Novels by Heeyya

Nobody had been murdered in Brimstone Market in four hundred years."It's the first thing they teach you," Pip said, riding Ignis's shoulder like a small, smug parrot. "The Truce of Ash. The Abyss and the Hells got sick of burning each other's trade, so they signed a treaty. No blood on the cobbles. Not a drop. If you want to kill somebody, you take it to the Pit.""The Pit," Kaelen said, from his shuffling half-step behind."The arena, east side. The Pit Lords run it. You can bleed there all you like. Anywhere else inside the walls, the Hall sends a clerk.""A clerk.""With a very long list of ways to ruin you." Pip's tail flicked. "People don't die in Brimstone, my boy. They get signed away."It was a better lesson than any map. Kaelen kept his head down, and his eyes moved.The city climbed the crater wall in terraces, and each terrace had its own smell and its own law. The Lower Market was all haggling and smoke, a hundred stalls under red canvas, where hobgoblins sold knives off

Humans did not walk into Brimstone Market. They were walked.Kaelen kept his eyes on the cobbles and the leash slack in front of him and tried to remember how a man with no hope was supposed to shuffle. It was harder than it sounded. The body wanted to stand tall. The old prince had been taught his posture by a swordmaster with a ruler, and every time Kaelen's shoulders squared, a quiet tug at his throat reminded him who was supposed to be in charge.The tug came from Ignis, at the other end of three feet of braided cord, and she was gripping it like a snake that might still bite."Head down," she muttered."It's down.""Lower. And stop looking at the gate."It was hard not to look. Brimstone Market rose out of the ash plain like a blister on the world. The city had been built in the lip of an old crater, tier on tier of black stone and iron scaffolding, lit from within by a hundred thousand lamps the color of rust. The walls were thirty feet thick and carved all over with grinning fa

Five thousand crowns is a great deal of money to spend on a dead boy.Kaelen sat on the tower sill with the poster in his hands and read it a third time. The woodcut had been carved by someone with talent. Beneath it, in the Crown's heavy black ink: Alive, preferred."Alive," he said. "Not 'dead or alive.' Not 'proof of death accepted.' Alive.""I noticed that," said Pip, perched on the shutter. "A corpse is cheap. Nobody pays five thousand for a body unless they've already got a use for the rest of it.""Think," Pip went on. "Somebody's ward breaks, and within a day there are posters on every gatepost for twenty miles. Nobody carves a woodcut that fast. Either the Church is very stupid or it wanted you found."Kaelen had heard that line before, from a very different mouth, on the first day of his second life. It sounded worse in the imp's.Behind them, the bedclothes stirred. Ignis woke the way a cat does, all at once, with her ears forward and her tail flicking. She took the poster

It took Ignis nineteen hours to admit she needed him again, and she did it by trying to start a fight."Draw," she said.Kaelen looked up from the courtyard wall. He had been working through a set of sword forms with a rusted quartermaster's blade, trying to find out what the dead prince's body remembered. It remembered a surprising amount. Church swordmasters had drilled this boy until his hands bled, and his arms still knew the cuts even when the head behind them didn't.Ignis stood at the other end of the yard with her cloak off and her fists wrapped in pale fire. It was whiter than it had been two days ago, a clean silver-gold, almost pretty. She wasn't holding it still. The flame shivered along her knuckles, and her breath came a little too fast."The contract has a clause for this," she said."Dispute resolution. A regulated duel, no lethal blows." He set the sword down. "What's the dispute?""You know what it is.""I really don't."She came at him anyway.She hit like a falling

The imp had spent six years locked in a cellar, and he had come out of it with a better business plan than any man Kaelen had ever met."Ransom," the creature repeated, as if the word were a sweet he was rolling around his mouth. He fanned the cards in his claws and studied them with one yellow eye. "I'd say fifty gold. A hundred, if you've got a taste for theater. I do have a thing about being let out of cages in a dramatic fashion.""We're not here to rescue you," Ignis said."No, no, of course you aren't." The imp looked her up and down, from the burned-off Church sun on her cloak to the horns, and gave a little delighted whistle. "Princess Ignis Ashblood. In a Church cloak. Oh, that's rich. That's the best thing I've seen since the garrison started eating their boots."Ignis went stiff. "You know me.""Sweetheart, I know everyone. It's the whole value proposition."He was about the size of a house cat, with gray-green skin, bat wings folded around him like a scarf, and a barbed ta

