The main street of Ashfall village was not wide enough for a crowd, but a crowd had gathered anyway.
They pressed together in a loose, murmuring knot near the old well at the center of the square—farmers with sun-cracked hands, traders with dust-caked boots, children who had wriggled through the gaps between adult legs to get a better view. The war had made everyone hungry for distraction. Any distraction. Even a bad one.
The source of the commotion was dangling six feet off the ground.
A wooden crane—old, splintered, groaning under its own weight—had been hauling a crate of volcanic stone from a collapsed cellar. The rope had snapped. The crate had shattered. And now a young man hung from the crane's hook by the back of his collar, swaying gently in the afternoon breeze, his arms limp, his face a shade of green that had no business existing outside of pond scum.
His name was Local Whiskey. Just Whiskey. Nobody in the village knew if it was a nickname, a birth name, or a dare that had gotten out of hand. Nobody had ever bothered to ask. He had wandered into Ashfall three years ago with a empty coin purse, a torn cloak, and a expression that suggested he had forgotten where he was going and didn't particularly care to remember.
He was fifteen. Five-foot-nine. His hair was the color of dry straw, messy and uncombed, falling over his forehead in uneven clumps. His face was sharp—too sharp for a boy his age—with cheekbones that could cut paper and a jawline that belonged on a portrait of some long-dead noble. His eyes were pale gray, almost colorless, and they stared at the world with the vague, unfocused intensity of someone who was only half-present. He was beautiful, in the way a cracked mirror was beautiful. In the way a half-finished painting was beautiful. You couldn't quite tell if the artist had made a mistake or a masterpiece.
His clothes were a disaster. A loose tunic that might have been white once, now stained with grass and grease and something purple. Trousers that were too short for his legs, revealing bony ankles and rope sandals that had seen better decades. A single earring dangled from his left ear—a copper coin with a hole punched through it, threaded on a loop of leather.
He was, by any reasonable measure, a mess.
And he was about to vomit.
"Someone get him down," a woman muttered.
"He's been up there for ten minutes," a farmer replied. "Tried. The crank's jammed."
"Is he even conscious?"
Whiskey answered this question by opening his mouth and producing a long, low groan that started somewhere in his stomach and ended in a sound like a dying cat. His face cycled through green, pale, green again. His throat bobbed.
"Don't," someone warned. "Don't you dare—"
He vomited.
The crowd scattered.
It was not a dignified vomit. It was not a quiet, polite, behind-the-hand vomit. It was the kind of vomit that came from a body that had been pushed past every limit it had and had decided to protest in the most spectacular way possible. It arced through the air like a horrific rainbow, catching the sunlight, and splattered across the cobblestones with a sound that made three grown men gag in sympathy.
Whiskey groaned again, spit trailing from his lips, and went limp.
The crane creaked. The rope, already frayed, began to snap thread by thread. One strand. Two strands. Three.
"Rope's going!" someone shouted.
Four gold coins slipped from Whiskey's pocket.
No one noticed them fall. No one ever noticed the coins. They were small—thin, worn, the kind of coins that had passed through a hundred hands before ending up in the pocket of a boy who barely remembered he had them. They tumbled through the air, spinning end over end, catching the light.
The first coin struck the cobblestone and bounced.
A stray cat—orange, fat, deeply judgmental—had been sleeping on a nearby barrel. The coin pinged off the barrel's rim, flipped sideways, and smacked the cat directly between the ears. The cat yowled, launched itself off the barrel, and shot across the street in a blur of orange fury. It collided with a stack of clay pots outside the potter's stall. The pots wobbled. Teetered. Fell.
Three assassins were moving through the crowd.
They were not from Ashfall. They were not farmers or traders or wandering singers. They were professionals—black-masked, silent-footed, their hands resting on the hilts of curved daggers. Their target was a woman in a dark cloak who had just stepped out of the herbalist's shop, a bundle of dried herbs clutched to her chest. She didn't see them. No one saw them. That was the point.
The cat hit the first assassin's ankle.
He stumbled. His dagger, already half-drawn, slipped from his fingers and clattered across the stone. He reached for it—
The second coin struck the cobblestone near the stables.
A horse—a massive, ill-tempered draft horse with hooves the size of dinner plates—snorted in surprise. The coin had bounced off its water trough, and the horse did not appreciate being startled. It lashed out with a hind leg, catching the stable door and ripping it clean off its hinges. The door flew across the street, spinning like a wooden discus.
The second assassin looked up just in time to take the door to the face.
He went down hard, his nose crunching, his dagger skittering into the gutter. The third assassin, momentarily distracted by his comrade's sudden horizontal departure, didn't see the third coin bounce off the well's stone rim and roll directly under his foot.
He stepped on it.
His ankle twisted. His balance shattered. He fell forward, arms flailing, and his own dagger—still clutched in his hand—drove deep into the thigh of the first assassin, who had just gotten back to his feet after the cat incident. The first assassin screamed. The third assassin, still falling, yanked the dagger free in a spray of crimson and tumbled backward into the herbalist's display table. The table collapsed. Jars of dried lavender and crushed nightshade rained down on his head.
The second assassin, the one who had been hit by the door, tried to rise. The horse, still angry, kicked him again. Not hard. Just enough to send him rolling into the gutter, where he landed face-first in the puddle of Whiskey's vomit.
