William: A Path Leading into Shadows

Night had long since fallen over Sleepinwood. The village slept. The shutters were closed, the lanterns extinguished, the chimneys nearly all gone cold. Only the wind moved through the empty alleys, dragging a thin dusting of snow from one roof to another, and the silence was so dense that, now and then, one could hear the solitary crack of a branch somewhere deep in the forest.
The orphanage was sleeping too. Titis had put all the children to bed early, because she needed the house to fall quiet. Pally's departure had left something in the walls that no one knew how to name.
An absence that asked not to be consoled, only respected. The children had eaten in silence. The youngest had fallen asleep clutching their sheets against them. No one had asked for a story.
On the first floor, in the middle bedroom, William was not sleeping.
His room was the smallest, because it was meant for one person, where the other rooms were shared by two.

Inside, everything was in its place. Not a single belonging left lying about. Not a crease on the coverlet that was not his own. On the one shelf against the wall, objects carefully aligned — a copper compass, a small black leather notebook tied with a thong, an inked quill, three new candles set in order from tallest to shortest, a polished black stone he liked to hold in his palm when he was thinking.
At the foot of the bed, a chest, locked. The key hung from a chain around his neck, beneath his shirt. He never parted from it.
The window was ajar. The cold crept in through the gap, and William let it in because he preferred being cold to being warm. The cold helped him think. Warmth put him to sleep.

William sat on the floor, his back against the frame of his bed, one leg bent, the other stretched stiff in front of him. On the floorboards, beside his right thigh, a small oil lantern gave off a yellow, flickering light that cast his shadow, outsized and distorted, against the wall to his left.

In his left hand, he held one of his daggers, lying flat across his palm. He was looking at it. The sapphire in the pommel caught the lantern light and diffused it into a single blue point that pulsed softly, as though the stone were breathing.
In his right hand, the other dagger. He raised it. He lowered it. And the tip drove into the floorboards between his legs, sharply, in the same spot each time. A little hole had formed in the wood, and it grew larger with every strike. Thunk. Pause. Thunk. Pause. Thunk.
He no longer even noticed it. His right hand was carrying out the motion on its own while his head, for its part, was somewhere else.

His head was a labyrinth.

Pally had left that morning. Pally, the boy he had never liked. Pally, who took pleasure in making a fool of him whenever he could. Pally, who laughed loud in the courtyard, who slammed every door he walked through, who had no idea what it meant to need quiet!

William clicked his tongue as he always did — this Pally was everything William detested.

But this same Pally, who had saved his life against the wolves...

William closed his eyes.
The memory came back without his summoning it. The beast's muzzle inches from his throat. The scalding drool. His arms giving out. The cold certainty that he was going to die there, in the snow, without having accomplished what he had sworn to live for. And then the flame. The outstretched hand. That hand he had taken because there was no other choice left.

Thunk.

And later, in the cabin, faced with the creature, he had fled.
He knew it. He had known it from the exact moment his legs had decided for him. He had shouted RUN thinking it was an act of courage, thinking he was saving everyone by raising the alarm, thinking the others would do as he had done. He had run, convincing himself he was making the right choice. And then he had heard Pally's cry behind him, and he had known, in that instant, that he had saved no one. That he had merely fled.

Thunk.

Pally had been bitten. Pally should have died. Pally had survived. And now Pally was riding toward Faithstone with two Paladins of the realm to become a Paladin himself, because he carried something in his blood that no one understood, something that could save humanity. Pally, who had never opened a book in his whole life. Pally, who didn't know how to hold a map. Pally, who did his sums on his fingers. Pally was going to become the hope of an entire people.

And he, William, was staying here. With the other orphans. With Titis, who cried while cooking. With Ellendia, who no longer spoke. With Merwinn and his crestfallen air, lying about all day doing nothing.
Just him, and his twisted shadow on the wall. Just him, and his hole in the floorboards.

Thunk.

He opened his eyes again. His right hand lifted the dagger once more. Drove it in. The hole widened by a millimetre. His eyes were growing damp.

A surge rose in him. A muffled rage, one that had no name, no precise object, rising simply because it had to rise. A rage at Pally who was leaving. A rage at himself who was staying. A rage at this night of horror that would not end, at this too-small room, at this too-quiet town, at those parents who...
And the memory took him from behind.
He didn't want it. He never called it up. But tonight was different, because he had let his guard down, because the dagger was driving its rhythm into the wood and the silence of the house was too vast, and the memory came looking for him, and William could not defend himself.
He closed his eyes.
And he was nine years old again.

