chapter ONE: PRACTICE makes a PERFECT CIRCUS

It wasn’t much of a village. To be honest, I’d already forgotten the name. It was mostly pasture, modest wooden houses with patched roofs clustered loosely across maybe a couple hundred yards, no more. The only landmarks were a granary and a well, both about as unremarkable and humble as they got. The square was really just the widest stretch of road, and even that was less worn than I’d expected.

Hardly enough boot-and-cart traffic to wear the weeds away, I thought.

Thin forest rose in the distance, a hazy line this far out in open grass country. But no matter how far, the children tending those fields still looked up now and then, wide-eyed, caught for a moment in awe of the great mountain Harmonia, where the heroes had conquered the gods and “freed humanity.” That had been ten years ago now. Even the eldest only half-remembered the stories their parents told of that day. How the ground had shaken, how the sky had split with flashes of light, and how cacophonous sound roared throughout the lands before going silent.

The troupe played places like this on purpose: small enough that no one asked many questions, poor enough that no one could afford to turn away whatever entertainment came waltzing through. And the further from the capital, the better. At least for me.

By the time the tent went up, half the village had turned out. Setting up was quick work for hands that had done it a hundred times over. Up front, the children sat cross-legged in a restless little huddle, close enough to smell the oil already burning as the sun dipped beneath the horizon. Behind them, parents drifted in with arms crossed and faces that hadn’t yet decided if this was worth the walk. The elderly, though, grinned just as openly as the children did—free, at their age, from having to wonder whether any of it was worth someone else’s while.

“Gather close, good people!”

Ama slipped into the rest of his rehearsed lines, working the crowd like the showman he was, voice pitched to carry through the dusk. His warm, chocolate-brown eyes sparkled in the lanternlight as he opened his arms. He was no stranger to storytelling.

“Tonight, we’ll show you wonders even the capital hasn’t seen!”

The rest of us waited behind the flaps, whispering among ourselves and fumbling with props before slipping out the moment a stage name was called. A couple of them clapped me on the shoulder on their way past. No words, no wishes for luck, as they’d learned that it only made my hands feel heavier.

Through the gap in the canvas, I could make out shapes moving quickly—the tumblers and acrobats had gone out first. Because we were constantly on the move, our acts never had to change, so I could follow the whole routine by ear: keeping count of each gasp from the crowd, then the audible relief that followed. The same cues drawing the same cheers every single time.

Then went the fire dancers, six or seven of them, moving to a tight, intimate rhythm that held the adults’ attention more than it did the children’s. Then the fire-eaters, bursts of orange flame devouring the darkness as the children screamed—the delighted kind. The whole show always seemed to speed up toward the end, or maybe it only felt that way the closer it got to my turn. My hands clenched tighter, throbbing as they tried to remember how I moved during practice earlier that day. Split calluses? I could’ve sworn I only put in a couple extra swings.

I closed my eyes, long enough to run through the three tricks in my head, from start to finish. Nothing new. I refused to take on anything else, not when I was still ironing out the details of the three I already had. A memory flickered for a half-second: my cadenza answering the way it used to, my body moving in swift, unbroken lines, my mind quiet the way it hadn’t been in years.

Of course this was nothing compared to what I used to do, but I’d practice these every night, until I could do it blind. I would be a fraud of a swordsman if I made a mistake. The thought alone sent a cold prickle down my neck, my stomach twisting right behind it.

“And now,” Ama began, dropping into a tense but excited growl, “give it up for a real knight of the old kingdom, back from the dead to show you his blade!”

I was most definitely not back from the dead. Technically, most royal knights would have answered to me.

I opened my eyes and reached for my mask. Plain, lacquered wood that left my face blank.

I went out into the firelight, the warmth embracing me as my fingers tightened around the grip of my sword.

“Our knight here isn’t too popular with the rest of the troupe,” Ama teased somewhere on my left, “on account of him making the rest of us look untalented!”

On cue, dramatic groans rippled through the crowd: three or four of ours playing wounded pride, who had sneaked in late enough that no one realized they weren’t actually locals.

That was the signal, amid the fires snapping and laughter rising. I heard something leaving someone’s hand with the unmistakable, uneven flutter of bruised fruit. Different from the whistle of a sharpened edge, or the dull weight of a fist.

My sword was already moving, and my wrists turned exactly where they needed to be, to meet the fruit dead center. It came apart in two clean halves before hitting the ground with a thud. Second toss. Third. Fourth. Without another breath, I carved through the whole barrage, never letting a single drop of juice find my clothes. I couldn’t remember what missing even felt like anymore.

That was exactly the whole point of never trying anything else.

I caught one in my mouth by the end of it. Out of habit more than showmanship, and sickly sweet. The crowd laughed, surprised by it every single time.

“Now,” Ama savored the hush he had drawn out of the crowd, “for something with a bit more nerve.”

A hand tapped my shoulder and turned me gently. Twenty paces out, she’d already be standing with the board braced flat against her chest.

Honestly? I hated this trick. If I messed up, it was someone else’s price to pay. Even after months of this, I could still hear the edge in her breathing, from whatever nerves remained.

I let my blade loose on her exhale.

