While some recruiters will spend up to a qattrokronos to purchase a promising recruit, in my experience, this is unnecessary. Whatever children cannot be had for a reasonable price, it is best to either leave them with their loving families or find a way to procure them without payment. If I'm being honest, I tend toward the latter.

-Fanus Rhe, Recruiter for the Perdita Free Collegium, private letter to Valeria Goodfellow

It was an open secret in Portogarra that Rook the Shadowbroker was a Shadow - hell, it was right there in his name. Technically, though, it wasn't true. Yes, Rook had received his training in distant Floria, the City of Shadows, but he left the Collegium, the fabled academy that trained Floria's notorious Shadows, as a Greycloak. Therefore, he never earned full distinctions at the Collegium and never took his Vow before Nurass, the Tyrant of Floria. Instead, he was contracted to one of the dozen or so official recruiters tasked by the tyrant with finding the world's greatest young talents and bringing them back to Floria. Rook wasn't a Shadow, but he wasn’t a man to be taken lightly and he wasn't bound by the same restrictive oath of loyalty, that all Shadows take. This meant he had his fingers in a lot of other pies. Not only did everybody know about Rook, but many people actually liked him because he was beholden to no polity. He offered useful services of questionable legality and he never got caught offering them.

"You didn't say it was at the western port, Alv," Beni grumbled.

"Relax, we're almost there," the other Lapis-Crown… Alvonzo, I presume, replied. With a not-so-gentle tug on my arm, he ushered me down the quiet nighttime streets.

The two Lapis-Crown thugs brought me to Rook's an hour before dawn. He lived in an old city house down by the western port - the seedy, squalid port that my parents refused to do business out of but that was right up an information broker's alley. The outside of Rook's house looked old and rundown even in the feeble, fuzzy pre-dawn moonslight, but the inside was in immaculate repair. The downstairs was an officer's pub, which Rook used as a legitimate front for his otherwise-shady business, a nice enough place that smelled of rum and fruit-wine, furnished in brass, suede, and polished walnut. And, even at the early hour, there was a guard armed with a smallbow and a cutlass snoozing just inside the pub's back entrance. Alv thumped at the security door twice and waited.

The guard inside unlocked and opened the door, taking a long and unimpressed look at the two thugs. They still wore their dark woolen cloaks but had removed the distinctive masks and headbands that identified them as Lapis-Crowns. Then the guard took a measured look at me and deduced what they were there for. "A recruit? You know I just about put a bolt between your eyes. Next time, go to the front entrance," he said eventually.

"We were trying to be discreet…"

"Discreet is going to the front entrance and mumming like you're a regular customer," the guard huffed. "What kind of business do you lot think gets transacted in dank alleyways?"

"Good point," Beni allowed.

The guard gestured into the pub. "All right, might as well come inside. Never know who's listening in."

The guard sat at a wooden chef's table and spent a minute filling out a half-sheaf form before carefully folding it with his big, callused hands and neatly tearing it along its perforation. He handed it to Alv, who scratched at his patchy stubble, none too happy with what he'd been handed. "What in the hills of hell is this?"

"A receipt for the girl." the guard said.

"What about our money?" Beni asked.

"That there receipt is your money. I don’t know this girl from Enoch, so I have no idea whether Rook thinks she's worth a red tollo. Most folks who figure they've got Shadow material haven't got a cow pie, and I can't go giving out kronettas for cow pies. So… look at it this way… would you really want me to pay you, and then Rook decides you've played him for a fool, and then he sends me to get the money back, at which point I won't be kindly disposed. Or you can come back in a day or so and I'll be pleased as pie to give you what's owed to you."

"Tomorrow?" Alv clarified.

The guard nodded. "Yeah, proper tomorrow, seeing as how it's the wee morning now."

"Promise?"

The guard snorted and gestured toward the door with his smallbow. "Ain't my promise to keep. Now bugger off."