The fourth coin never hit the ground.
It landed on the toe of Whiskey's sandal, balanced there for a impossible moment, and then slipped into the fold of his collar as the rope finally snapped.
He fell.
The crowd gasped. The crane hook crashed into the well. Whiskey plummeted six feet, his tunic tearing, his limbs flailing, and landed directly on top of the woman in the dark cloak.
The herbs went everywhere.
He rolled off her, groaning, his face now a shade of green that was closer to death than nausea. His stomach heaved one last time. He vomited again—directly onto the cobblestones six inches from the woman's face.
She yelped.
He stared at her. She stared at him. The crowd stared at both of them.
"Sorry," Whiskey said. His voice was hoarse, cracked, utterly unconcerned. "Motion sickness."
The woman—a merchant's wife, probably, judging by the quality of her cloak—opened her mouth to scream at him. Then she looked past him. At the three assassins groaning in the street. At the daggers scattered across the cobblestones. At the cat, now sitting on the herbalist's ruined table, licking its paw with the serene satisfaction of a creature that had caused chaos and had no regrets.
She realized, slowly, what had just happened.
"You—" she started.
Whiskey was already on his feet. He swayed, caught his balance on the well's rim, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His pale eyes drifted over the scene—the broken pots, the traumatized horse, the groaning assassins, the furious cat—with the vague, disconnected interest of someone watching a mildly entertaining cloud.
"Huh," he said. "Lucky."
He didn't sound surprised. He didn't sound grateful. He just sounded like a boy who had observed a mildly interesting fact and was now moving on to the next thought, whatever that might be.
The crowd was staring at him. The woman was staring at him. The assassins, those that were still conscious, were staring at him.
Whiskey scratched the back of his neck.
"Anyone got bread?"
No one answered. He didn't seem to notice.
His gaze drifted upward, toward the roof of the herbalist's shop, where a pigeon had just landed. He stared at it. His lips moved silently, as if he were having a conversation with the bird, or with himself, or with some invisible companion that only he could see. The pigeon cooed. Whiskey nodded, as if the pigeon had made an excellent point.
Then he sneezed.
The force of the sneeze made him lose his balance again. He stumbled sideways, tripped over the fourth assassin—no, wait, there had only been three—and landed in a heap next to the well. He didn't get up. He just lay there, staring at the sky, his chest rising and falling with the slow, untroubled rhythm of someone who had completely forgotten that he had almost died four times in the last thirty seconds.
"Nice clouds," he said to no one.
The crowd slowly began to disperse. Not because they had lost interest, but because they had learned, over the years, that trying to understand Whiskey was like trying to understand a rock that occasionally exploded. It was better to just accept that things happened around him, and sometimes those things involved gold coins, stray cats, and extremely unlucky assassins, and there was no explanation for any of it.
It was luck.
Absurd, impossible, logic-defying luck.
The kind of luck that made people whisper about old gods and forgotten blessings. The kind of luck that had saved his life a hundred times in ways he never noticed. The kind of luck that had killed three trained killers without him even knowing they were there.
Whiskey closed his eyes.
The sun was warm on his face. The vomit was drying on the cobblestones. The cat had found a new barrel to sleep on. The woman in the dark cloak had fled, clutching what remained of her herbs. The assassins had been dragged away by the local guard, too injured to resist, too confused to speak.
And somewhere in the back of Whiskey's mind, a thought surfaced—slow, lazy, completely disconnected from the previous ten minutes.
I should buy a hat.
He didn't know why. He didn't need a hat. But the thought felt right, so he held onto it, turning it over in his head like a smooth stone, until his stomach settled and the world stopped spinning.
The crowd had thinned to nothing. The crane hung broken and silent. The horse had calmed down. The cat was purring.
Whiskey opened his eyes.
"What was I thinking about?" he muttered.
He couldn't remember. So he stopped trying, got to his feet, and wandered off down the street, stepping over the broken pots without looking at them. He was humming something tuneless and half-formed. A lullaby, maybe. Or a drinking song. He couldn't remember which.
It didn't matter.
Tomorrow, something else insane would happen around him. It always did. And he would react with the same vague, disconnected surprise, and then forget about it five minutes later, and the cycle would continue until whatever strange force protected him decided it was done.
Today, it had been three assassins and a cat.
Yesterday, it had been a falling crate of fish that had missed him by an inch and instead crushed the stall of a corrupt tax collector.
The day before that, it had been a lightning strike that had hit the exact spot where a bandit had been about to ambush him.
Local Whiskey did not believe in fate. He did not believe in destiny. He did not believe in anything much, except that bread was good and motion sickness was bad and clouds were, objectively, very nice to look at.
He was a random street walker. A village weirdo. A boy who barely thought before he spoke, who sometimes daydreamed in the middle of conversations, who was thoughtless most of the time and reckless the rest of it. He was mentally unstable, probably. A freak, definitely. But he was a good kind of freak. The kind who wouldn't hurt a fly, mostly because he wouldn't notice the fly in the first place.
And as he wandered past the herbalist's shattered table, the cat opened one eye and watched him go.
It flicked its tail.
It had seen many strange things in its life. It had seen wars and famines and the slow, patient cruelty of humans who thought themselves important. But it had never seen a boy like this.
The cat yawned.
Then it went back to sleep.