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CHAPTER TWO

GABE

If you can’t find love, start looking for a fight.

—Caldienan proverb

H e was getting better at taking a punch.

His opponent was shorter, but broader, and had clearly been fighting far longer than Gabe had. Gabe hunched over, the back of his wrist against his bloodied nose, and knew that taking a moment to regain his bearings was a mistake even before the massive Caldienan man kicked him in the gut.

Heat at the tips of his fingers as he fell, his back cracking against a stone floor softened by dirty straw. Flame flickering in the corners of his vision.

No , Gabe snarled inside his head. Stop.

It did.

Briefly, he considered getting up, refusing through sheer spite to let the bout end. But his eyes were watering, and his stomach hurt, and he was already going to be sore as every hell tomorrow, when he’d have to either come back here or find work in the market somewhere. Rent was due.

He closed his eyes, ears ringing as the referee shouted the countdown. The crowd roared, stomping onto the straw, rallying around the man who’d won.

Good for you , Gabe thought. He pushed himself up, wincing. Be thankful I didn’t use every tool at my disposal.

A singed smell in his nostrils, like burning wood.

The crowd mostly left him alone. That was something different between the fighting rings here and those in Auverraine. There wasn’t much jeering in Caldien. They were content to celebrate their winners without heaping misery on the loser.

It was an odd dichotomy, since the fighting was so much more brutal. There was no genteel pretense of boxing, with wrapped hands and defined rules. In Caldien, people just beat the shit out of each other.

That suited his mood fine. Gabe felt like he probably deserved to get the shit beat out of him.

It was not lost on him, the irony that he was coping the same way Bastian had, back when Bastian was… well, was Bastian. Gabe tried not to think of the implications, of why he felt better when he was subjecting himself to the same humbling. A twisted kind of closeness.

He wished he could find something that made him feel even marginally closer to Lore.

Now upright, Gabe limped to the edge of the ring, holding on to a wooden post for balance. Most fights here took place in repurposed barns, since outside it was always either raining or about to be. Gabe supposed that was a good thing, for him. The weather in Caldien was not conducive to fire.

The referee approached holding a small bag, clinking coins.

He handed it to Gabe with an almost-pitying look before turning back to the next fight.

Gabe stuck it in his pocket without counting the winnings.

He didn’t necessarily want to draw attention to the fact that he was betting against himself.

His dignity had taken enough hits as it was, no pun intended.

After arriving in Caldien two weeks ago, following a week on the sea, Val had found them a few rooms in a hovel near the harbor.

She knew the landlord from running poisons, but smugglers were not a warm bunch, and even their acquaintance didn’t equal out to free rent.

Malcolm’s friend at the university, a librarian named Adrian, had offered to help them with accommodations, but there were no cheaper rooms to be found, and Adrian’s own apartment was far too small for all of them.

And there were the Citadel guards crawling all over the city that made staying near an escape route seem like a good idea.

So they earned money however they could. Mari had sold off one pistol, though she still wore a bandolier with enough ammunition for two. Malcolm did the landlord’s accounting.

And Gabe bet against himself in the fighting rings.

“Again, Gabe?”

Michal. He’d known the other man was here; he always came to watch the fights. Gabe supposed it was a nostalgia thing, Michal remembering who he’d been before he got caught up in god-schemes.

“You only have the one eye,” Michal said, leaning against one of the barn’s support beams. “You should really take better care of it.”

The aforementioned eye was already swelling, smarting to the touch. “I’ll sacrifice my eye so that we don’t have to sleep in Caldienan weather.”

Michal glanced at the sky beyond the door. Rainy, as always, and threatening to blow into a full storm. “There are other ways to earn coin.”

“Nothing I’m good at.”

There were other reasons, reasons Gabe probably wasn’t hiding half as well as he wanted to be.

Getting beaten to a pulp every day gave him something to think about that wasn’t the complete mess they found themselves in.

His body being one constant ache made other thoughts, if not disappear, at least recede into background noise.

Thoughts like Bastian being Apollius. That the return of the benevolent god their entire religion—Gabe’s entire life—was predicated on was actually the precursor to an Empire that would smash everything beneath a holy fist.

As if in response to the thought, the perpetually threatening storm finally arrived, thunder crashing as endless rain poured from the clouds. A spear of lightning split the sky.

