The first heat of the day did not come from the sun.

It came from Ranoke’s fire.

He stood close enough to feel the breath of it against his forearms, close enough that the hairs on his wrists curled and his skin shone with sweat before dawn had fully loosened its grip on the valley. The forge was a square of stone and soot behind the Havka Inn, half sheltered by a slanted roof of weathered boards. Most mornings, the village woke slowly. The inn’s shutters opened with lazy creaks. Chickens began their arguments. A few early farmers crossed the packed road with buckets swinging at their sides.

But the forge always woke with purpose.

Ranoke set the iron in the coals and watched it disappear into the orange heart. For a moment the bar was just a dark shape swallowed by flame. Then its edges began to soften. The metal took on a dim red, then a deeper glow, the color of a coal pulled from a hearth.

He waited until it was ready. Not because someone told him to. Because he could feel it.

He drew it out with tongs, laid it on the anvil, and brought the hammer down.

The first strike rang out over Springville like a bell.

Sound carried strangely at this hour. It didn’t bounce and blur the way it did at midday when the streets filled with voices. The ring of iron on iron was clean. It slid between houses and across gardens, over the river and into the low hills where mist still clung to the grass.

Ranoke struck again.

A rhythm formed. Not hurried. Not lazy. Measured, like walking.

Strike. Turn. Strike. Turn.

He liked the pattern. He liked that the metal would obey if he obeyed it first. Heat and pressure, patience and force. Nothing here cared who he was, or what his name meant to strangers, or why a boy his age owned a forge at all.

The bar lengthened beneath his hammer. Its edges squared. A blade began to reveal itself, not yet sharp, not yet anything more than an intention. He worked until the iron was tired and the glow dulled. He returned it to the coals and fed the fire a fresh piece of charcoal.

He had learned to do that quietly, without fuss. The fire did not need ceremony. It needed fuel.

Ranoke wiped his brow with the inside of his wrist, leaving a smear of soot. He glanced toward the inn.

Havka Inn was not grand. It was built for travelers, not nobles. Its beams were thick and stained dark with age. Its sign, painted long ago, still showed a stylized cup and a sleeping horse. Most nights it was half full, and that was enough for Springville.

This morning, its door opened early.

Bram stepped out, squinting like the daylight offended him. He was carrying something wrapped in cloth.

He came toward the forge with the familiar swagger of someone who had decided long ago that the world would not be allowed to intimidate him. Bram was only a year older than Ranoke, but he walked like an older brother anyway. His hair stuck up in places where he had clearly tried to smooth it down and given up, sun-dark curls refusing discipline no matter how often he cut them. He had a strong jaw and a mouth that always looked like it was deciding whether to laugh or argue.

He held up the wrapped bundle. “Before you start telling me you don’t eat, I stole this.”

Ranoke set the tongs down. “You didn’t steal it.”

Bram shrugged. “I acquired it without permission.”

Ranoke gave him a look.

Bram’s grin widened, and he unwrapped the cloth to reveal a chunk of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a small apple. “Havka said it’s for you. But he said it like he was doing me a favor.”

Ranoke took the bread. “Tell him thank you.”

“I did. He told me to stop getting in the way of paying customers.”

“That sounds like Havka.”

Bram leaned against the forge’s stone edge, watching the coals. “You’re up early.”

“I’m always up early.”

“You’re always up early when you’re worried.”

Ranoke paused with the bread halfway to his mouth. Bram’s voice had gone casual, but his eyes had sharpened.

“I’m not worried,” Ranoke said.

Bram made a sound that could have been disbelief or amusement. “Fine. You’re always up early when you’re thinking too hard.”

Ranoke took a bite. The bread was still warm inside, probably pulled from the oven at dawn. He chewed slowly, then spoke as if it didn’t matter. “What did you hear?”

Bram shifted his weight, gaze sliding toward the road that ran through town. “Caravan came in late last night. Two wagons short.”

