Mara di Rosso died on a quiet Sunday morning, suspended by a rope from the ceiling in Hasheem's old room, in her father's house.

It wasn't the first time a woman had hung herself in his room, Hasheem had been told. People killed themselves in the pleasure district. These things happened, in the Salasar, in the peninsula. Everyone broke, eventually, one way or another. Some broke into weapons, others into pieces. Some lived, some took another life, some died bringing to life monsters and beasts.

The world made rooms for these things. It made rooms for change when one wished for change, for courage when one chose to face its consequences, for love and desire when life demanded vengeance, for kindness and compassion when one drew the line between humans and beasts.

Humans and beasts. Hasheem asked himself that Sunday morning, staring at the bruises on her dangling feet, storing into memory the piercing creak of the beam above her swinging corpse, if what he had done or was about to do would make him a beast or a man, if there ever was a time where the line was constant and reliable, when things were as simple as the black and white that separated the lands they lived in and fought for, if he would find the answer in the ending of his life, or the beginning.

***

He was sold for the price of a pig, was the common introduction to the story of his life people liked to hear. That particular line, among the other, more spiced-up or entirely made-up ones, happened to be quite accurate.

Five hundred silas was the actual sum. Back then, it was considered outrageously high for a ten-year-old boy. In the world of slave auction, the starting price for a child that young was just fifty, given they weren't being offered for free as a bundle deal with the mother. Young boys and girls needed more time to train. They also made mistakes, lacked the strength needed for most jobs, and could die young. Not a great investment, unless one were out of options.

Some children were, however, the most profitable assets for the pleasure district of Rasharwi. Men could be expected to pay a good fee to break the innocents, and comely children could be sold above market price for such purpose. In the business of pleasure, it was also considered wise to train them young. Children had less resistance, could be taught and shaped into whatever was needed, made to believe it was what their lives were meant to be.

By the hands of Fate or whichever god who had sought to curse him out of boredom, Hasheem hadn't been born comely, not just anyway. At ten, his was already a face that made people stare and hold their breaths staring—the kind of face that stood out in the crowd. But more than that, he was a pureblood Shakshi, born, raised, conveniently orphaned and directly plucked from the White Desert during the raid that wiped out his kha'gan. As with most purebloods, his typical package of light hair, pale eyes, and dark skin was a rarity in a city full of black-haired, fair-skinned Rashais. An exotic flower, the auctioneer had said to raise his price.

Beauty, however, was a privilege until it singled one out from the rest to be sent to private quarters of captains and generals before the auctions commenced. They couldn't do that with girls whose virginity had a price. Boys, however, didn't lose their values no matter how many times one used them. They also couldn't become pregnant, so they were used with little care, often, and often for free.

They had–– not unexpectedly––used him the most often during those eight months while waiting to be sold in the holding cells at Sabha. By the time Hasheem had been put on auction, there wasn't much he hadn't been through. These things, of course, had value, and pleasure house bidders knew experience and endurance when they saw them. Unsurprisingly, his was the highest price paid for boys that day. The bid had been won by the House of Azalea, the biggest, most profitable pleasure house in Rasharwi.

It was the first time Hasheem had learned the art of trading. You could do that if you listened, observed, and connected the right dots during auctions. You'd learn, for instance, that the value of a product had less to do with what it was, and more to do with what it could be, or what you made people believe it could be. Anything could be sold at auction if you could do that well enough, even garbage.

Such a craft was a ticket out of anything, into anywhere. It didn't take Hasheem long to realize that if they could sell him for a better price than he was worth, then there was nothing to stop him from selling himself to a better life than the one they'd thrown him in. One could focus on that, understand that there was nothing to be gained by crying for help, take pride out of the equation, and start getting results. For a slave, crying was a one way ticket to getting you whipped, and those whose only talent was to feel sorry for themselves always ended up in the sewers, eaten by rats, or things that ate rats.

Now, there were only two options for a boy cursed with his face in the pleasure district—he could serve the largest number of clients unwillingly or willingly serve just a few by being exceptionally good. The choice was never difficult for anyone in his position. The implementation required the same things any success in life did: endurance and tenacity.

Endurance and tenacity were what he had. You couldn't survive Sabha for eight months without growing some of those along with warts and a supernatural ability to tolerate all kinds of human waste and everything in-between. One also had to remember that he came from the desert, where death happened on a daily basis and waking up the next morning was what they prayed for at night. By comparison, life in the pleasure district was bearable, even comfortable at times. For the very least the owners tried to keep you alive––until you ran out of reasons anyway.

