The Mirror of Wrath

Erlenhain had never given anyone a reason to be afraid.

It sat where the imperial heartland petered out, like a river splitting into too many small arms to still be called a current — a few dozen farms, a well of grey stone, a mill whose wheel had belonged to the same family for three generations and whose creaking carried on the night air when the wind sat right. In late summer the smell of cut straw hung over the fields, along with the barking of farm dogs whenever a stranger came down the road, and the calling of mothers bringing children in for supper before the mosquitoes started biting. Anyone from Corvanheim — which almost never happened — would not have spared the place a second glance. That was exactly why the small family had settled at the edge of the village a few months back: far enough from the capital to be forgotten, close enough to the heartland not to stand out.

The farm they lived on looked no different from any other. A low stone house with a thatched roof, a stable for two goats and a horse, a field that stood honey-colored in late summer and that the man of the house tended with a care that was almost too precise for someone who'd only recently taken up the trade. Anyone who looked closely might have noticed that his hands, when he bound the sheaves, were too smooth for a farmer's, that beneath the calluses he'd worked hard to earn in a few short months there still lingered the pallor of a man who had spent half his life holding a quill rather than a sickle. That something in his posture refused to unlearn itself — that straight, controlled back, no matter how deeply he bent over the earth. But nobody in Erlenhain looked closely. That had been the whole point.

The sample ends here.