---

The house was large. It had always been. But that evening, for the first time in his life, it had seemed immense to him — not large the way a house in which one grows up is large, but immense the way a place one no longer knows is immense. The chandeliers were dark. The paintings in the great corridor, which he passed every day without looking at, suddenly stared down at him from their gilded frames as if they knew something he did not.
He was in the great entrance hall, crouched behind the sideboard, hands clamped to his ears. But his ears were no longer enough. The noise passed through his fingers. It passed through his bones. It was everywhere.
Outside, at the gate, the crowd was shouting.
A crowd from all over the town. Men he knew. The butcher. The blacksmith. The young stable boy who brought them oats, the very one who teased him with jokes when he came through the yard. All of them. And their voices rose together into a single mass of sound, hysterical, swollen with fear and with something else he did not yet know how to name.

Bring them out! Bring them out to us! They have the plague! They brought it here!
Burn them before they burn us!
For our children! FOR OUR CHILDREN!

The torches lit the fanlight above the door, and the light danced on the walls of the entrance hall as though the house itself had caught fire. William could hear the wood of the gate cracking under the weight of bodies pressing against it.
His parents were upstairs. He didn't know exactly where. He had run to hide as soon as the noise had begun, and no one had had time to tell him what to do. He was not crying. Not yet. He was beyond tears. His whole nine-year-old body had been transformed into a small trembling thing that was trying to become invisible behind a piece of furniture.
Footsteps in the hallway. Quick. Not the footsteps of the crowd. The footsteps of someone searching.
"Master William? Master William, where are you?"
The voice was trembling. It never usually trembled. But it was his voice all the same.
"Alfred..." William breathed.
The butler heard him. He burst into the entrance hall, his uniform in disarray for the first time in all the years William had known him, his tie half undone, his grey hair wild. He carried a pack over one shoulder and another smaller bag clutched against his chest. When he saw William behind the sideboard, he stopped dead, and his face broke for a fraction of a second before he composed himself again.

"Master William, at last I have found you!"
He knelt in front of him. His hands seized the boy's shoulders, firm and trembling at once.
"We must leave quickly, follow me, I beg you, quickly!"
"Alfred, my parents..."
"Follow me, Master William."
"But my parents, they are..."
"FOLLOW ME."

The butler had never raised his voice at him in all his life. Not once. That voice — strangled, pleading, hard — made William understand, without need of further explanation, that something was happening against which he could do nothing.
He took the hand Alfred held out to him. And he ran.
They passed through the dark kitchen, the laundry room, the room where the preserves were kept. Alfred knew the house like the back of his hand — he had served in it for thirty years, since before William was born. He chose the corridors, skirted the windows, led them through the shadowy areas. When they reached the back door that opened onto the kitchen garden, he stopped and pulled two cloaks from the pack over his shoulder.

"Put this on, Master William. And pull the hood well down over your face. Whatever happens, do not lift it."
It was a dark cloak, heavy, with a large hood trimmed in a thicker fabric that fell well over the eyes. William slipped it on. Alfred put on his own. They looked now like two shadows that had nothing more to do with the house of a notable and his servant.

"We're going out the back. Don't let go of my hand. If we are separated, you run toward the stables. There is a cart there. You wait for me. Understood?"
"Understood."
Alfred placed his hand on the bolt. He hesitated for a second. Then he opened the door.

The cold struck them in the face. And something else, too. A light.
The sky above the town was no longer the sky. It was a red and black vault, crossed by embers that rose from the streets like inverted stars, spiralling up into the night before going out. The crowd's torches were so numerous that they had created their own firmament, closer, hotter, more malevolent, which covered the real sky. Shadows danced on the snow of the kitchen garden as though they were looking for something to burn.
William stopped dead. Alfred tugged at his hand.
"Come on, Master William. Come on, I beg you."

They skirted the house along the east side, keeping close to the garden wall, crouched behind the boxwood hedge. The crowd was gathered chiefly in front of the gate, but there were clusters of men everywhere, circling around, trying to get in through the side windows. A pane shattered on the first floor.
Alfred quickened his pace. He pulled William by the hand so hard that the boy felt his shoulder was about to come apart.
They emerged at the corner of the house. And William saw.
The square in front of the gate of their own home had been turned into a public square. Men had erected a gallows with a speed that said they had prepared it in advance. Not an improvised gallows with a rope thrown over a branch. A real gallows, of squared timber, set up in the middle of the courtyard one crossed to come inside. The gallows of their own house, on their own land, before their own door.
And standing on the platform, two silhouettes.
William recognised the bodies. He recognised the hair. He recognised the faces.
It was his father and his mother.