Things became straightforward after that. Reading people was simple when you learned to look at clients as humans, not beasts. Deep down, people always wanted something more than sex when they came to the pleasure district––a distraction, some attention, an opportunity to hold power for once in their lives, a need for release, and, on rare occasions, even love. Give them those, and sometimes, though not often, you could even get paid without having to take off your clothes.

Reading people was what he was good at, and by the end of his career, the fee for a night with him could feed a small village for a week––with pigs thrown in as extras.

They called him the Silver Sparrow. Silver for the shade of his eyes. Sparrow for the color of his hair. That name, given to him by his owner to elevate his status, had landed him on the paths of some immensely powerful people. One of those happened to be Deo di Amarra, a royal advisor to Salar Muradi of Rasharwi, an entrepreneur with investments in half the businesses in the city, and the master of the most exclusive house of assassins catering only to the elites of the Salasar. The most influential man in the peninsula, some would say.

Deo di Amarra's decision to buy him was made on the first day they met and before it was over.

The actual trade happened two years later, before which time he continued working for the House of Azalea while apprenticing under Deo di Amarra, or Dee, Hasheem had come to call him. During those years, he was taught everything from trade, politics, and, most importantly, the art of killing. At the end of the two-year period, a sum of five hundred thousand silas was paid in gold by Deo di Amarra to fully acquire him into his service—the equivalent of the price for a thousand pigs, most people would point out to finish the story.

It was how he became both the Silver Sparrow and Deo di Amarra's first class assassin, how his worth had gone from one pig to a thousand. With endurance and tenacity.

He was going to need both of those things again tonight, Hasheem thought one evening on his seventh year of living in Rasharwi, trying, as discreetly as he could, to pick a piece of something that might have come off a kidney or liver from his sleeve before it was noticed. Not that identifying it was required. Kidney or liver, entrails were supposed to stay inside the corpse when the job was done professionally, and professionalism was important to Deo di Amarra. He didn't see himself being given those two choices now, not for the crime he had done, but considering the circumstances, he could still try to die quickly, as opposed to dying slowly, painfully, and in as many pieces as possible.

Standing in a robe of exquisite golden brown bear pelt, arms crossed over his chest by his priceless desk carved out of a single oak tree, Deo di Amarra stood staring at him with an expression of someone who'd just taken a mouthful of leftover wine and being deprived of a decent way to spit it out.

A bad sign, considering his wine habit.

Not that Hasheem was expecting anything different. If Deo di Amarra wanted you brought in as opposed to killing you on the spot when he found out you'd just dismembered someone on his protected list, it meant he wanted to let you know how pissed he was before you died. Out of principles.

"Ravi's precious cunt," Dee rasped in his native Khandoor tongue, disgust dripping off his face. "That's Makena fucking silk, you ungrateful imbecile. Do you have the slightest idea what that shit costs?"

It cost a day's job at most with his fee, but one didn't try to argue with Dee, especially when he started swearing. "I wanted to die pretty." He decided lightening the mood might help a bit. Sometimes, you could get away with all kinds of feces if he liked your answer enough.

"Did you now?" The tone, this time, rose to a pitch usually reserved for a kitchen staff who'd messed up an expensive cut of meat or spilled a priceless wine. Which, to Dee, happened to be a crime of equivalent proportion to having his most trusted subordinate gone off on a killing spree and getting himself chased down by half the city over a personal agenda. "Understand me, my prancing little peacock." Dee shot off the desk he'd been leaning on and took a step forward, just in case his apprentice was half-deaf, or perhaps to make sure that happened. "No five-hundred-thousand silas purchase of mine is going to walk out on me or die in anything until I say so. The next time you want to get yourself killed, have the fucking decency to ask for permission or I will make sure you don't die so I can put you back on auction for a tenth of the price to be used like cattle for life and die eaten by pigs, never mind how pretty you are."

He'd expected that, truly. They were as close as could be as master and apprentice, but everyone who knew him well knew Deo di Amarra put profits before all else, without exceptions.

To Hasheem's surprise, and for all his seventy-something-word curses in three dialects packed in a single sentence with no punctuations in sight, Dee was on his feet, leading him into the study.

The room was warm when Hasheem walked in, telling him the fireplace had been lit for some time. His mentor had known his plan, it seemed, perhaps even before his arrival at the general's estate. Had prepared for it, actually. Probably could have stopped him too, but hadn't, for some reason Hasheem would rather not find out. The evidence of it appeared in the form of clean clothes, a pack filled with supplies, and enough weapons to besiege a fort, all arranged neatly on the oversized desk, along with his Jar of Souls.

