The Wish Granter (Ravenspire #2)(13)
But with quite a few members of the palace staff refusing to work for the new king out of loyalty to the recently deceased royal family, and with plenty of workers uneasy about casting their lot in with the king when rumor had it many in the upper class didn’t support him, Sebastian figured maybe the king was desperate enough to overlook Sebastian’s upbringing and youth.
Maybe desperate enough to not ask too many questions about why Sebastian, an eighteen-year-old boy living in poverty and filth, knew how to use every weapon in the king’s arsenal and then some.
It was the best hope Sebastian had of finding steady income and a roof over his head.
The best hope he had of finally saving up enough to leave Kosim Thalas, escape his father’s reach, and never look back.
The ferryman slowed his rowing as they bumped their way past a handful of boats leaving the dock the led into the eastern market. Once they’d docked, Sebastian tipped the ferryman and leaped from the boat.
Moments later, he’d picked up his weekly food order from a local merchant and was facing the entrance to east Kosim Thalas, his stomach sour at the thought of what lay ahead.
His mother didn’t deserve his weekly visits to fill her cupboards with food and to make sure she wasn’t lying passed out or dead, unnoticed and unmissed by anyone. He knew that. She deserved the anger and hatred she seemed to constantly expect from him, no matter how many times he refused to give it. But Sebastian wasn’t doing this because he felt obligated to the woman who’d given birth to him and his brother and then ignored their screams while her husband whipped them whenever he felt like it.
He was doing this because hatred and rage were the hallmarks of his father’s life. Making a different choice was the only way he knew to exert control over the kind of man he hoped to become.
Dusk clung to the streets in pockets of gloom that stretched hazy gray fingers toward the darkening sky. Sebastian strode toward the gate leading into east Kosim Thalas, shutting down all reflections about his parents until nothing remained but one burning thought: survive.
His steps lengthened, and he flexed his shoulders as he pushed past the last of the market’s shoppers and walked through the cracked, decrepit archway that served as an entrance to the corner of the city that only the desperately poor and those who hoped to prey on them dared to enter.
He reached for his cudgel and pulled it free as he left the gate behind. Tension hummed through his muscles. The scars on his back tingled and burned as he focused on every movement, every sound that whispered toward him.
He walked rapidly, passing buildings of faded pastel clay with weeds growing out of cracks in the walls and the bitter stench of cheap pipe weed hanging heavy in the air. The four-story buildings were depressingly uniform in their decay. Inside, tiny apartments were rented out for coin or pipe weed or the kind of favors that the nobility in their fancy estates had no idea existed.
People sat on front stoops watching the street with careful attention. Sebastian met the gaze of a few of the runners—children responsible for quickly informing the right people about the arrival of the city’s guard or an unsuspecting member of the upper class—and gave them a look that promised consequences if they interfered with him.
He didn’t want trouble with those who ran the streets.
And he’d made sure to earn a reputation for seriously injuring those who brought trouble his way.
Sebastian turned a corner and faced the hill leading toward his mother’s house. Keeping his face expressionless in the face of the crumbling, filthy buildings took effort.
East Kosim Thalas had never been pretty, but before the recent introduction of Teague’s newest business venture, a drug called apodrasi, it had at least made a passable attempt at being clean. Now, addicts huddled on doorsteps or on broken blocks of stone, pulling at their hair and gnashing their yellowed teeth while they tried to sell their labor or their bodies for enough coin to get another vial. Now, the street bosses weren’t content to commit crimes against the merchant and noble classes. They had sellers moving through their own streets, giving free samples to those too young or too beaten down to refuse an escape from the life they led.
Apodrasi and Alistair Teague, the undisputed crime lord of all Súndraille, were east Kosim Thalas’s curse, and no one knew that better than Sebastian.
Making his way into his mother’s building, he climbed the rickety stairs to the third-floor apartment where he and Parrish had survived her neglect and his father’s whip.
He stood outside her door, scars aching, the tang of pipe weed resting on the back of his tongue, and listened while he fought to stay calm.
It had been six months since his father had left for his new job collecting payments for Teague in the neighboring kingdom of Balavata, but still Sebastian’s hands shook and his chest ached at the thought that the man who’d raised him might be on the other side of the door.
Dragging in a deep breath of dusty, smoke-scented air, Sebastian unlocked the door and entered. As the door clicked shut behind him, he rolled to the balls of his feet and raised his cudgel while he swept the room with his gaze.
His mother lay on the threadbare sofa, a filthy blanket pulled haphazardly over her legs while she slept, her fingers still curled around a pipe that reeked of the cloyingly sweet scent of apodrasi. The candle on the table beside her had guttered out, and a small puddle of wax had spilled across the surface, hardening around a layer of dust and bits of pipe weed leaf.