His parents stood side by side, hands bound behind their backs, necks bare, exposed to the howling crowd. They did not struggle. They did not cry out. They lowered their heads, as though they had already accepted what was about to happen, as though they did not want to see the faces of the men they had known all their lives clamouring for their death.
William stopped. His whole body stopped. His legs refused to obey.
"Master William," Alfred hissed. "No. NO. Keep going."
But William could not. He was looking at his parents. He was looking at his father, who was the calmest man he knew, who had been teaching him to read since he was five in the study, whose deep voice had sung him lullabies when he was smaller. He was looking at his mother, who always smiled a little to one side, who made him compresses when he had a fever, who slipped him sweets in secret during deportment lessons. And above all he remembered the love they had for each other, so beautiful, so pure, and so loyal.
And at that exact moment, as though he had sensed something through the night, through the crowd, through the torches, his father slowly raised his head.
He searched. His eyes swept the shadows around the square. He was looking for something. William understood with a muffled horror that his father was looking for his face in the crowd. He was trying to find out whether his son was still alive, still somewhere, watching.
And his father found him.

Their eyes met through the flames.
William's father opened his mouth slightly, as though he were about to say something, then he said nothing. He only gave a small movement of the head, a tiny nod, a motion that could mean only one thing to William: I see you. You are there. I am at peace.
His mother, who had not moved, felt her husband's gesture. She followed his gaze. And when she too found William through the crowd, her face changed.
It was not joy. It was not relief, not exactly. It was something deeper and more shattering. She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second. She let a silent tear fall. And when she opened her eyes again, she was looking at her son with a love so total, so naked, that it reached William through everything — through the distance, through the torches, through the crowd that was insulting them — as though there were nothing else in the world but that gaze.

Then his parents looked at each other.
They were still standing on the gallows. The executioners were right behind them, hands on the levers. The crowd was shouting DO IT, DO IT. And they, in the midst of all of it, looked at each other.
William saw in that look everything he had always seen in them and had never truly understood. That old tenderness. That complicity which did without words. That love which did not strut. His mother smiled. Not at the crowd. At her husband. The way one smiles at someone with whom one has shared a whole life, and to whom one says: I am glad it was with you, right to the end. His father returned that gentle smile. The same one.

William felt something tear inside him. He took a step forward. He could not leave them. He had to go. He had to shout. He had to run to them and tell the crowd they were mistaken, that these were his parents, that his parents were not sick, that his parents...
Alfred caught him and held him against him.
"No, Master William. No. There is nothing you can do. Forgive me. Forgive me."
The butler pressed the child's head against his shoulder, his hand on his skull, so that he would see no more. But William did not need to see in order to hear. The lever being pulled. The clap of the wood. The silence a crowd makes all at once when it has got what it wanted. There was no cry from his parents. They had not cried out.
Alfred waited two seconds. Then he hoisted William onto his hip and ran.
Before they vanished around the corner of the stables, William, over the butler's shoulder, saw something else.
He saw, standing back from the side of the platform, a man he had never seen in the town.

This man was not shouting. This man was not brandishing a torch. This man stood there, motionless, his hands folded in front of him, and watched the execution with a quiet gravity that resembled nothing else in that crowd. He wore armour that glittered beneath the torches, white and silver, wrought in a way no ordinary soldier's armour was. A long dark cloak fell from his shoulders. His hair was white, long, loose on the pauldrons, and his face was hollow, austere, marked by the years — the face of a judge, not the face of a peasant.
He said nothing. He watched. And around him, two paces away, two other men in simpler armour stood like guards.
The white-haired man nodded slowly toward the executioner. An approval. A seal.
Then his eyes rose. And William, over the shoulder of Alfred as he ran, met his gaze for a fraction of a second.
The man did not move. Did not react. Did not alert anyone. He merely looked at the child being carried off into the night, and William felt something in that gaze, something that was not quite indifference, and not quite hatred either. It was a glacial calm, the calm of someone for whom what was happening there was simply a decision already made, a matter closed.
Then Alfred turned the corner and the man was gone.