Ranoke’s hand tightened on the bread. “Bandits?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Bram scratched the back of his neck. “They said the forest routes are getting worse. People are traveling with more guards and still getting hit. Not robbed clean, either. Strange stuff missing.”

“What kind of strange stuff?”

Bram hesitated. Ranoke knew that look. It meant Bram thought something sounded foolish and hated repeating it.

“Relics,” Bram said at last, tasting the word like it was too grand for their dusty road. “Old trinkets. Amulets. Bits of carved stone. The kind of junk traders pick up because it looks ancient and someone always thinks ancient means valuable.”

Ranoke swallowed. “Bandits don’t risk blades for carved stone.”

“Exactly.”

Ranoke glanced at the fire. The coals pulsed. Heat rose in waves, distorting the air. “Who did it?”

Bram lifted one shoulder. “You want names, you’ll have to travel into Buva yourself. People say there’s a bandit leader out there now who’s not like the others.”

Ranoke said nothing.

Bram watched him. “You’ve heard it.”

Ranoke chewed another bite. The cheese was sharp. “People say a lot.”

“People say he doesn’t take coin,” Bram continued. “People say he doesn’t drink. People say he burns wagons after he empties them so no one can trace where he came from.”

Ranoke kept his eyes on the fire. “That sounds like a story.”

Bram lowered his voice anyway. “They say his name like it’s a curse. The Ghost of Buva..”

The words landed between them and did not bounce away like an ordinary rumor.

Ranoke did not let his face change. He forced himself to take another bite. He forced himself to swallow.

“That’s just a story,” he said.

Bram studied him. “Funny. Most stories don’t make you stop chewing.”

Ranoke set the bread down on the cloth. He reached for the tongs and pulled the iron from the coals again, giving himself an excuse to move. The metal glowed. He laid it on the anvil and struck it harder than he needed to.

The ring of the hammer sounded sharper now.

Strike. Turn. Strike.

Bram didn’t push. Not yet. Bram had always had a talent for knowing when to wait.

A few minutes passed in silence, filled with iron song and rising smoke. The smell of hot metal mixed with char and damp morning air.

When Ranoke finally spoke, he kept his voice flat. “What else did they say?”

Bram leaned closer, lowering his voice into something that might have been mockery if it didn’t carry tension. “They said there are riders with banners traveling farther out than usual. Patrols, but not like the old ones. Too many soldiers. Too clean.”

Ranoke glanced up.

“Clayland,” Bram said. “Or so the caravan thinks.”

Ranoke’s hammer paused in midair.

Clayland. The far north. The crown that most people in Springville only felt in the form of taxes and distant decrees. Springville sat in the borderlands of belonging, close enough to be claimed, far enough to be forgotten.

“What would Clayland want down here?” Ranoke asked.

Bram’s mouth twisted. “To remind everyone we belong to them.”

Ranoke set the hammer down carefully. The blade shape was beginning to emerge, but he left it unfinished. He hated leaving things half done. It made his hands itch.

He wiped his palms on a rag and stepped back from the anvil. “Any sign of why they’re moving?”

Bram shrugged. “Caravan gossip. Someone said Northdale is stirring too. That the dwarves are opening vaults again.”

“Vaults?” Ranoke repeated.

Bram nodded. “Apparently they found a sealed door in the Drula range that has been there longer than anyone can remember. People have tried to break it. It’s scarred with hammer marks and old burns. Nothing works.”

Ranoke’s eyes narrowed. “And now?”

“Now they’re sending for smiths,” Bram said. “Real smiths. Not just dwarves who know rock and metal. Outsiders. People with different hands.”

Ranoke stared at Bram.

Bram held up both hands quickly. “I’m not saying they’ll send for you.”

Ranoke’s silence answered him.

Bram exhaled. “They might. Someone in that caravan said your name came up at a tavern two towns over. They said, ‘If Congor wants an outsider to touch his vault, he’ll want the boy from Springville.’”

Ranoke’s throat tightened.

