The hunger in Ren Vale’s gut didn’t feel like an ordinary appetite. It felt like an empty iron stove left burning in an abandoned house, the fire gnawing at the cold cast walls until the metal warped and groaned.
He knelt behind a shelf of glass-fused dark rock, his knees grinding with the dull, stiff protest of a thirty-year-old labourer. The wind blowing off the northern salt flats was bitter. It carried the scent of sulfur, crushed bone, and stale incense. He lifted a trembling, ink-stained hand to tuck a loose lock of silver hair behind his ear, then reached into the breast pocket of his lambskin apron.
He didn’t reach for dried salt beef or hard-tack biscuit. Yesterday morning, when a refugee had pressed a handful of roasted oats into his palm, the grain had touched his tongue like lye. His throat had closed in a violent burst. That brought up mouthfuls of purple bile and burned acids that had left him retching in the dirt for twenty minutes.
Instead, Ren pulled out a battered brass snuffbox. Inside lay a tightly packed cake of cold potion-made willow charcoal, mixed with the burned up scrapings of seventeenth-century court registers.
He pinched a small flake between his thumb and forefinger, placed it upon his tongue, and forced himself to swallow.
