Chapter 1 #4
Then he eats. The cook at the Hollow leaves plates for the dancers, simple food but better than anything Emery could afford on his own.
Bread that isn't stale. Cheese that isn't hard.
Meat that he doesn't have to inspect before eating.
At the guild he'd been eating whatever the kitchen had left over, which was usually broth with things floating in it that he chose not to identify and bread hard enough to use as a weapon.
This is different. This is food prepared by someone who gives a damn about whether the people eating it enjoy the experience, and Emery is not used to that kind of kindness, and he is careful not to get used to it because everything he's ever gotten comfortable with has been taken away.
He takes his plate and he goes to his room, which is small but warm and has a real bed with a real blanket that doesn't scratch, and he curls up by the lamp and reads.
This is the best part of his day. Every day. Without exception. The rest of his hours are spent performing, pretending, tolerating, calculating. But this, the lamp and the blanket and the pages under his fingers, this is his.
He reads about the knight. The portal. The world on the other side, with its impossible colors and its creatures that don't exist and its vast, rolling spaces that go on farther than Emery can imagine because he has spent his entire life in rooms and corridors and tunnels that press in on all sides.
The knight makes friends. The knight is brave and good and people love him and fight for him, and at the end of the book the knight goes home changed, better, carrying the memory of somewhere beautiful.
Emery knows by now that this is a fantasy in more ways than one.
Not just the portal and the strange creatures.
The idea that someone could be loved that way.
That someone could matter enough to be fought for.
That you could walk through a door into a place that was better than the one you left and that the place would want you to be there.
He has read this book so many times the pages are soft at the edges and some of the words are fading from the pressure of his thumbs.
He doesn't care. He would read it until the ink was gone entirely and the pages were blank and he was reciting it from memory in the dark, because the story isn't in the words anymore.
It's in the feeling of having somewhere to go that isn't here.
He sets the book on his chest. The lamp flickers, guttering in the draft from under the door, and the shadows shift on the ceiling. This ceiling is plaster, not stone, and doesn't have a crack in it, which counts as progress.
Sometimes he reads the poetry instead. Guille's words are dangerous in a different way than the knight's story.
The adventure book is an escape, a place to go when the world presses too close.
But Guille writes about wanting. About the ache of reaching for something you know you can't have and reaching anyway, because the reaching is part of the journey, because the wound of wanting is its own kind of proof that you're still alive enough to feel it.
Emery reads those poems and feels exposed in a way that nothing else in his life exposes him.
No patron at the Hollow has ever gotten as close to him as Guille's dead, foolish, beautiful words.
He wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to have someone fight for him. To have someone look at him and see more than a body, more than a tool, more than a warm mouth and a sharp blade. He wonders what it would be like to matter to someone in a way that doesn't come with a price tag.
Emery has spent years scraping by. Clawing out of the dirt from nothing only to end up there again.
No one in his life has ever fought for him.
No one has ever come back for him. He is accustomed to being used and discarded and has built an entire identity around not needing anyone.
His cynicism is not an affect. It's armor he has worn so long he has forgotten what is underneath it.
Maybe nothing is there at all. Maybe there was never anything underneath it and the armor is all there is and the person wearing it is just a convenient fiction, a shape the armor takes so it has something to hang on.
He doesn't pursue that thought. Self-pity doesn't pay his keep and it doesn't sharpen his blade and it doesn't bring him any closer to killing Bastian Kane.
He puts the book on the table. He pulls the blanket up to his chin.
He thinks about the token hidden in his spare shirt across the room, the weight of it, the promise it represents.
Fourteen contracts fulfilled. Fourteen lives ended.
This will be fifteen, and fifteen will be the hardest by far, and after fifteen he will go back to the guild and collect his pay and wait for the next token to land in his hands.
And that will be fine. That will be his life. That has always been his life. He knows better than to hope for more.
He blows out the lamp and sleeps.