The Nightshade God

Book 3: The Nightshade Crown

by Hannah Whitten

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Dark Fantasy; Romantic Fantasy

Synopsis

The Nightshade Crown is in the hands of a ruthless god. Lore will stop at nothing to defeat him and save the troubled prince and tortured priest ensnared in his wicked plot, in this final installment of this lush, romantic, New York Times bestselling fantasy series from breakout star Hannah Whitten.

Lore has failed. She couldn’t save King Bastian from the rotten god speaking voices in his mind. She couldn’t save her allies from being scattered across the continent—their own lesser gods whispering to them in their dreams. She couldn’t save her beautiful, corrupt city from the dark power beneath the catacombs. And she couldn’t save herself.
 

Banished to the Burnt Isles, Lore must use every skill she earned on the streets of Dellaire to survive the prison colony and figure out a way to defeat the power that’s captured everything and everyone she holds dear. When a surprise ally joins her on the Burnt Isles she realizes the way forward may lie on the island itself. Somehow, her friends must help her collect the far-scattered pieces of the broken Fount—the source of all the god’s powers—and bring them back together on the Burnt Isles, returning all magic to its source and destroying, once and for all, the gods corrupting the land.
 

But as Lore gets closer to her goal, her magic grows stronger… and to a woman who’s always had to fight for survival, that kind of power may be hard to give up.

Release date: July 15, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 480

Sample

Let all my abasements be used for glory, for the uplifting of my betters.

—The Book of Prayer, Tract 367

Lore was exceedingly bad at being a convict.

Maybe if she’d been left to languish in a prison, draped dramatically over a cot in a bare stone cell and not required to do anything but wallow, she could have excelled in her newfound position. She wasn’t as good at brooding as Gabe—gods, no one was—but she thought she could have given it a solid go. At least then she wouldn’t have perpetually watering eyes from the ash in the air, and always-open blisters on her hands, and a crick in her neck that at this point she assumed was permanent.

No, Lore was not good at this at all.

But she tried her best not to show it, because the guards on the Burnt Isles all wanted to make her as miserable as possible. And if there was one thing Lore hated more than her current circumstances, it was letting someone else win.

She straightened as much as her sore back would let her and wiped her wrist across her brow. The ridged skin at her temple was still a surprise every time she felt it. A scar from that day in the North Sanctuary when she’d brought the whole thing down, tried to kill herself enough to banish the gods in her and Bastian’s heads.

Thinking of him hurt. Thinking of Gabe hurt, too. She tried to do both as little as possible. Thankfully, there were many other things to think of, like how in every hell she was going to get off this damn island. How in even more hells she was going to get to Apollius’s body on the Golden Mount.

How she was going to kill Him.

But even though she thought of those things constantly, she wasn’t any closer to actually knowing how to accomplish them.

And in all that thinking, she still had to find at least three pieces of gems or gold if she wanted a meal and a place to sleep tonight.

Lore wiped at her temple again. It was hard to get a good look at her new scar—mirrors were scarce on the Burnt Isles—but she’d managed to glimpse her reflection in the trough where they were allowed to scoop water into tin cups four times a day for five-minute intervals, drinking as much as they could before the seconds ran dry and their cups did, too. Red lines wavering from the corner of her eye up to her hairline and down to her cheekbone. It wasn’t terrible, but Lore was vain, and it still made her want to cry.

She didn’t. Couldn’t spare the water.

The pickax had a splintery handle, and she took a furtive moment to rewrap the cloth around her bleeding palms before picking it up again. Bastian’s old trick from the boxing ring served her well. None of the pickaxes were in especially good shape, but some were in worse shape than others, and the better ones were on unspoken reserve for the most senior inmates.

Though Lore was sure she’d have to use a shitty pickax even if she was here for fifty years.

She lifted the pickax again, brought it down on the rock in front of her. It bounced off, barely making a dent. A faint gleam of gold seamed the scratch the blade had made.