He wasn’t used to his name traveling without him.

He wasn’t used to being discussed like a tool.

Bram’s voice gentled. “It could be nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Ranoke said quietly.

Bram watched him for a long moment, then said, “You didn’t finish your blade.”

Ranoke glanced at the iron on the anvil. The glow had faded to a dull red. It would need to be reheated. More time. More work.

He should have felt annoyed.

Instead he felt… distracted. As if something unseen had tugged at a thread in the back of his mind.

Ranoke glanced past Bram toward the town. Springville was waking. A few children ran barefoot between houses. A woman carried a bucket of water and waved at Ranoke without stopping. Smoke rose from chimneys. Life continued in the way it always had.

And yet the words Bram had brought made everything feel slightly off-balance.

Clayland banners.

Northdale vaults.

Buva bandits.

It felt like the island itself had shifted on its foundations.

“Come on,” Bram said suddenly. “Walk with me.”

“I have work.”

“You’ll still have work after you walk. Unless the forge grows legs and runs away.”

Ranoke almost smiled. Almost.

He hesitated, then followed Bram toward the road.

As they passed the inn, Havka stood in the doorway, wiping his hands on his apron. He was a broad man with tired eyes and a voice that could fill a room.

“You’re feeding him properly?” Havka called.

Bram saluted lazily. “I’m keeping him alive.”

Havka snorted. His gaze shifted to Ranoke, lingering in that way adults did when they were silently measuring whether a boy was still a boy or something else. “Morning, Ranoke.”

“Morning,” Ranoke replied.

Havka’s eyes flicked toward the road. “Heard anything?”

Bram answered before Ranoke could. “Nothing worth worrying about.”

Havka’s mouth tightened. “That’s what people always say when there’s something worth worrying about.”

Ranoke didn’t argue.

They continued down the road that curved past gardens and small workshops. The river ran alongside the town, shallow enough to wade in summer, loud enough in spring floods to drown out conversation. Beyond it, fields stretched with new shoots of green and patches of frost that had not yet melted.

At the edge of town, a group of men stood gathered near a wagon. The wagon was half unloaded, sacks of grain and barrels of dried goods scattered around it. Two guards leaned on spears nearby, watching the road with the weary posture of men who had spent too long listening for trouble.

A traveler stood with them, a woman in a brown cloak. Her boots were caked with mud. Her face was windburned. She spoke with her hands, gestures quick and frustrated.

Bram slowed. Ranoke slowed with him.

“…I’m telling you,” the traveler was saying, “we lost them in the trees. Not a fight. Not really. It was like they wanted to scare us more than kill us.”

One of the men asked, “Bandits?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But bandits don’t leave your coin untouched and take your carved stone.”

Ranoke’s heartbeat ticked up.

“What carved stone?” someone asked.

The traveler hesitated, then reached into her cloak and pulled out a square of cloth, unfolding it slowly in her palm.

“It was wrapped in this,” she said. “My father found it in a ruin. Dark stone. Carved with spirals. He thought it might fetch a good price in Lexon.”

Ranoke leaned forward without realizing he had.

“They didn’t even look at my silver,” she went on. “They only asked for that.”

“Asked?” Bram repeated.

“They spoke like…” She shook her head. “Like they were delivering a message. One of them said, ‘You’ve carried it far enough.’ And then he took it and walked away.”

One of the men frowned. “Did you see their faces?”

“No,” she said. “Black hoods and scarves. Kept their heads down.”

“That doesn’t sound strange,” someone muttered.

“It wasn’t the clothes,” she said quickly. “It was how calm they were. No shouting. No threats. Like they’d already decided how it would go.”

The men exchanged glances. That kind of certainty unsettled more than blades.

Ranoke felt Bram’s gaze on him, but Bram didn’t speak.

A child tugged at the traveler’s cloak. “Were they ghosts?”

The traveler looked down at him. “No,” she said. “Just men.”

