The quill scratched twice against the parchment — once for Tomas, once for Elsbet — and that was all it took.
No ceremony.
No raised voices.
Just two names, and the debt that had hung over the house for three weeks quietly stopped existing, replaced by something that would hang over it far longer.
Corren Vell rolled the signed contract, slid it into his ledger case, and offered the kind of brisk, practiced nod men in his line of work must learn early.
“Placement will be arranged within the season,” he said.
“You’ll receive notice of the sponsoring household before transport. I’ll leave you to your evening.”
He let himself out.
Nobody walked him to the door.
Finn didn’t come out from behind the wall until he heard the gate latch shut, and by then his mother was already sitting at the kitchen table with her face in her hands, not crying anymore, just still, the particular stillness of someone who’s used up everything they had to give a moment and has nothing left over for the one after it.
“I heard,” Finn said, because there wasn’t any point pretending otherwise.
Elsbet looked up, and whatever composure she’d been holding onto cracked clean through at the sight of him standing there, pale, thin from three weeks in bed, looking so much older than eleven that it frightened her.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice broke on it.
“I’m so sorry, Finn. We didn’t have another—”
“I know.” He crossed the room and put his arms around her before she could finish, careful of his ribs, careful of everything.
“I heard the whole conversation. I know there wasn’t another way.”
Tomas stood by the window, jaw tight, hands opening and closing at his sides like he wanted something to hit and there was nothing in the room that deserved it.
“Seven years,” he said, low.
“Could be less, with good conduct. That’s what he said.”
“Seven years,” Finn repeated, and found, to his own quiet surprise, that the number didn’t frighten him the way it should have.
He’d spent longer than that in a Temple that took an eye and a hand and asked for nothing in return but everything he had.
Seven years of ordinary hard labor, whatever it turned out to be, felt almost survivable by comparison.
There wasn’t a version of that sentence that wouldn’t have broken his mother’s heart worse than it already was.
He found Bram at the riverbank two days later, in the last stretch of afternoon before the light started going gold and long, exactly where he always was, exactly like nothing at all had changed.
Except everything had.
Bram’s the one who noticed him first, and the grin that started across his face died halfway there, replaced by something more careful, more grown-up than eleven usually managed.
“Heard,” Bram said, before Finn had to say it himself.
“Whit’s mother told my mother. Everyone knows by now.”
“Figured.”
“Seven years.” Bram said the number like it tasted bad in his mouth.
“That’s — Finn, that’s most of the rest of being a kid. That’s—”
“I know what it is.”
Bram sat down hard on the bank, drawing his knees up, staring at the water instead of at Finn, the particular way people look anywhere except at something they don’t know how to face directly.
“I keep thinking,” he said, quiet, “that if I hadn’t wanted to go to that stupid mill—”
“Don’t.” Finn sat down beside him, shoulder to shoulder, the way they’d sat a hundred times before over a hundred smaller disasters.
“It’s not because of the mill. It’s not because of you. Whatever that thing was, it was looking for me specifically. It would’ve found me somewhere, eventually. At least this way you’re the one who got to swing a piece of wood at an angel and live to complain about it.”
That got something close to a laugh out of Bram, wet and unwilling, and for a moment they just sat there, the river sliding past, brown and patient, indifferent as ever to either of them.
“You’ll come back,” Bram said finally.
Not a question.
A demand, the kind only an eleven-year-old can make of the universe and half expect it to obey.
“Seven years, or less with good conduct.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Finn looked at him a long moment — his first real friend in two lives, loud and reckless and endlessly, stupidly loyal, the boy who’d swung a plank of wood at something that could have unmade him without noticing — and found he didn’t have it in him to hedge the answer.
“I don’t know what shape I’ll be in when I do. But I’ll come back.”
Bram nodded like that settled it, the way children settle things, with total conviction and no actual guarantee behind it at all, and they sat there together until the light went fully gold and Elsbet’s voice carried faint across the fields, calling Finn home for what both of them understood, without saying so, might be one of the last suppers they’d ever share.
The sponsor’s notice came eleven days later, delivered by a different Guild courier, considerably less polished than Vell had been — a boy barely older than Finn himself, handing over a sealed letter before hurrying back toward the dock without waiting for a reply.
Tomas read it once, silent, and set it down on the table like it had grown heavier in his hands.
“Well,” he said, after a long moment.
“At least it’s not far. Merchant house out of New Taipeng. Trading concern. Says they take on indentures for general labor, warehouse work, that sort of thing.”
Elsbet didn’t ask to see the letter.
She already knew, the way mothers know things they’d rather not, that whatever waited in New Taipeng for her son wasn’t going to be gentle about the seven years it had bought.
Finn read it himself, later, alone in his room, the same ceiling stains keeping him company one last time.
The letter was short, formal, entirely unremarkable — a date, a dock, a name he didn’t recognize signed at the bottom in a hand too neat to belong to anyone kind.
𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝑇𝑎𝑖𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑔, the System said, quiet.
𝐵𝑖𝑔𝑔𝑒𝑟 𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑣𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒.
𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒.
𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒𝑠.
𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒, 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑢𝑙.
I’ll be careful.
𝑌𝑜𝑢’𝑙𝑙 𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒.
𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡’𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑎𝑚𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑎 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡.
Finn folded the letter and set it on the table beside his bed, and lay back to look at the ceiling one more time, and found himself thinking, without quite meaning to, of a gate carved with a single question, half a world and one whole death away.
What are you willing to become.
He still didn’t have a complete answer.
He suspected, lying there in the dark, that he wouldn’t have one for years yet.
He fell asleep anyway, and in the morning, he began packing the very little he was allowed to take with him.