“Guess we’re eating tonight,” Lore muttered, resenting her own inner leap of enthusiasm. Sleeping on the ground was no particular horror after the life she’d led, but hunger was. Her first few days here, when she’d barely managed to find anything and gone without dinner most nights, her stomach had felt like a feral animal trying to claw its way out of her throat. Desperation had claws, too, and when she saw inmates attacking each other for pieces to turn into rations, she understood.

There wasn’t much here—the Second Isle had been mined to death already—but she managed to find at least one piece a day. Mostly because she didn’t want to think about how far she could push that understanding before it became a plan.

The main mine on the Second Isle was mostly just a hole in the ground, dizzyingly deep. Concentric rings lined the hole, different levels where prisoners hacked the chasm ever deeper in search of jewels and gold made by Apollius’s and Nyxara’s blood, dripping to the ground in the Godsfall, growing treasure like seeds. The deeper you went, the more there was to find.

There were paltry railings to keep prisoners from falling to their deaths, but they were as splintery as the pickax handles. It wasn’t unusual for someone to pitch over the edge, whether by accident or with a push. Or by a solemn decision.

The railings on the First Isle were better, apparently. That was where the prisoners with money went, those who had a few years to serve instead of a lifetime. The Second Isle was for poison runners, back-alley murderers, and petty thieves. You only ended up here if the Sainted King didn’t care about you or was very, very angry.

So Lore’s arrival was bound to be a topic of amusement.

Something slammed into the small of her back, nearly sending her headfirst into the open pit. “Fuck!” Lore dropped her pickax, cloth unraveling from her bleeding hands as she gripped a rock beside her to keep from pitching over. The sharp edges she’d made earlier this morning bit into her palms, thin blood obscuring the seam of uncovered gold.

Below, jagged stones, winking with the occasional gem; prisoners winding around them like ants headed for the hill. It all shimmered in her vision, dehydration and exhaustion turning the belly of the mine into a kaleidoscope.

“Apologies, Your Majesty.” Gods, they all got a kick out of that. Lore had hoped that maybe her identity could be kept under wraps, but that proved exceptionally foolish of her. Every convict on the Second Isle knew who she was, and every one of them hated her for it. “I thought your balance would be better, being honed in ballrooms.”

“You do know that I spent maybe six months of my life in ballrooms, right, Jilly?” Lore turned, her balance regained, and scowled at the woman behind her. “The rest of it was spent poison running. Just like you.”

Jilly scowled right back. She was probably forty, but years in the mines had put a hunch in her back, and her skin looked sun-leathered despite the coating of ash and fog in the air. Her own pickax, with a handle that looked silky smooth to Lore’s eyes, waved in her direction again. “You were never just like me.”

Truer than the other woman could know.

“And now you’re here, with your big death-power,” Jilly continued, “and you won’t even use it to get us out. Fat lot of good you are, Your Majesty.”

Lore’s fingers twitched involuntarily against the linen wraps. Searching for Mortem threads, trying to call them. She could feel the filaments of death running through everything here, the rock and the dirt, closer to the surface in the people than they should be.

But they wouldn’t come. Mortem wouldn’t obey her.

Lore couldn’t tell Jilly that, either. “How exactly do you think that would work? I turn all the guards to stone and we take the ships, only to be executed when we get to the mainland? I know dust inhalation is bad for your brain, but surely you still have one.”

The older woman’s lip lifted, a sneer that showed her nightshade-stained teeth. “It’d be something,” she said quietly, with a lace of desperation. “Something other than this. Hope is enough, even when it doesn’t make sense.”

“Get moving!”

The guards on the Burnt Isles were somehow even worse than the bloodcoats in the Citadel. Just as self-important, with an extra helping of stupidity and brute strength. This one, Fulbert, was as tall as Gabe and probably twice his weight, with what seemed to be the common sense of a dazed cow.