The cart was waiting for them behind the stables, already hitched. Alfred must have prepared it before coming to fetch William. A hooded driver sat on the front bench, reins in hand, silent as though he had always been there. Alfred signalled to William to climb into the back. He climbed up after him, drew the oilcloth closed behind them, and rapped twice with his fist on the forward panel. The horse sprang off without a word from the driver, and the night swallowed them.
They rolled on. For a long time. Along paths William did not recognise, through woods he had never seen, beneath a veiled moon. The town receded behind them, the howling too, and soon there was nothing but the steady clatter of hooves on the frozen ground and the creak of the wheels.
William, huddled against Alfred, said nothing. He cried without a sound. His tears fell on the butler's coat and the cloth drank them up. Alfred, for his part, looked straight ahead and did not speak. Once, he raised his hand and laid it on William's nape, without looking at him. That was all he did. But that hand stayed there a long while.
After what seemed like hours, when they were far enough for the night around them to have become a true silent night again, Alfred rapped his fist three times on the forward panel. The driver pulled on the reins and halted the cart at the edge of a clearing. Alfred jumped to the ground. He helped William down in turn. He opened the small bag he had kept against him throughout the journey.
He drew from it two daggers, wrapped in a cloth of black velvet.
William, his face swollen and his eyes red, raised his head.
Alfred knelt before him and slowly unrolled the cloth. The daggers appeared in the moonlight.
They were long, tapering, a black so deep it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Across their surface, violet and blue glimmers rippled as though the blades were liquid. The quillons were finely carved, ornamented with ancient runes William could not read. The grips were wrapped in black leather woven with silver thread. And at the pommel of each, a stone — an amethyst for one, a sapphire for the other — that seemed to glow from within with a held, contained light, like a distant heartbeat.
William was no longer moving. He was no longer even crying. He was looking at the daggers the way one looks at something one has always known without knowing it.
"Master William," Alfred said softly. His voice had cracked at times during the journey, and he could barely master it now. "These daggers belonged to your parents."
William raised his eyes to him. Alfred held his gaze.
"Your parents... your parents were not merely what the town knew of them. They were not what they seemed. They served interests greater than this village, Master William. They worked in the shadows, for whoever paid them, and sometimes for their own cause. They were spies. Independent ones. One of the finest pairs I have known in forty years in their service."
He paused. He looked at the daggers one last time before holding them out to William.
"These blades were their tool. The amethyst for your mother. The sapphire for your father. They never parted from them on a mission. They entrusted them to me two days ago. Before all of this began. As though they had known." He closed his eyes. "As though they had known."
He opened his eyes again and held out the daggers.
"They are yours now."
William held out his hands. They were still small. But when he closed his fingers around the grips, the leather fit his palms perfectly. He did not know why. He only knew that these objects, at that exact instant, were the last thing in the world that tied him to his parents. That without them, he would have nothing of them left.
He looked at them. For a long time. The moon reflected on the black blades and made the violet and blue glimmers dance across his own face.
Alfred waited for him to look up. Then he rose slowly and laid a hand on his shoulder.
"Master William. Listen to me carefully."
William sheathed his daggers and raised his head.
"I cannot go with you any further tonight."
He felt William's hand clutch at his sleeve, a reflex the child could not hold back. Alfred laid his other hand over it, firmly.
"There is a matter. A matter that belonged to your parents, and that they did not have time to finish. I must see it through in their place. It is what they would have wanted. If I do not do it tonight, it will be too late, and what they began will be lost. Do you understand?"
William understood nothing. But he nodded because he was being asked to.
"The driver will take you. He knows the road. He knows where to leave you. There is a village several days' journey to the south-east of here, far from the town, where no one will know you or come looking for you. An orphanage will take you in. You will be safe there."
"What is it called?" William asked. His voice came out rough.
Alfred hesitated for a second. Then he said, very softly:
"Sleepinwood."
He tightened his grip on the child's shoulder.
"I do not know whether I shall ever come back, Master William. If I come back, I shall find you. If I do not come back, it will be because what I am trying to do has not succeeded, and you must not weep for me: I shall have done it with my eyes open." He paused. "What I can promise you is this: no one will know where you are. No one will find you through me. You are now the last thing your parents have left in this world. Protect it."
William felt an enormous lump form in his throat. He wanted to ask what matter? He wanted to ask is it because of that white-haired man? He wanted to ask did my parents know they were going to die? He wanted to ask a hundred things. But Alfred no longer had the time, he could see it in his face — the butler was already looking toward the road, his mind already elsewhere, already gone on to what he had to do.
William nodded once. Just once.
Alfred laid his hand on the child's cheek, a gesture he had never made in twelve years of service to the family. Then he rose, returned the daggers to their velvet, slid them into the small bag, which he handed to William. He helped him back up into the cart. He drew the oilcloth closed.
He went over to the driver and said three words to him in a low voice:
"The Sleepinwood orphanage."
The driver inclined his head without a word.
He slapped the horse's flank twice. The cart lurched forward.
William watched Alfred's silhouette shrink behind him in the night, motionless in the middle of the clearing, his hands crossed behind his back, in that dignified posture he had always held even when serving tea. And as the cart sank into the woods, that silhouette stood out one last time against the veiled moon, and then vanished.
William never saw him again.
He clutched the little velvet bag against his chest. Inside, the two daggers pulsed gently, like sleeping hearts.
The cart rolled on. For hours. For days. One village, then another. A coach-house where the driver changed horses without a word. An inn where he brought him bread and soup without looking at him. William ate. Slept. Cried. His tears eventually ran dry somewhere between the third and fourth day. When he raised his head, he had understood that he would shed no more, not for a while.
At the end of the journey, the cart stopped in front of a large stone building at the entrance of a village William had never heard of. The driver got down, knocked at the door, exchanged a few words in a low voice with a plump woman in an apron who had come to open it. Then he came back to the cart, opened the oilcloth, and signalled to William to climb down.
William got down, the little bag held tight against his chest.
The driver placed a brief hand on his head, without a word, then climbed back onto his bench and drove off. William never saw his face.
He turned toward the building. The woman in the apron was watching him from the threshold, her hands folded over her belly. She had a round face, red cheeks, and eyes that seemed already to have seen everything there was to see of the misery of children.
"Come inside, little one," she said softly. "You must be hungry."
William took a step toward her.
From that moment on, he was simply called William. No more family name. No more house. No more Alfred. Nothing at all. Just a nine-year-old boy with a little velvet bag that held two daggers and the memory of a crowd.
From that moment, and throughout all the years that followed at the Sleepinwood orphanage, William never parted from his daggers. They slept under his pillow. They went with him into the yard. They were always on him, beneath his tunic, tucked in his belt, strapped to his thigh. He would draw them out when he was alone and practise handling them in the attic or in the forest. He had no one to show them to. He had no one to explain them to. They were his. They were for him.