The jar was there to make a point. Assassins didn't count their dead. They counted coins, silver, gold, and reputations that made it into the nightmares of people whose names had been written on a piece of paper––a piece of paper small enough to fit in one's palm yet large enough to hold a life. Dee collected those. He had the jar on display in his study for all to see, next to a quill and a stack of blank papers ready for him to write someone into that jar.

Hasheem had imagined himself contributing to its content tonight. Apparently, Dee had another thing in mind.

"You're letting me go?" he asked, still trying to understand how it was even an option. Helping him escape was crossing the line; it would make Dee an accomplice, a traitor. Advisor to the Salar or not, it could get him executed or thrown into prison for life. Killing him was the simplest, safest, most logical solution, he would have agreed on that advice, might have even advised it. "Why?"

Dee ignored his question, walked over to the nearest torch, took it down from the wall. "Sit," he said. "Take off that silk."

"Dee," he said, realizing all of the sudden what the torch was for. "It's a death sentence to tamper with the mark of the Salar." The only way he would live past tonight was for him to run, and to do that, the mark of slavery on his back had to be gone, or wherever he ended up, anyone who saw it would drag him back to Rasharwi. There were rewards for turning in runaway slaves, and someone of his reputation would fetch a sum large enough for a whole village to hunt him down, if not the entire peninsula.

Deo di Amarra snorted. "I know the laws of this peninsula better than you know how to fuck, boy. Shut up and sit down."

It was the end of the conversation. When Dee used that tone, you obeyed.

"Do you remember the passage leading to Sabha? The one I showed you on the map?"

"I do, ye—" Hasheem clenched his fists, forced the scream back down his throat as the flame licked the back of his right shoulder. That could have been better with a warning.

"Behind the second brick from the bottom on your right is the key to the outer gate of the fortress. Put it back when you're done. Do you understand?"

Hasheem nodded, holding down a groan as the fire continued to burn off the brand on his back.

"Once you're out, you'll be in Shakshi territory. If you run into a Kha'gan and they catch you, make up a story, a good one. They'll kill you if they find out you've been branded."

That, they would. The Shakshis wouldn't send him back to Rasharwi—they would kill him on the spot. It didn't matter that he was one of them. The Kha'gans had been at war with the Salasar for centuries. They took zero risks when it came to having spies in their lands. In the White Desert, deserters or captured slaves bearing the mark of the Salar were killed on sight without trial.

"Lie low and try to make it to Makena one way or another. You'll be safe there if you can make it. Or you can stay in the White Desert, if they'll take you back."

If they'll take me back.

He might have laughed at that if only the burn on his back hadn't hurt so much. These people had more reasons to hunt him down than the Rashais. For them to take him back would require him to lie. They cut out your tongue for that, if he remembered correctly.

Moreover, this was the White Desert they were talking about, the largest unclaimed strip of the peninsula filled with inexorably proud, code-abiding, unforgiving Shakshis and their White Warriors that made Rashai soldiers piss their pants at the mere sight of their white robes. The White Desert, where the heat killed during the day and the cold turned corpses into ice at night, preserving them in perfect condition to be eaten by wolves in the morning. There was no other place on the peninsula as brutal as his former home, which was precisely why the Salasar had never been able to claim it. The Shakshis had survived every day—for generations—in the harshest conditions the land had to offer, meanwhile Rashai soldiers were fed like pigs, fattened by wine, entertained by whores, and woke up in warm beds stuffed with enough wool to suffocate a sheep.

And he had been living like a Rashai for the past seven years––except for the whore part.

No, he would rather take his chances to reach Makena. Far, yes, but still a better plan than hoping the Kha'gans would take him in as one of their own. He didn't even see himself now as one of them. Couldn't even remember what the tents looked like or how to milk a goddamn goat.

"Which way do I go?" he asked sometime later when Dee was applying a layer of salve on his back. There were several ways he could get to Makena, but all of them would require going through the White Desert. Hasheem had only a vague knowledge of his homeland or the different Kha'gans that ruled it since he'd been taken by the Salasar. It seemed like a good idea to know now.

Dee didn't reply. He finished bandaging the wound, helped him change, handed him weapons.

When it was done, after the long, crippling silence between them, the last thing Dee said to him, his parting gift, were two simple words.

"Go west."