“You’re up farther than you should be, Jilly; get back down to your tier and leave the Queen alone.” Fulbert leered at Lore, waving Jilly on with a hand built for fistfights. “Are you trying to hold court, Your Majesty? Miss having a whole Citadel pay attention to you?”

“You people desperately need a different bit,” Lore muttered, rewrapping her hands and retrieving her pickax.

Fulbert wagged his finger and grabbed it from her. “No more mines for you today, Queenie. You’re on dock duty. Martin’s orders.”

Ah. Time to make a bad day even worse.

The sun was covered in a gray miasma, but Lore still squinted as she stepped out of the rickety lift between the central mine and the beach—the sunlight reflected off the particles in the air, making it bright but not really sunny, which didn’t seem fair. She paused, trying to get her bearings, but Fulbert was impatient and pushed her out, sending her stumbling onto the rocky sand.

“The beach is no marble floor, huh?” He grinned, poking her again. The end of his bayonet was blunt, but it still hurt. “Not like the Citadel. Can’t walk without iron bars under your feet?”

Lore kept her mouth shut. It was the one skill she’d honed on the Burnt Isles. If she had any hope of escaping, of finding a way to the Golden Mount so she could finish the job Nyxara had left undone, she had to let them tire of her. Become one more unwatched face in the crowd.

With no response to his needling, Fulbert grew bored quickly, as men of his intelligence were wont to do. “Martin’s at the lighthouse,” he grumbled, turning back to the lift. “Go straight there and get a mop.”

She was sure a mop was not the only thing Martin would try to give her. Fists already clenched, Lore stumbled her way across the beach in her flimsy prisoner-issue boots, blisters screaming across her arches.

At first, she’d been shocked by how little the guards here… well, guarded. But after a week or so, it made sense. For the few miles directly around the Isles, the sea was nigh unnavigable, the ash so thick in the air that you could barely see a yard in front of your face. The only way the prison barges were able to make it was by following the steel lines in the water, anchored to the Auverrani shore and the island’s beach, laid by the first generation of prisoners. Every once in a while an inmate would disappear, but it was chalked up to either suicide or murder. If you were on the Second Isle, those were the only two ways to get off it.

Lore walked slowly across the beach, since there was no guard to prod her on. She wanted to spend as little time at the lighthouse as she could and already felt the first pangs of hunger. It’d be bad tonight. When you worked dock duty, Martin decided if you got your rations or not.

The Burnt Isles’ harbor hardly deserved the name. Five sun-bleached docks jutting out into the surf and a barnacle-encrusted lighthouse a few yards out, barely visible before the curtains of fog and ash closed over it, both thickening over open water. Depending on the tide, you had to either climb over sharp rocks to reach the lighthouse or wade through the ocean and hope you didn’t trip over them.

Today was a wading day. Lore hitched up the baggy trousers she’d been given upon her arrival—too long in the leg, too tight in the waist—and made her way to the lighthouse. The current pulled at her from the moment she stepped into the sea, forceful as hands on her ankles.

Martin was waiting. The lighthouse keeper lounged in the doorway and watched her approach, his tall, thin frame giving the impression of a spider lingering in a web. A sly smile revealed blindingly white teeth in a sunburnt white face, his cut-short hair turned the same grayish not-color as the sky. His neck was tanned, but his arms were nearly as pale as his teeth, as if he covered them up when he went outdoors. “If it isn’t the Queen.”

Lore stopped on the rock closest to the lighthouse, blessedly flat and mostly out of the water, locking her legs against the wind. “You called?”

He pushed off from the door, hands in his pockets, eyes flickering lazily up and down her form. She’d been wrong before. He wasn’t like a spider; he was like a snake, eyes slitted against the ashy light, body primed for striking.

“I have work for you.” Where most of the other guards on the Isles spoke roughly, Martin always had a superciliously polite air about him, carefully articulate. “Both inside and outside. Which will it be, Your Majesty?”

