The Blood Tithe

Ansel Calder has been paying the Crown's hearth tax out of his own arm for six years. Eleven jars a season, a tally string on his wrist, and a plan: ten crowns buys a man's name off the Red Roll forever, and forever is worth going grey for.

He is nine notches in with nine days left when he notices something that nobody on his side of the river has ever bothered to notice. Every sealed jar in Ostrovar is bound west, to the College of Physick. It says so on the writ, in three languages, at the fork at the top of the hill.

The carts go east.

What Ansel does with that costs him more than he has, and what he gets back is not a reward. It is an inheritance: an old, curt thing behind his eyes that counts what he becomes and never once explains itself. Every creature on the far bank sees the same number climbing. Ansel sees a second one, going down, that nobody else can see at all.

There are two roads out of a grave. He is going to have to pick one before he is strong enough for either.