

“Coming.” I dropped the spoon in relief, wincing as I gently prodded my lip. It had doubled in size and was likely already blooming with purple bruising, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’d served customers with one of Henrik’s little reminders on my face.

I quickly rebraided my hair and tried to wash most of the blood and dirt from my face. My cleanest skirt was still stained and threadbare, but I replaced the dirty, blood-streaked skirt anyway and hoped Henrik would be happy enough with my appearance to leave me alone for the rest of the night.

A steady trickle of customers began to settle into the tavern, and I lost myself in a haze of pain as a pounding headache took up firm residence in my skull. A lump had formed on my scalp where I’d hit the bar, and each throb of my temple was echoed in my bruised lip.

Every time the door opened to admit a traveler, a frigid gust swept through the tavern, chasing away the heat from the hearths that blazed in the main room and the kitchen. It was almost spring, but we were far enough south that the snow and ice that blew in from Ironholm and the Odemark beyond never really released their hold on us.

I shivered, the wool skirt and wrap doing little against the bursts of cold.

“Need someone to keep you warm, love?” came the voice of one extremely inebriated customer, face ruddy and eyes glazed with drink. I rolled my eyes as a frigid gust of wind announced another new customer, and the drunk man took the opportunity to snatch for my skirt. I skittered away, only to stagger backward into the firm, hard chest of the man who had just entered.

“I don’t think she’s interested,” came a low, menacing growl as the man behind me steadied me, his hand warm against my chilled skin.

The drunk man who had grabbed for me paled, his face going very white as he took in the stranger behind me.

“Y-y-yes, of course,” he stammered, turning studiously back to his ale and crouching over the glass as if it might somehow make him invisible.

The room fell silent, and I felt the hair prickle at the back of my neck as I slowly turned to face the man behind me.

He was tall, his cloak doing little to hide his imposing frame. Ashen hair fell about his shoulders and down his back where several braids kept it out of his face. His scalp was shaved bare at the sides, revealing black tattoos inked across his scalp, and a short beard emphasized his firm jaw and serious mouth.

He hadn’t bothered to lift his hood to cover his ears, pierced with large, black disks and tapering to sharp points.

Hearthmother above. The drage were here.