Prologue

The night was starless pitch, enveloping him as in the feathered wings of a giant black raven.

Everything ached: his body, his head, the stifling darkness itself, and that darkness was spinning off-kilter, moving unpredictably and leaving him nauseous. His eyes felt warm and wet, and he opened them, strained them wide, but still he could not see. He was not a fighter by nature; nonetheless, his survival instincts had been awakened and the boy struck out—once, twice—hitting nothing but air. Sharp blows came back out of that unpredictable, impenetrable inky blanket, returning his unsuccessful strikes with hard and unforgiving ones. Pain shot through him again in white-hot flashes—his cheekbone, his ribs, his gut—and then the blows stopped. He curled into a ball once more, protecting his head, and he breathed uneasily, his ears ringing. His face felt hot. Something warm and salty dripped into his mouth.

Barely past his seventeenth birthday, he’d already traveled across the seas, seen injustice and violence, but he had never been so scared in his life as he was in that moment, there in the darkness, huddled and blind. Yes, he was scared. Scared as a fly in a web. If it was shameful to feel scared he’d have to think on that another time—if there was anything after this, any time to come at all. For now there was only room for one emotion.

Fear.

“Didn’t nobody tell you about curiosity and the cat?” came a voice, and then the earth was moving beneath him; he was pulled by his arms, the ground scraping against his face, his shoulder. He was lifted into the air like a rag doll and dropped. The ground beneath him gave and swayed. It was not ground; it was wool. A blanket. It smelled horribly of damp and carried the metallic tang of blood.

He tried again to speak. “But—”

Another blow. Somewhere in the close distance, just beyond the ringing in his ears, he heard a boot close and an engine start. The dark black bird of oblivion reached for him again and he was gone.