---
William opened his eyes again in his bedroom.
The lantern on the floor was still flickering. The hole in the floorboards had widened further without his noticing. His right hand was gripping the handle of the dagger with such force that his knuckles were white.
He unclenched his fingers. The dagger slipped and lodged upright in the wood, standing there like a tree that had been driven in.
That man.
That white-haired man.
That man in his silver armour gleaming above the gallows.
William had thought of him for years. At the orphanage, in his bed, in those first weeks, he had seen him again every night as he fell asleep. Then he had learned to put him away somewhere, in a corner of his mind. He had never known who he was. He had never had anything to go on. No one in the town could have helped him — half the men had been on the square that night, and the other half had preferred to look away.

But this morning, in the headmistress's room, he had listened to Elric speak.
He had listened to Elric's deep voice, he had looked at his armour, he had observed the deference with which even Braum bowed before him. He had seen Daemon, younger, leaner, but wearing the same attire, the same contained authority. He had understood that these two were not guards, not ordinary soldiers, but men belonging to an Order, to an institution, to something greater than a kingdom.
And suddenly, the image of the white-haired man, which had been sleeping in a corner of his head for eighteen months, had begun to line up exactly with the silhouette of Elric. Not the same man. Not the same man at all — the other had been older, more austere, probably higher placed. But the same category. The same kind. The same belonging.
The man who had nodded his approval at his parents' execution wore the same armour as Elric.

He was a Paladin.

Not Elric. Someone else. Someone higher placed, perhaps far higher placed, perhaps even the head of their Order. How to know? William did not know. He had always lacked information. That was the problem.

Thunk.

He had driven in the left-hand dagger this time. The right one still stood upright between his legs. The left had planted itself without his thinking about it, four inches from the first.
His parents had not been killed by mistake.
That was the thought he had been trying to hold at a distance since morning, and that he could no longer hold at a distance now. For eight years, he had told himself the same story so that he could go on breathing: the plague had inspired fear, the town had panicked, his parents had been innocent victims of a crowd gone mad. It had been terrible, it had been unjust, it had been unforgivable, but it was a tragedy. An accident. A monstrous error caused by ignorance.
But there had always been that image which did not fit. The white-haired man to the side of the platform, nodding. Granting permission. That man had not been a peasant. That man had not been afraid. That man had known exactly what he was doing and he had chosen to do it.

And a Paladin, William now knew thanks to Elric, was a man who had the means to tell the difference between a true infected and an innocent. A Paladin could approach a creature, identify it, study it. A Paladin did not need the town's fear to distinguish the sick from the healthy. If a Paladin had let the crowd hang his parents saying they had the plague, it was because he knew they did not have it.
It was because he knew, and because hanging them was precisely what he wanted.
His parents had not died by mistake.
His parents had been murdered.

Thunk.

William drove the blade in again, harder. The wood cracked around the steel.
Why? Why would a high-ranking Paladin have two spies hanged in a small forgotten town, using the crowd as cover, hiding behind the fear of plague?
He was missing every piece of the puzzle. Every one. William knew nothing of his parents' missions, nothing of their employers, nothing of what they might have discovered, nothing of the interests they might have disturbed. He did not even know whether the white-haired man had been the one behind it or only an enforcer.
He knew nothing.
And it was unbearable.

Thunk.

He had no choice.
He had spent eight years waiting for a certainty he could not put into words. That morning, listening to Elric, the certainty had come. And now that it was there, he could no longer stay in that room. He could no longer stay in that village. Pally had left for Faithstone to become a Paladin. The order that had ordered his parents' death. William would leave as well. But in another direction. Along another path.
He would discover who had given the order. He would discover why. And he would kill him.
He was not yet ten, had not yet the means, not yet the information. But he had his daggers. And he had his whole life ahead of him to learn.

Thunk.

