The bell dragged him out of sleep.
It was not sharp. It was not urgent. It was a dull, tired clang that sounded like it had been ringing for years and had finally grown bored of the job.
For a moment Eryk did not know where he was. The pallet under him was not his. The air did not smell like damp earth and stored turnips. The rafters above were too low, too close, webbed with grime instead of the smoke-stained beams he knew.
Then he shifted, and his wrists flared.
Short loops of rope still bit into raw grooves, the fibers crusted with dried blood and dirt. The pain was clean and immediate, and it pulled the last scraps of confusion out of him like a hook.
Blackstone.
The night came back in hard pieces. Stone walls. Narrow stairs. A door that closed halfway and left him listening to a town that did not care why he was there.
The bell clanged again.
Voices rose outside, boys shouting, a dog barking, someone cursing about cold water. The sounds had the same tired rhythm as the bell, as if even anger had a schedule.
Eryk pushed himself up. His shoulders protested. His legs felt hollow, as if the road had scooped the strength out of them and left only soreness behind. His cheek throbbed where Droth's fist had landed at the stake.
He swung his feet to the floor.
The stone was cold enough to sting.
The shed door creaked open and let in a blade of gray light.
"Up, hill boy," Bran said. "Mistress Hala wants hands, not corpses."
Bran stood in the doorway with his arms folded. In the dim he looked broader than he had yesterday, like the shadows added weight to him. His nose, bent wrong, cast a crooked shape across his upper lip.
Eryk blinked at him.
Bran's expression did not soften. It also did not harden. It was the face of someone who had learned that feelings were expensive.
"Move," Bran repeated, and jerked his head toward the yard.
Eryk rose.
His feet hit the floor like bruises hitting stone. He stood anyway, because standing was what the bell demanded.
They went out into the lower yard.
Morning in Blackstone did not feel like morning. The sky was a pale sheet above the walls, and the air held damp coal smoke that clung to your throat. People moved in tight lines between buildings, shoulders hunched, hands busy, eyes quick.
No one looked at the horizon. There was too much wall for that.
A bucket waited by the trough.
"Wash," Bran said. "Face too. Hala hates ash on her bowls."
Eryk knelt and plunged his hands into the water.
Cold stabbed up his arms. He hissed through his teeth. The rope burns lit again, bright and vicious, and he pulled his hands out too fast, water dripping and shaking from his fingers.
Bran watched him.
"You can whine or you can get used to it," he said. "Cold is cheaper than bandages."
Eryk cupped water and splashed his face. It felt like being struck. When he wiped his eyes, his palms came away streaked with gray.
A line of boys formed by the kitchen door, bowls in hand. Older boys stood closest. Younger ones hovered behind, quiet and tight-lipped, waiting for an opening like rats waiting for a dropped crust.
A yard guard paced in front of them.
Gerrit.
He was narrow, with patchy beard growth and eyes that did not settle on anything for long. His spear was not held like a weapon. It was held like an extension of his patience, and that patience looked thin.
"Don't crowd," Gerrit barked. "You'll get your turn. Or you won't. Either way I'll eat."
A boy shuffled forward too early and got a cuff that snapped his head to the side. No apology followed. The boy did not make a sound. He only stepped back into place and stared at the ground.
Bran pushed Eryk toward the side door.
"Not the line," he said. "Work first. Eat after."
Inside, heat and steam hit like a slap.
The kitchen was not big, but it was loud. Pots hissed. Ladles clinked against iron. A woman's voice cut through it all like a cleaver.
"Move, you useless sacks. The bell doesn't wait and neither do I."
Mistress Hala.
She stood over a pot the size of a barrel, arms bare to the elbow, stirring with a long wooden paddle. Her hair was tied back tight. Her face looked carved from habit, and her eyes had the blunt focus of someone who had fed too many mouths to be impressed by any of them.
She looked at Eryk and did not bother to hide her assessment.
"Thin," she said. "But thin can carry."
She jabbed a ladle toward a stack of buckets.
"Water. Two at a time. Spill and you mop it with your tongue."
Eryk stepped forward, hands aching as he gripped the bucket handles.
The first lift pulled pain up his wrists in a hot line. The rope grooves scraped against wood. His fingers wanted to open. He forced them shut.
He carried.
The buckets sloshed. Water slapped the rims and ran down his knuckles. Each drip was a small punishment, and he learned quickly to hold the handles steady and keep his steps short.
Hala's voice followed him.
"Faster. You're walking like you've got time to die."
He did not answer. He moved.
Outside, the yard was waking into full motion. Two boys dragged a crate of root vegetables. Someone scrubbed a trough. A man hammered at a bent hinge on the shed door, swearing under his breath in rhythm with each strike.
Eryk carried water until his shoulders burned and the cold in his hands became a numb ache.
Then Hala changed the job without warning.
"Chop," she said, and shoved a knife toward him with the handle first.
