Len Vey walked the gentle northern approach road toward the former Gate Ward boundary canopy, his iron-ferruled ash staff swinging easily in his right hand.
The morning was cool, clear, and fragrant with the sharp scent of crushed juniper and dry pine needles. Overhead, three mountain ravens were riding the thermals above the Guard cliffs, their black wings catching the sun with glossy, rainbow-bright sheens of deep violet.
On the broad, gravelled terrace where the city court customs depot had once funneled citizens through barbed-wire cattle-pens and locked check cages, fourteen-year-old Tavi Rusk was running five apprentice runners through their morning drills.
Len stopped by the low dry-stone wall at the edge of the roadway, leaning his sound hip against the granite, watching the boy work.
It was still difficult for Len to reconcile the stationmaster he saw on the terrace with the boy he had met on his first terrifying evening in Rookvale.
On that night, five months ago, Tavi had been an underfed, ragged thirteen-year-old roof-runner living in the dark spaces between the corrugated iron roofs of the tram sheds. He had scurried like a rat through the steam chimney pipes, his ribs showing through a grease-blackened cotton smock. He carried stolen cabbage leaves and charcoal pills to sick children in the quarantine dormitories. He had lived with his ears cocked for the heavy tread of Bram Ash’s court guards, scared that an unsealed advancement would summon a double wearing his own child’s face to drag him down…