He stood up.
He did what he had always known he would do, that night or another. He took the rucksack he had kept ready under his bed for three years — food for five days, a flint, a folded blanket, a little leather notebook and his quill, a waterskin, two candles. He pulled a thick cloak on over his tunic. He slipped his two daggers into the leather sheaths fastened to his belt. He unhooked the chain at his neck, opened the chest at the foot of the bed, took from it a leather purse containing the few coins he had saved from errands, and slipped it into his pack.
He stopped in the middle of the room. He looked around him one last time. The made bed. The aligned shelf. The hole in the floorboards.
He would not leave a note. No one was waiting for him. No one would search for him with the same fury that Merwinn would have searched for Pally. Except one person... Titis.
He felt a pang in his heart. Titis was the only one who had been a grandmother to all the children here, and he knew it. He took his quill from his pack, and set it on the bedside table. Titis knew that he was always asking her for ink to write down his reflections. She would understand that it was for her.
He blew out the lantern. The room fell into darkness.
He opened the window, swung his leg over the sill, climbed down the drainpipe he had assessed dozens of times while imagining this moment without ever really believing in it. His feet touched the snow of the kitchen garden without a sound.
He set off toward the southern edge of the village, keeping to the walls.

---

The night was deep. The moon carved the rooftops with a white edge. William walked in the shadows, keeping to the alleys that did not cross Braum's rounds. He made no sound. No one saw him. He passed the shuttered tavern, Benz's house, the dark shop where one day he had bought a rope to practise tying knots. He did not stop anywhere.
He left the village by the north gate, the road that led to the suspension bridge above the waterfall, different from the one Pally had taken with the Paladins.
William crossed the arch without slowing.
He took the north-east path, the one that led through the Sleeping Woods toward the river. He did not know exactly where he was going. He knew only that he had to get out of Sleepinwood, reach a larger road, find a town he did not know, start learning things. He had a few coins. He could read. He could observe. He would find his way.
He walked for an hour, perhaps more, through the dark forest. The trees creaked around him in the cold. An owl hooted somewhere, far off. The snow muffled his steps. He walked without fear — he had survived more wolves, more zombies, more witches than most of the adults of this world, and he was an orphan by his own will as much as by his history. He had passed beyond fear a long time ago.
He came to a place where the path ran alongside a waterfall he knew by reputation. The wooden bridge built to cross it from above rose a few paces ahead, barely visible in the gloom. William slowed instinctively. The bridge was the most exposed point of the road. If there were to be a bad moment in this forest, it would be there.
He was right.
A silhouette detached itself from the trunk of a tree to his right. Then another, further off, to his left. Then a third, which came down from the bridge itself, landing lightly on the path. They converged on him without running, without shouting, with the calm slowness of predators who know the prey has nowhere to go.
William counted. Five. Maybe six. He could not see everything in the dark. They were all hooded, their faces in shadow, and he saw the metallic glint of several short blades shining in the night. Knives. Not soldiers' weapons. Bandits' weapons.
"Well, well," said one of them in a drawling voice. "A little wanderer."
William did not answer. His hand settled naturally on the hilt of one of his daggers, and his heart, which he had thought hard as stone, began to pound too fast in his chest. Stay calm. Stay calm. Count. There were six of them. He was sure of it now. Six grown men, armed, against a ten-year-old boy in an oversized cloak.
One of them stepped forward. He was tall, broad-shouldered. He had a scar that ran from his temple to his jaw, barely visible beneath the hood.
"You all alone, kid? At this hour?"
William stayed silent.
"That means yes, that does." The man sneered. He turned to his companions. "We've got a little adventurer out on the road, boys."
The others sneered in their turn. One of them circled around William from behind. The circle closed. William felt his back prickle — there was someone behind him now, and he could not see who.
"We'll ask you nicely," the tall one continued. "Your pack. Your purse. And whatever you've got of value on you. You put it all on the ground, you turn around, and you go. You sleep in your little village tonight, and tomorrow morning you tell yourself you were lucky. All right?"
William swallowed. His right hand was still on the dagger. Do not draw the dagger. Not yet. Do not give him the excuse. Put down the pack. Put down the purse. Keep the daggers. He had rehearsed this situation in his head dozens of times — not quite this one, but situations like it. Never resist as long as what is being demanded is replaceable. Everything in the pack was replaceable.
He slowly unhooked the pack from his shoulder. He set it on the ground in front of him.
"Good boy," said the tall one. "The purse."
William took the leather purse out from inside the pack. He held it out. The man took it. He weighed it in his hand.
"Not much, but it'll do for the night. Now the rest."
"That's all I have," William said. His voice came out steadier than he would have expected.
The man stepped forward. His hand, huge, caught William's collar and lifted him half off the ground. The man's face drew close. He smelled of drink and sweat.
"I said the rest."
One of the other bandits was rifling through the pack on the ground. He pulled out the blanket, threw it aside. The waterskin, which he kept. The flint. And then he paused. He had found something else.