A pile of onions waited on the table, skins papery and brown. A block of wood was scarred with old cuts.
Eryk picked up the knife.
It was heavy. It was sharper than anything he had ever used at home.
His first slice came down too hard. The onion split uneven, and his eyes filled with tears that had nothing to do with grief.
Hala leaned in.
"Smaller," she said once, glancing at the uneven chunks. "You want to gnaw half a field in your bowl?"
He cut smaller.
The blade rose and fell. The motion became a small rhythm that held his mind in place. Lift. Down. Slide. Gather. Repeat.
Lysa passed behind him with a coil of twine and a stack of bowls balanced against her hip. She did not stop. Her eyes flicked to his wrists and then away, fast as a flinch.
Later, when Hala turned her back to curse at someone else, Lysa returned.
She set something on the edge of the table without looking like she was doing it.
A scrap of cloth. A thumb-sized lump of pale grease.
Eryk stared at it.
Lysa's voice was low. "Tallow."
He looked up.
She shrugged as if she were explaining a boring fact. "Rub it on. Rope eats skin. Skin splits. Hala hates blood on her buckets."
"Why help me?" Eryk asked.
Lysa's mouth tightened. "Because you're loud when it hurts. You make her shout more. I hear her through the wall. I don't like that."
It was not warmth. It was not friendship. It was practical mercy, and it was more than anyone had offered him since Hollowford.
"Thank you," he said anyway.
Lysa did not accept it. "Don't," she said. Then, after a beat, "If you keep working, you'll last."
"Last," Eryk repeated.
Lysa's eyes met his for a breath. There was something tired there, like a candle that had burned too long.
"Yeah," she said. "Last."
She moved away before Hala's gaze could catch her lingering.
Eryk unwound the cloth under the table and smeared the tallow onto the rope grooves. It stung at first, then dulled. When he lifted the next bucket, it hurt a little less.
The day blurred.
Water. Chopping. Scrubbing bowls until his fingers pruned and his wrists went slick with grease. Carrying slop buckets to the trench where pigs rooted in trampled mud, their thick backs heaving as they shoved each other for scraps.
"They'll eat anything," Bran said, dumping kitchen waste into the trench.
"Even bones," Tomas added from beside him.
Tomas was older than Bran by a year or two, maybe. He had a narrow face and eyes that looked like they had stopped expecting better things. His hands were cracked and red, the kind of hands that had been worked too young.
"That's what Harnach used to say," Tomas went on. "He said pigs are honest. They don't pretend not to be hungry."
Eryk watched the pigs' teeth flash as they fought over a peel.
The smell made his stomach roll.
"People?" he asked before he could stop himself.
Bran's mouth twisted. "If they fall in, I suppose."
Tomas did not laugh. He watched the pigs with the same flat attention he gave everything else.
"Don't fall," he said. It was not advice. It was a rule.
At midday, Bran took Eryk up the steps toward the upper yard.
The stairs were worn smooth by too many feet. The air changed as they climbed, cleaner but colder, as if warmth belonged below with the kitchens and pens.
The steward's building sat near the top, a squat stone shape with a door that looked too thick for its frame.
Beside it, mounted on the wall, was a board.
It was not a notice board like a village used for lost dogs and harvest dates. This one was covered in lines, ink and chalk and scraped marks.
Names, or what passed for them, marched down it in cramped writing. Some were real. Some were only places. Some were only a single letter followed by a number.
Eryk found Bran's line.
Bran, yard.
He found Lysa's.
Lysa, kitchen.
He found Hala's.
Hala, kitchen.
Then he saw one he did not recognize.
A name beside a word that made his throat tighten.
Pit.
The name was crossed out. Not neatly. The ink was scored through so hard the wood beneath had been gouged. Beside it, in a different hand, someone had written a number, and the number was small, as if a life could be reduced to a handful of strokes.
Eryk stared.
Bran tugged his sleeve. "Keep moving."
They did not go inside the steward's building. They did not knock. They only walked past the board, and Eryk felt as if he had been shown a blade and told to pretend it was a tool.
Back in the lower yard, the pot steamed, and the line of boys shuffled again. The light dulled to a gray smear. Smoke gathered under low clouds.
Eryk carried a crate of stale loaves from the store shed to the kitchen door, arms trembling by the time he set it down.
When he turned, Gerrit was there, pacing in front of the line as Hala ladled out evening portions.
"Don't crowd," Gerrit barked again, as if he said it every day and it never became true.
A younger boy edged forward, small and sharp-faced, hair cut too close. His bowl shook in his hands.
Jory.
Eryk had heard Bran snap the name earlier when the boy lingered by the bucket line.
Now Jory's eyes kept flicking to the bread crate.
Hala's ladle dipped and rose. Stew splashed into bowls, thin and watery, with the occasional chunk of onion or potato as a rare gift.