Rook is a man of his word, so I assume those two eventually got whatever money recruits went for in those days, but that was the last I saw of them. Rook's guard ushered me inside, introduced himself as Rodjarvo, Rod for short, and offered to cook me breakfast, which I quickly acquiesced to. It had been a frightening night and I'd worked up an appetite. So I sat there, prim as I could be in my night clothes at the chef's table in the kitchen, while Rod made me a traditional Barsoan breakfast of fry bread, fried eggs, and fried fish cakes. Barsoan cuisine is not light fare.

"This smells good!" I said, carefully sprinkling country flakes onto my fish cake to season, cutting out a crispy little wedge, and nibbling a bite off of my fork. Cuisine at Uncle Horantz's had consisted of slightly-stale bread, willow greens, and dry-aged sausage that tasted like it was a quarter sawdust. This was quite a bit better. "It's very good! Thank you, Mister Rod!"

He chuckled at my demeanor, but his brow furrowed in thought - Rook didn't employ stupid people, and even his night guard had to be pretty sharp. He gestured at the way I'd tucked my napkin. "I'm guessing you aren't a street kid," he stated. "Got any family? By that, I mean any who might be lookin' for ya."

"N- no. The Lapis-Cloaks…"

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"If it's not too painful to say, why don't you tell me what happened? That way, we'll save Mister Rook some time."

I nodded and, between bites of breakfast, told Rod all about what had befallen me. Maybe I should have been more discreet - certainly, I now play things a lot closer to the chest even in my daily affairs - but the man had a surprisingly friendly demeanor for a burly guard who stood a head taller than most men, was built like a pit brawler, and had the litany of facial scars to suggest that he might have been exactly that at some point. Rod nodded thoughtfully as I told my tale and slid the last fish cake onto my plate as I finished my last slice of fry bread.

"I'll give you a piece of advice for free, Miss Vix - sounds like you were brought up in a place where most folks were nice and now you're coming to learn that some of 'em aren't. Not to say most are bad, either, but sad truth is that most people don't give a damn about you, and they're only worried about where the next coin or even the next meal is coming from. You got to look after yourself, else you can't look after nobody else. However nice a person seems… well… some folks are nice, but you always got to think in the back of your brain how you're going to shiv them just in case they try to shiv you…"

"Shiv?" I asked.

Rod took a paring knife from the counter and twirled with surprising deftness. "A shiv's a knife that you can hide as something else. If people know you've always got a way to hurt them, even if you don't look it, they'll be a lot less inclined to do at you first. Do you understand?"

"I don't want to hurt anybody…"

"Maybe not now. Anybody will hurt other folks if they're desperate enough, even you. And some folks… well, some folks don't have to be desperate at all…"

Just then, a lanky figure entered the doorway - I hadn't heard him coming or sensed anything at all. One second, it was just me and Rod, and the next moment Rook stood in the doorway, pale and gaunt, his golden blond hair streaked through with locks of shock white, his eyes so dark his irises were like little black billiard balls. There are few enough people in Portogarra with light hair that I could probably count the number I'd met in person on one hand, but Rook would have been memorable regardless. Despite his fair complexion and unusual pallor, he always seemed to be cloaked in the shadows, seeming to slip in and out of the background of your perception in a way that was difficult to square. Have you ever got the feeling of being watched? Well… you'll never get that feeling if you're being watched by a trained Shadow, or even a mostly-trained one like Rook. You'll never know a Shadow is after you unless she wants you to know, in which case you'll know.

"We have a guest?" Rook asked quietly, his voice velvety and just a bit deep. He was a half a head shorter than Rod and couldn't have weighed more than half what the big man did, but there was no question of who deferred to whom… he stalked into the room like an apex predator surveying his domain. "What's your name, my sweet?"

"Al… Al…" I couldn't even manage to say my name as his gaze bore down on me.

"Vix," Rod said. "Alvixia Altorelli - she's a Seelie, rest of her family taken by the blue-bands."