He stood up and came to show his chief. In his hand, he held one of the daggers — the one with the sapphire. William, lifted off the ground, felt the blood leave his face. How. He had two sheaths at his belt. He had always had two sheaths. The bandit behind him must have drawn one of them while his attention was on the tall one in front, how did I not feel that, how did I not feel it.
"Oho," said the tall one. He took the dagger. He turned it in the moonlight. The sapphire caught a glint. "Now what have we here?"
William stopped breathing.
"That's fine craftsmanship, that is." The man whistled softly through his teeth. "Real fine craftsmanship. Who did you steal it from, boy?"
"Give it back."
His voice came out, low, contained. Not a plea. Not a shout. Just three words. The tall one looked at him and frowned, as though he sensed something he did not quite understand.
"Calm down, kid. You're not old enough for that kind of toy." He turned to his men. "Come on, let's teach him his lesson and be off."
What followed, William did not really see. He felt it. The first blow, a fist in the belly, doubled his body over and knocked the wind out of him. The second, a knee to the jaw, sent him rolling into the snow. The third, a kick in the ribs, half-lifted him off the ground before he fell back.
He was trying to breathe but the air would not come in. His mouth tasted of iron. He could feel his ears ringing. Somewhere in the haze he could hear the men laughing and one of them saying see, we're having a bit of fun and another answering wait for me, I haven't had my turn. A fourth blow. A fifth. A boot sank into his flank and made him gasp with pain.
And through all of it — while his body received these blows, while his sight blurred, while he felt the snow against his cheek — one single thing was turning in his head.
The tall one was walking off with his dagger.
The tall one was walking off with his father's dagger.
The tall one was walking off with the last thing that remained of his father.
The tall one was walking off.
He did not know, what happened next. He did not know whether he began to scream or whether he had only thought it. He did not know whether the word that came out of his mouth was a word or a sound. All he knew was that his right hand, as though it had a life of its own, drew the amethyst dagger still at his belt, and that that dagger, at the exact instant he drew it, began to shine.
Not a reflection. Not a glint. A glow. The amethyst burned with a deep, luminous, tangible violet that suddenly lit the whole path around him. And at the same moment, ten metres away, on the dagger the tall one carried, the sapphire awoke — an identical intensity of blue, vibrating, answering the other like a call.
The two stones sought each other out. William felt it in his hand. He felt the amethyst pulling toward the sapphire, as though the two daggers were the two halves of one thing that had been separated by accident, and that the separation was unbearable to them.
The tall one, who had turned at the glow of his own blade, had time to widen his eyes.
And William shifted.
There was no movement. There was no dash. There was only a sound — a heavy, muffled sound, like the beat of a reversed drum, as though the air around him had been sucked all at once into a point — and William found himself instantly before the thief. His right hand completed its gesture, and the amethyst dagger sank into the man's belly up to the hilt.
The tall one opened his mouth. No sound came out. His eyes went from William to the dagger buried in his belly, and he staggered. The sapphire dagger slipped from his fingers.
William, half-crouched against him, reached out and caught the sapphire in mid-air before it touched the ground. The tall one fell to his knees, then onto his side, in silence. He would not rise again.
William stood up.
He had both daggers now. One in each hand. And around him, in the sudden silence of the forest, the five other bandits stared at him.
None of them moved. None of them breathed, perhaps. They had just seen a ten-year-old boy vanish from five metres away and reappear against their chief in less time than it takes to blink. And in the violet and blue glow that emanated from the daggers, William's face, white and bloodied, no longer had anything of a child's face about it.
One of them was the quickest to understand. He drew his knife and charged straight at him, howling.
William did not think. Something inside him already knew. He lifted the amethyst dagger and threw it — not toward the man who was charging, but behind him, over his shoulder. The dagger split the air, spinning, tracing a violet comet into the night, and buried itself in the trunk of a tree ten metres away.
And at the exact moment it lodged there, William shifted again.
The muffled sound. The sucked-in air. And he was behind the man who had charged, at his back, beside the tree where his dagger was still vibrating. The man, still running forward into empty air toward where William had stood a moment earlier, did not have time to understand. The sapphire dagger, in William's right hand, passed through his back between the shoulder blades.
Two. William was breathing in jerks. He did not know whether he was accomplishing something or whether he was going mad. But his hands, they knew.
One of the remaining bandits turned and tried to flee toward the bridge. William saw the movement out of the corner of his eye. He raised the amethyst dagger and threw it, straight this time, in the direction of the fugitive. The blade sank into his left shoulder blade.
Shift.
William reappeared just behind the man. He ripped the dagger from his back and drove it in again beneath the nape of his neck. The bandit fell face-down.
Three.
Three men were still standing. One of them let out a strangled cry and raised his hands flat in front of him.
"STOP!"
The voice came from the bandit who had hung back from the beginning. The one who had watched. The one who had not struck. The one who, when William's aura had changed a minute earlier, had been the only one to step back half a pace instead of laughing.