A seemingly benign question. But Lore had an advantage, the one kindness her fellow prisoners had shown her.

Space in the communal bunkhouse was reserved for prisoners who found at least five valuable pieces a day, and Lore never had. Her first night, she found a shallow cave with a relatively soft sandy floor, one that already held a few others who’d had the same idea. One of them was a girl who’d been on the Isles for weeks, and she gave them all a rundown of the guards.

“Gellert is an ass, but he’ll let you get an extra drink from the trough if you’re quick about it and no captains are watching. Don’t try to go down a tier in the mine, or the seniors will jump you, and the guards won’t do shit about it. And if Martin calls you to the lighthouse, never tell him you want inside work.” She’d narrowed reddened eyes, pointed with a broken-nailed finger at no one in particular. “Or do—I’m certainly not above sticky work for a favor—but be smart about it. He’s the kind who doesn’t just want that.”

The bruises on her cheekbone had told the rest of the story.

The girl had been gone in the next couple days. No one looked for her. Martin started calling up new girls for the lighthouse afterward.

And it hadn’t taken long for him to ask for Lore by name. This was the third time he’d called her here, given her the choice of inside or outside work. They both knew what he was really asking.

And they both knew a time was coming when she wouldn’t get the luxury of choice.

“Outside,” Lore answered, same as she always did.

The smile on his face turned sharp at the corners. Martin advanced a step, out onto the flat rock where Lore stood. She fought the urge to step back, knowing it’d just send her toppling into the water—onto the rocks. The tide was going out.

“You think you’re too good for me?” He still spoke with that polite tone, and it made gooseflesh ripple up Lore’s arms. She’d had similar things spat at her before when she rebuffed an advance in a tavern or alleyway, but none of those catcallers had been in a position of power over her. “You think that because you were a Queen for two minutes, I can’t have you whenever I want? I keep asking because I like them willing, but I’ll be having some of what the King was having, deathwitch.”

Gods, she hated feeling afraid. She’d fielded many unpleasant emotions recently, but fear was always the worst, the most helpless. Lore’s fingers worked back and forth, metaphysically clawing at the rock below her, the dead driftwood on the beach, the stone of the lighthouse.

“Outside work,” Lore said again. Then, choking on it, “Please.”

Martin stood right in front of her, now. Still smiling, he shook his head. “No. I think you need some inside work today, Hemlock Queen.”

“What about a trade?” she said, quickly, the words racing her disgust so they couldn’t be overtaken. “I’ll do something for you if you do something for me.”

“Something,” Martin scoffed. “Say it. I want to hear it.”

The back of her throat tasted sour. “I’ll choose inside work if you get me a boat.”

Martin stared at her, near-colorless eyebrow raised to near-colorless hairline. Then he brayed a laugh. “You think you’re in a position to bargain?” His leathery hand closed around her wrist. Instinctually, Lore jerked backward, losing her balance—he used the moment to pull her to his chest, his breath in her face, hot and harsh and smelling like cheap alcohol. “Even if I gave you a ship all to yourself, you wouldn’t be able to get off this island. The prison galleys can barely navigate through the ash even with the steel guidelines. What makes you think you can?”

Nothing did, but she was desperate. Lore’s fingers worked and worked as she tried to pull away from Martin, weaving at magic that was no longer there.

She’d held all of it, every drop of Mortem left in the world. And now there was nothing.

It’d happened right as the barge approached the shoreline of the Second Isle, a deep ripping feeling, something vital as an organ torn out. Lore had gasped, pressing a hand against her middle. Nyxara?

Something happened, the goddess had murmured, a thrum of anxiety in the back of Lore’s mind.

She knew even before she reached for magic that it was gone, her grasping hands gripping nothing. No darkness, no death, just the stale, smoggy air of the Isles.

What do I do? Panic made her heart race and her breath come heavy.