After a pause, she added, “Men who weren’t afraid of anyone.”

Ranoke looked back toward town.

The forge smoke rose in a steady line.

The world still looked ordinary.

But it no longer felt like it.

They left the gathering behind and walked along the river until the town thinned and the fields widened. For a while Bram kicked at stones, silent.

Ranoke waited, listening to water and wind and distant hammering from another workshop.

Bram spoke at last. “You ever wish you could just… leave?”

Ranoke’s eyes narrowed. “Leave Springville?”

“Leave the island,” Bram said. “Leave all of it. The kings. The taxes. The soldiers who show up once a year and pretend they care about us.”

Ranoke didn’t answer immediately.

He thought of his parents.

Not their faces, not exactly. Those were fading in his mind, softened by time and by the fact that he had been young when they left. But he remembered his father’s hands, scarred and strong. He remembered his mother’s quiet voice reading maps as if she could see the world better than anyone else.

They had left.

They had never returned.

Everyone said they were dead.

And Ranoke had learned to live as if that was true, because believing anything else felt like stepping onto a bridge that might not hold.

“We’re not important enough for kings to worry about,” Ranoke said finally.

Bram gave a humorless laugh. “That’s what I used to think too.”

They turned back toward town.

As they approached the southern road, a distant sound carried on the wind.

Hooves.

Not fast, not frantic. Controlled.

Ranoke and Bram reached the town’s main road just as the first riders appeared.

They came in a line of six, cloaks dark, armor polished. Their horses were well fed, their tack clean. A banner rose above them, stiff in the morning breeze.

Ranoke didn’t need to see the crest clearly to know what it was. Everyone on Villaga knew it. The crowned sigil of Clayland, stitched in heavy thread, the symbol of a kingdom that liked to remind the world it was older than anyone else.

Villagers stopped what they were doing.

Buckets paused mid-lift.

Children fell silent.

Havka stepped out of his doorway, wiping his hands again as if he could scrub away whatever trouble the banner brought.

The riders slowed at the town center. The one at the front lifted a hand and the line halted as if controlled by a single mind.

He was not a king.

He was not even a noble.

But he held himself like a man used to being obeyed.

His eyes swept over Springville.

Then, very briefly, they swept over Ranoke.

Ranoke felt it like a touch.

Bram shifted closer, instinctively placing himself half a step in front of Ranoke. It was a small gesture, probably unnoticed by anyone else, but Ranoke noticed. Ranoke always noticed.

The rider dismounted. His boots struck the earth with deliberate calm. He nodded once to Havka.

“Springville,” he said, voice carrying. “We are traveling through in the name of King Aldric.”

A murmur rippled through the crowd at the name.

The rider continued. “We will take water and supplies. We will speak with your mayor, and we will inspect the road conditions. There have been disruptions.”

Havka inclined his head. “We have no mayor.”

The rider’s expression did not change. “Then we will speak with whoever holds authority here.”

A few villagers looked at each other as if wondering who that might be. Springville was small enough that authority was mostly a matter of who spoke loudest.

Bram leaned toward Ranoke and whispered, “Don’t move.”

Ranoke didn’t answer.

He watched the rider’s eyes, watched the way his gaze drifted again, not quite directly toward him, but near enough that Ranoke felt the weight of it. The rider’s gaze skimmed his soot-dark hair and lingered, briefly, on eyes too pale for a smith’s son.

The rider’s mouth twitched slightly, as if recognizing something he had been told to recognize.

Then the rider turned away, walking toward Havka and the men near the wagon.

Ranoke breathed out slowly.

His hands smelled of iron and smoke.

The banner fluttered above the riders.

And without warning, Ranoke felt something he could not name.

It was the kind of feeling that crept up your spine when you walked a forest road after dark.

The sense that if he turned too quickly, he might catch nothing at all.

No footsteps.

No breath.

No shadow.

Just the certainty that the world was paying closer attention than it had a moment before.

Prologue

Chapter 2