The other two froze. William, a dagger in each hand, blood on his face, violet and blue glimmers dancing around him, froze as well. He was looking at the man who had shouted. He could not see him clearly — the hood covered the upper part of his face — but he could make out spare features, dark eyes, and a bearing that was not that of the other bandits. An upright, balanced bearing, which spoke of another trade.
"Stop," the man repeated, more calmly. He raised both hands, palms open, in a sign of peace. Or of appraisal. William could not have said.
"You've just killed three of my men, kid."
William did not answer. His right hand was gripping the amethyst dagger so hard that he felt his own nails sinking into his palm through the handle.
"I don't know who you are," the man went on. "I don't know where you learned that trick. I don't even know if you know yourself what you've just done." He tilted his head slightly. "But what I do know is that I have never seen that before. And I've seen plenty of things in my life."
William was catching his breath with difficulty. He could feel his legs, burning with adrenaline a moment earlier, beginning to tremble. The reaction was coming. He could not afford to fall. Not in front of them.
"You've got potential, kid."
The word struck William like another blow. Potential. Alfred had said the same thing to him when he was nine and had been training himself to throw stones at targets.
The man slowly lowered his hands and took a step forward. No more.
"We are a guild. A brotherhood. We work under contract. We are not common bandits robbing travellers — those two," he indicated two of the bodies on the ground, "were recruits I was testing. At night, they had their fun. I let them. It served them as training." He gave a short dry laugh. "Plainly, they were not ready."
William said nothing. He was listening. His whole body was trembling, but his ears were wide open. Something in the man's voice — something measured, weighed, strategic — was catching hold of threads in William's mind that no one had caught hold of in a long time.
"You've nowhere to go tonight. That's why you're walking in this forest at this hour. Otherwise you'd be at home. Am I wrong?"
William lowered his eyes. He did not answer, but that silence was answer enough.
"Join us."
The man had said it simply, without solemnity, as though offering a meal to someone passing by.
"You will have a roof. You will have food. You will have companions who will not ask you where you come from. And we will train you. What you just did with those daggers," he indicated them with a jerk of his chin, "that is only a beginning. You have no idea what you can become with five years of training, kid. None."
William hesitated. He could feel all of Alfred's voices rising back up in him — trust no one, Master William, least of all those who offer you something for nothing. And then he also felt his own weariness, his ten-year-old body giving way, the blood running from his brow, the cold biting through the torn cloak, the night that would not end.
The man must have felt the hesitation. Because he added, after a calculated silence, one other thing. A single one.
"And we have information."
William raised his head.
"Information on peoples. On kingdoms. On orders. On men of power. Our brotherhood is everywhere, kid. We know things kings do not know. We sell information the way we sell deaths — to the highest bidder, or to the cleverest." He took another step forward. "If you are looking for someone, for example. Or if you are trying to understand something. You will find with us what you will find nowhere else."
William stayed motionless.
In his head, a single image. The white-haired man. Beside the platform. Nodding his head. Granting permission.
That man had a name. That man had a role. That man had a face that was walking about somewhere in the world and which someone, somewhere, knew what it was doing. Our brotherhood is everywhere. We know things the kings do not know.
William breathed in slowly. Then he straightened, as far as his bruised ribs allowed, and wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of his sleeve.
"When do we start?"
The man did not quite smile. But something in his eyes, beneath the hood, lit up.
"Right now," he said. "You're coming with us."
He gave a sign to his two last men. They drew nearer without a sound. One of them picked up William's pack from the ground and put it away without a word. The other leaned over the tall one's body, searched quickly, and straightened up again.
The chief turned toward the trees. He gestured toward the depths of the forest. Somewhere in the dark, a light flared briefly, then went out. A signal. An answer. Someone who had been waiting.
"Follow me," the man said.
William slowly slid his daggers back into their sheaths. The stones had ceased to glow. They had returned to their held, contained gleam, as though nothing had happened. But he knew. He knew now what his parents had left him. He knew what these daggers were for.
He took a step.
Then another.
And he sank into the Sleeping Woods in the wake of the hooded man, without looking back toward Sleepinwood.
Somewhere in the night, behind the trees, the orphanage was still sleeping. Titis was sleeping, her face turned toward the window. Ellendia was sleeping, her arm resting on the blanket as though she were waiting for something. Merwinn was sleeping with Pally's sword laid flat on his chest, his fingers closed around the hilt even in his sleep. And the room furthest off on that floor, the smallest and the most tidy, was empty. No one would know until morning.
When the headmistress opened the door at daybreak to call all the children down to breakfast, she would find only a hole in the floorboards, beside the made bed, a quill on the bedside table, and the window ajar onto the cold.
William, for his part, was already walking far off in the forest, in the shadow of a man he did not know, toward a life he had not chosen but had accepted.
Toward his vengeance.