I don’t know, the goddess said, sounding as helpless as Lore felt. I don’t know.

The next morning, the gray stars on Lore’s palms had faded. She could feel Mortem, but she still couldn’t wield it. And though that was something she’d always wanted, now it felt like a punishment. One she couldn’t figure out what she’d done to deserve.

Especially since the damn Buried Goddess was still in her head.

Not now, though, as the sun burned high behind the ash, this awful man trying to haul her toward the door and not caring about anything but showing his own power. Now Nyxara was silent. Cowed once again by a man who looked at a woman and saw nothing but a vessel for his violence, a tool for his use. Lore’s feet fought for purchase on the rock, her hands pressing fruitlessly at Martin’s chest, trying to keep him away.

“Stop fighting,” Martin said, slapping the side of her face, the barely healed lines of her new scar. “I own you, Lore Arceneaux.”

And something about that—how it reminded her of Apollius, reminded her of how she was married to Bastian when Bastian had been locked inside his own mind—made Lore’s fear alchemize into rage.

She tore away from Martin, letting the momentum force her off the rock and into the churn of the sea. The currents pulled at her ankles, but she didn’t topple. “Don’t touch me.”

“Have you forgotten where you are?” He crowded her again, his face mere inches from her own, gaining extra height from his position on the rock. “I can do whatever I like, and then I can throw you in the sea, and no one will care. No one will come looking for you.” He smiled again, sour wine fuming into her face. “I’ll make you call me Your Majesty while you’re choking on—”

Maybe it was the reminders of Bastian. Maybe it was something that had been brewing ever since she set foot on the Isles, so near to the Golden Mount and the Fount the gods had broken.

Or maybe it was just plain desperation making her try something she wasn’t sure would work.

Part of her didn’t expect that she could use Spiritum anymore. Mortem had been pulled from her grasp when she arrived here; she assumed the same thing had happened to the power of life, especially now that she was separated from Bastian, their Law of Opposites sundered. Using magic didn’t really fit into her tentative plan to become an irrelevant face in the crowd, unmarked enough to someday, somehow slip away.

But when she reached for the threads of Spiritum lurking in Martin’s skin and bone and blood, they jumped to her like they’d been waiting.

Lore channeled it through her, second nature. She tugged on a strand, and Martin’s heart sped, galloping behind his ribs. He dropped back, hands pressed to his chest, his face turning red and his veins swelling like leeches.

Martin stumbled on the rock, gasping, crawling toward the lighthouse door. When he reached it, he pulled himself up, his face an alarming shade of purple.

She let the thread go, slowly. Let it wind its way out of her, let his heart regain its rhythm, his veins return to their usual dimensions.

“Be careful, Martin,” Lore said quietly. “Seems like your heart isn’t doing so well. You probably don’t want to get too excited for the next few days.”

Martin said nothing, still gasping, the doorframe the only thing keeping him upright. Watching her like she was the spider now, and he the fly.

Stupid of her to try bargaining with him. But her chances of success were already thin and getting thinner.

Martin closed the door, apparently content to leave her be for now.

That was all well and good, but she still needed a mop.

Sighing, Lore picked her way around the lighthouse, headed for the back entrance. The incoming tide swept over her boots and soaked the too-long hem of her trousers.

Mops and buckets for swabbing the prison ships were right inside the back door. Lore stepped into the lighthouse and grabbed one, enjoying the momentary coolness and a break for her eyes from the constant itch and glare.

Something moved in the shadows. One of the other prisoners, probably; one who’d taken the risks of Martin’s attentions along with the easier labor. Lore opened her eyes, sure she’d be shooed out.

A familiar face stared at her from the spiral stairs that led farther up into the lighthouse. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Beautiful.

For a minute, Lore thought it was Amelia, come back to haunt her.

No, not Amelia. Her sister.

“Dani?” Lore breathed, but the other woman was already gone.

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

—Caldienan proverb

He 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