“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” Michal said quietly. “You’re someone they’ll all remember.”

A risk, certainly. Gabe hadn’t heard any murmurs of whether the Citadel was looking for them, but the bloodcoats lurking in every corner of Farramark made it seem likely.

He and Malcolm had taken to wearing fingerless gloves to hide their palm tattoos, but there was nothing to be done for his eye patch.

He nodded. “Point taken.”

But he wasn’t going to stop, and Michal’s pinched expression said he knew it.

The punishment of fighting felt right. Penance for the ones he couldn’t save, for his betrayals.

He wasn’t worthy of the love he held, and though no one could beat it out of him, he could at least feel the pain of it and be reminded of all the ways he’d failed, so maybe, hopefully, he wouldn’t again.

“Myriad hells.” A winner from a previous bout approached the barn door, hands on her hips, bruises blooming on her shoulders. The broad brogue of her accent made the profanity somehow softer. “The weather in autumn has never been good, but storms like this are usually reserved for summertime.”

“We have cloaks,” pointed out her friend, presumably antsy to leave the barn. “We can brave it.”

The fighter snorted. “Raincoats are as useless as the Rotunda when it’s this bad.”

Her friend smirked. “Maybe they’ll put the weather to a vote next session. It’d be just as effective as the shit they actually vote on.”

The fighter laughed, then the two of them wandered back into the barn, supposedly to wait out the storm.

“Malcolm wants you to meet him at the boardinghouse,” Michal said when the fighters were far enough away not to overhear. “He’s found something.”

Water from the trough dripped off Gabe’s bruised nose. “In one of those books from Adrian?”

Michal shrugged and didn’t answer, canting his eyes toward the milling crowd. “Something that shouldn’t be discussed in mixed company.”

Gabe ran another handful of water through his hair. It was longer than he liked; he’d have to get Mari to cut it again. “Lead the way, then.”

“You don’t want to do something about that nose first?”

“What’s the point?”

Michal sighed, headed for the door, shoulders already hunching in expectation of rain. “Sometimes I can’t believe you were the Priest Exalted.”

Sometimes Gabe couldn’t, either.

The storm had mostly stopped by the time they reached the boardinghouse. Calling it such was kind; it was more like a shed with bedrooms. It wasn’t as dilapidated as some of the row houses in the Auverrani Harbor District, but it was close.

Val waited just inside the door, perched on a stool, picking at her nails with a knife. She looked up as they entered, water from the erstwhile rain streaming off their shoulders and puddling on the floor. She raised a brow at Gabe. “Did you lose another fight?”

“Maybe.”

“You might earn more if you won once in a while.”

But Gabe was not prone to betting on himself. Not in anything.

A small room right off the main entrance served as Malcolm’s office, cluttered with stacks of water-spotted paper. Apparently, the landlord’s accounts had been neglected for quite a while before Malcolm came along. He sat at the table, dark circles under his eyes. “Took you long enough.”

“He was getting beat within an inch of his life again,” Michal said, going to sit next to Malcolm. The two of them were always in close proximity when they were in the same room.

But Gabe was not interested in defending his extracurriculars. He was far more interested in the man standing in front of Malcolm’s desk.

He was dressed too well for the slums, though not so well that it immediately stood out.

Handsome, well-groomed, with short dark hair and a trimmed beard to match, green eyes with a glint that said he would be a good friend to have at a bar and a bad enemy to have in a dark alley.

The bare outline of a dark tattoo showed beneath the white linen of his shirt, and he stood with a lazy grace that reminded Gabe of Bastian.

The mysterious man looked to Gabe’s eye, which must be fully purple by now. He raised a brow.

“I wish you’d…” But Malcolm didn’t finish the thought, just shook his head instead. He didn’t stand up, but waved a hand at the newcomer. “This is Finn Lucais.”

“And?” Whatever manners Gabe’s nobility had bred into him had bled out by now.

Finn didn’t look offended. He looked delighted, in fact. “And,” he said, “I believe I can help you with your bloodcoat problem.”

The name clicked into place, recognition dawning even as Gabe’s muscles tensed for yet another fight. Finn Lucais, the former pirate. The Caldienan naval officer.