Eryk waited his place, bowl warm in his hands, when he saw it.
A crust had fallen from the crate, knocked loose by someone's careless hip. It landed by Jory's boot.
The boy froze.
His foot moved, very slightly.
The crust slid against his toes.
Eryk felt something tighten in his chest. It was not pity exactly. It was recognition. Hunger did not care how small you were.
Gerrit saw.
His eyes snapped down like a hawk's.
"Oi," Gerrit said. "What's that?"
The yard went quiet in a thin, immediate way. Even the dog stopped barking, as if it had learned the shape of trouble.
Jory's foot stopped moving.
His face went pale.
Gerrit stepped forward and ground the bread under his heel, slow, then stooped and pinched it up between two fingers as if it were filth.
He held it up like evidence.
"You stealing, rat?"
Jory swallowed. His mouth opened. No sound came.
Gerrit's spear butt tapped the ground once.
Hala's ladle did not pause. She kept serving, eyes fixed on the pot as if she could pretend she was not listening.
"I didn't," Jory whispered at last.
Gerrit's mouth curled. "You didn't what? You didn't touch it? Or you didn't mean to?"
Jory shook his head too hard. Tears gathered in his eyes, bright and humiliating.
Gerrit turned his head toward Hala. "Kitchen mistress. Your boy's thieving."
Hala glanced up at last, expression flat.
"Is he?" she said, like she was asking whether the water was boiling.
Gerrit tossed the crushed crust at her feet. "Caught him."
Hala looked at Jory.
For a heartbeat, Eryk thought she might let it go. He thought she might decide a crust was not worth the trouble.
Then Hala's eyes shifted to Gerrit, and something passed between them, not kindness, not cruelty, but the quiet agreement of people who kept order by feeding it.
Hala sighed.
"Bran," she called, voice carrying. "Take him up. Hand him to the steward. Tell him I caught him thieving."
Bran flinched like he had been struck. Then he set his own bowl aside and stepped forward.
He took Jory by the arm, not roughly, not gently. Just firmly, the way you held something that might run.
Jory looked back once.
His eyes met Eryk's for a fraction of a breath.
Eryk did not know what to do with that look. It was not accusation. It was fear, and it was the question underneath fear.
Will anyone stop this.
Eryk said nothing.
Bran led Jory up the steps and out of the lower yard.
Hala kept serving.
"Next," she said, as if nothing had happened.
Eryk stepped forward.
His bowl filled with watery stew. An onion slice floated on top like a pale coin.
He took it and moved away before his hands could start shaking.
He ate in the corner of the yard with his back to the wall, where nobody could easily come at him from behind. The stew tasted of bones and salt and something bitter that was not in the pot.
Around him, boys ate quickly, eyes down. A few glanced toward the steps as if waiting for Bran to return with Jory still attached to his arm.
He did not.
When Bran came back, he came alone.
His face was blank. His jaw worked once, as if he were chewing words he would not swallow.
Tomas leaned close enough that his shoulder brushed Eryk's.
"Don't look," Tomas murmured, eyes still on his own bowl. "If you look, Gerrit remembers you looked."
Eryk stared at the mud by his boots until his eyes hurt.
Later, when the light had faded and the last pots were scraped clean, Hala sent them out with slop buckets. The pigs surged forward in a grunting wave, mouths working.
"They'll eat anything," Tomas said behind him, the same words as before, but different now.
Eryk watched the mass of jostling backs, the flash of teeth in the mud.
His stomach turned.
He thought of the board. Of the crossed-out name beside pit. Of Jory's thin wrist in Bran's hand. Of the steward's ink-stained fingers.
He tipped the slop into the trench and walked away before the pigs finished.
By the time the bell rang again, short and sharp for end of work, Eryk's hands were swollen and stiff. His wrists burned under the rope loops. His feet throbbed with every step.
Lysa met him by the shed door, a basket tucked against her hip.
"You managed," she said.
"Barely."
"That's more than some." She leaned one shoulder against the frame and watched the yard with tired eyes. "If you keep your head down, and you don't steal in front of Gerrit, you'll last."
Eryk hesitated. The question came out rougher than he meant.
"What happens to the ones who don't?"
Lysa's gaze slid toward the steps.
"Sometimes they go to the quarry," she said. "Sometimes they go to the pit. Sometimes they just stop showing up and nobody asks why."
Eryk swallowed.
"No one… cares?"
Lysa's mouth twisted. "People care. Quietly. Caring loud gets you counted."
She pushed off the doorframe.
"Sleep," she said. "Bell comes early."
Eryk lay on the pallet again, straw scratching his cheek. The yard noises softened into distant movement and the occasional bark.
His wrists stung where the tallow had worn thin.
He had lived through the bandits.
He had lived through the road.
He had lived through his first full day in Blackstone's yard.
He had learned how to last a day.
Tomorrow, he would have to learn how to last another.