Sentiment, once written

He was six years old the first time he killed a man for money.

Piccaron doesn't remember a life before Baum Goldenir, the mercenary guild that raised him from an infant abandoned in the wilderness. He doesn't remember a name that isn't the one they gave him, or a home besides the guild hall where a scarred old killer taught him that a contract, once signed, is the only thing in this world worth keeping sacred.

He's good at his job. Frighteningly good. Fast enough to end fights before they start, cold enough to walk away from the wreckage without looking back, and cursed — or blessed — with a magic no one else seems to carry: the ability to seize hold of a spell mid-cast and turn it back on the one who threw it. They've started calling him the magic parasite in whispered rumors that follow him from kingdom to kingdom. He's started to enjoy the sound of it.

Then the guild that made him burns to the ground in a single night, and the closest thing he ever had to a father dies buying him the time to run. What's left is a stranger to himself — no contract to follow, no guild to answer to, and a fae-forged blade wrapped in bandages that he was always told never to draw.

Half-dead and adrift with nowhere left to go, he washes up in a life he was never built for — a household that wants nothing from him, a woman who teaches him magic and, without meaning to, teaches him something he doesn't have a word for yet, and a war creeping in from three directions at once. Ancient magic. Armies of the dead. A scholar who built his gift from someone else's suffering, and — somewhere behind it all — a queen the world hasn't met.

He still isn't sure he believes in things that can't be written down and signed in blood. But some things, it turns out, were never meant to be.