Rook clicked his tongue in distaste. "Horrible business. Lucky for us, though," he hummed. He crouched down in front of me, smiling with the predatory mien of a panther. He placed something cool and smooth in the palm of my hand, something about the width of a pencil and half as long. It was cool and heavy like a stone, the faintest shade of pale blue, and it had an unsettling feel to it that I couldn't quite describe. It took me a moment to recognize the object as a bare glowglobe filament, the part that actually lit up when somebody activated the globe. "Vix, I'd like you to try to light that up for me," Rook said.

"Um…" I turned it over in my palm. "Only grown-ups are supposed to light globes…" This had been a fairly uncontroversial rule in the Altorelli household.

"Yes, normally," he chuckled. "But, just this once, I'd like you to try…"

I looked at the filament on my open palm, mentally willing Rook to take it back so I wouldn't have to make a fool of myself in front of two grown-ups. "I don't know how…"

Rook hummed in amusement. "You do know how… it's much easier than what you did when you tried to escape. I want you to remember how you felt when the blue-bands found you. Think on that, Vix, and push your feelings into the stick. Can you do that?"

I was pretty sure nothing would happen, remembering that it took my brother, Chansone, weeks of practice before he was finally able to consistently light the things. I didn't think I could do it, but I nodded anyway. Rook was the kind of grown up that you didn't say no to, not because they would strike you but because they might decide you weren't even worth their time, and they wouldn't even feel bad about it. He would sooner leave a useless Selenite child for the Lapis-Cloaks than go through the minor inconvenience of taking her in - so I had to prove I was worth it.

"I can do this," I said to myself.

I tried to remember how I felt the one time that I slipped into the Shadelands, but all I could think about was how the place had looked and felt. The wall clock next to the stairwell had looked like a shadowy spider's nest and not a nondescript timepiece. The whole realm had felt utterly empty despite being so full of shadows and the mere existence of light seemed to negate space in the Shadelands. I'd felt like a tiny bug pressed to a corkboard, being observed by something unspeakably more immense than myself, observed with something between amusement and contempt. My breath seized in my chest. I… I couldn't. I shook my head, my dark hair jostling about me. I almost blurted out that I couldn’t do it…

But I had to. I had to show Rook for my family. I remembered my mother being dragged through the night, dragged screaming past the flaming trellis in our courtyard. I remembered Tess the magpie being torn from my grip, downy stuffing scattering to the winds. My hand tingled at the sensation, still remembering how it felt when her little stuffed wing was yanked out of my childish grip. I remembered Chiaro being kicked by the Lapis-Crown thug, how my little brother had gone airborne, hit the wall, and curled up, his face twisted in a grimace of agony. For a terrifying moment, I'd thought he might be dead. I remembered my oath, the first oath of my young life, but far from the last: before Honored Asuna, I would have my revenge…

"That's enough," Rook said softly.

I opened my eyes and found that the filament was now aglow in my palm, brilliant and pure white, almost too bright to look at. A moment later, I registered that it was searing hot and my hand was pulsing in pain as I burned. I shrieked and jerked away from the thing and, faster than I could even register it, Rook plucked the still-glowing filament out of the air and placed it on the table. Then he took my little hand with his bony, ice-cold fingers and clicked his tongue in disapproval.

"Rod, will you get some salve?"

"Of course, Mister Rook," Rod said. He pulled his gaze from the gradually-dimming crystal.

"M-mister Rook? What just happened?" I asked. My hand still hurt, a band of unhealthy red stretched across my palm, but I was a lot more distracted by what I'd felt shifting within myself in the moment before Rook stopped me. My pleading eyes turned toward him.

"What happened? You just did your first purposeful magic, Vix. You sent your intent out into the world, and the world obeyed. How does that feel?"

"It… it burns?" I may have missed the subtlety of his question.

Rook hummed in amusement, his dark eyes betraying no light in the glow of the filament. "Sometimes it does," he agreed. "The world itself will try to burn you. The trick is to not care that it hurts."