First the gasp, sharp and short, then the clapping. The crowd’s reaction was clearly relief dressed up nicely as applause.

“And now,” Ama said, brandishing a small pouch made of animal skin, “the finish.”

By then, heat had gathered in the thin blade, humming against my skin. I pressed the edge to the fuse coiled at the pouch’s mouth in Ama’s hands.

It was filled with what Ama called sparkling sand, something the Southern quarrymen dug out of the vein-rock and refined until it was a fine powder that glittered with pride. I never quite believed that was the whole story. He had a way of simplifying things when he explained them to me, as if he was exasperated by explanations.

The fuse caught aflame with a hiss, and before the flame could crawl any further, Ama hurled the pouch skyward—a throw with far more strength behind it than his frame ever let on, and gone before the crowd even had time to look up.

For half a heartbeat, I wanted to tear off my mask just to see what would happen. Odds were good no one here would even recognize my face underneath—after all, ten years buries most faces, even ones that used to matter. But good odds weren’t the same as no risk, and a former hero gambling his life on a coin flip, in front of strangers who’d talk long after the tent packed up, was exactly the kind of detail I didn’t want finding its way to the capital.

The sound came before the light. Dozens of loud cracks that stacked on top of each other, some snapping close, others rolling out low like a dragon clearing its throat. It felt like the night itself flinched in response. The heat brushed my face, and my heart hammered white-hot somewhere behind my ribs.

I bowed the way I always did.

---

Empty stomachs and colder air stop a crowd from lingering, and within a few minutes the square had thinned to the troupe, some stragglers, and the last curling threads of lantern smoke.

I peeled off my mask, no reason to keep it on a second longer than the act demanded. My eyes adjusted to the fire first, then night, noticing the darker shapes of the tent poles and houses against a sky that had taken on the color of a bruise. I walked far out past the last wagon, further than I usually let myself, until the grass went knee-high and untrampled and the trees were close enough to touch.

I hadn’t stayed for the usual round of cheers and tired jokes. I stood for a while, breathing air that didn’t smell like oil and sweat, listening to the troupe get quieter behind me. Laughter, cheerful humming, the occasional clink of glass… performers who were content with themselves. I used to be better at faking it, and on most nights I still managed. Tonight, for some reason, the sound of them enjoying themselves made something in my chest pull tight instead. I just couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed like that with anyone who actually knew who I was.

We used to laugh like that too, once, before any of us had learned what the others were capable of.

The crickets had stopped, I noted.

Grass, disturbed, but not by the wind. A slow, deliberate rhythm—and not a new one, either. It had followed me for a while now, but I’d mistaken it for nothing. Someone walking like they’d practiced walking quietly, and had practiced enough to almost get it right.

Almost.

And then an arm was around my throat, sudden and sure, and something small and cold pressed just beneath my jaw. My hand reached for a hilt that wasn’t there before I could stop it—reached, and found nothing, because my sword was back with the wagons where I’d left it. Apparently not all habits stuck around, even the ones that used to keep me alive. I’d have laughed at myself, if laughing had seemed like the right thing to do with a knife where it was.

“Don’t,” she said. A young voice I didn’t recognize.

“You’re the knight,” she continued. Not quite a question. “From the act. ‘Back from the dead,’ the showman said.”

“That’s marketing,” I said, as flat and bored as I could manage with a blade at my throat. “I’m a fire-breather and these scars are from messing up.”

“You didn’t miss once tonight. With the sword. Not the fruit, not the plank, not the fuse. I watched the whole thing.”

“I’m very good at what I do.”

The knife pressed a fraction closer, but in a way that told me this wasn’t something she was used to. “Tell me the truth,” she demanded. In the dark, but I’d have guessed that she had on a scowl that did a bad job of hiding nerves. “Are you really one of them? One of the old kingdom’s knights?”

“Which kingdom?”

The knife twitched against my skin. “You know which one. The one that fell. No more jokes.”

I opened my mouth to argue and, wisely, didn’t.

“You know as well as I do that the Royal Knights of Descantor don’t exist anymore,” I said instead, “not since the Church had made sure of it.”

It was a dead title that no longer meant anything—why was she still hunting one, out here, in the outskirts of Solemarch, in the dark, with a small blade that any competent knight could disarm?

“I don’t think I’m the one you’re looking for,” I offered.

She didn’t answer right away. The silence that followed had an uncomfortable weight to it I didn’t like. Somewhere behind us, the last of the troupe’s laughter had gone quiet too, swallowed by distance or by something else.

“You’re just a fake,” she said finally. Quieter this time. Less like an accusation, more like disappointment.

“That’s right.”

“Then explain the fire magic.” Her voice caught on the last word. “And the tricks. Nobody does that blind. Nobody does that at all, unless they’ve had a sword put in their hand before they could walk.”

I didn’t have a clean answer for that one. Mostly because she wasn’t wrong.

Then, deep within the forest, a sound stuck out sorely from the crickets and the night breeze rustling through the leaves.

Hoofbeats.

The knife at my throat didn’t move. But the arm behind it went rigid, and her breathing quickened, hot against the back of my neck.

“That’s not for you,” she murmured.

It didn’t sound like a guess.