Cinder Keep had been abandoned for six years, and somebody had left the pantry fully stocked.Kaelen stood in the kitchen doorway and did not like it. Salt in sealed crocks. Sacks of barley gone gray but dry. A row of iron pots on their hooks, and a ladle still hanging beside the stove as though the cook had stepped out for a smoke. In every campaign he had ever run, a dungeon that left its chests unlocked was hiding something."What are you doing?" Ignis asked behind him."Being suspicious.""Of soup?""Of soup that lasts six years."She had found herself a gray Church cloak and wore it like an insult, belted over her leather, the little sun cut off the breast. Kaelen wore a quartermaster's spare: wool trousers, boots a size too big and stuffed with rag, a tunic with the sun scratched out. The body fit better than it had yesterday. Mortal Tier 4 showed up in small ways. He had shifted a fallen roof beam this morning without noticing.Ignis had mentioned Hallowgate eleven times since

The photographer's pictures didn't show anything.I know because I checked. I spent most of Sunday on my bed with a laptop balanced on my knees, searching every outlet that had sent someone to the library, scrolling through hundreds of frames of myself at various angles, in various expressions. The mayor's hand on my shoulder. The crayon drawing held up like a trophy. A single shot, half hidden behind someone's elbow, of a boy with his face turned away, one hand pressed to his mouth.The bracelet appeared in none of them.I sat looking at that last picture for a long time. In the caption, someone had written, *Overcome with emotion: Guardian pauses during Community Day ceremony.* Underneath it were two thousand comments. *Aww. He's so humble. Protect this boy. He's just a kid. Can't believe he gets so emotional about everything he does for us.*My heart gave a long, slow thump of relief.It lasted until I realized that the relief itself was the problem. I'd gotten away with it. I'd go

The Millhaven Public Library is a squat limestone building with a copper roof gone green with age and a lawn that slopes down to the street in a way that makes everything that happens on it look slightly staged. On the last Saturday of October, someone had hung bunting from its columns, and set up folding chairs in neat rows along the grass, and put a small wooden stage in front of the steps with a banner across it that read MILLHAVEN COMMUNITY DAY: HONORING OUR OWN.I was the *own.*I'd been told it would be small. Marcus had said so at breakfast, and Diane had said so in the car, and the woman from the mayor's office who greeted me at the curb with a clipboard and a smile like a held breath had said so too. *Just a quick presentation. A photo with the mayor. A few words. We'll have you out in forty minutes.* By the time I got there, a crowd of nearly four hundred people had filled the lawn, and there were three television vans parked along the curb.I didn't have the bracelet on whe

By the end of October, I had stopped being a person and become a weather system.That's the closest I can come to it. Before, there had been days when I was a boy who happened to be talked about, and days when I wasn't, and the days when I wasn't felt like small private holidays. After the Marsh bust there were no holidays. Every morning I woke to a phone filled with the same overnight tide of messages, and every morning I understood a little better that none of them were addressed to me.They were addressed to someone who had my name. Someone strong and clear-eyed and never tired, who was out there in the night keeping everyone safe.I'd read the editorials. It was a small, stupid vice, like pressing a bruise. *Millhaven's Teenage Sentinel*, one called me. *The Shadow Deputy*, said another, which I found myself oddly proud of for about four seconds. A columnist from a paper in the capital wrote four thousand words on what she called "the new vigilance," the idea that a boy my age cou

1I lost them in the rail yard, in the end, not through any particular skill. I lost them because I was small enough to fit through a gap beneath a rusted boxcar that the sedan's driver couldn't follow, and because the bracelet let me hold my breath for longer than I should have been able to.I lay in the dark beneath that boxcar for twenty minutes with gravel digging into my ribs and listened to the engine idle, and circle, and finally pull away. When the last sound had died, I crawled out and sat in the weeds with my back against a wheel, shaking so hard that my teeth clicked together.Then I called Ruiz.She picked up on the second ring. She didn't say hello. "Where are you?""The old rail yard. East of the depot. There's a shed, long, with the door half off. Six men, maybe more. They've got a lift, a stack of plates, laptops." I was talking too fast. "I didn't touch anything. I swear. I just — I followed one of them."There was a long silence. I heard something that might have been

I lay on that roof for another forty minutes after the salute, and I didn't move a muscle.It's a skill, being still. Most people think of it as the absence of something, as if you simply stop doing things until the world stops noticing you. It isn't. It's work. It's a hundred tiny decisions, to breathe through your nose, to let your weight sink into the tar, to keep your eyes soft instead of fixed. I'd learned it in the Hensley house, at the end of the hallway on nights when Chloe's friends were over, and it came back to me now with a kind of grim gratitude.The men below me finished what they were doing without any sign of hurry. The one with the laptop closed it. The one with the metal tool slid it up his sleeve like a magician putting away a prop. The gray SUV started with a quiet turn of the key and rolled out of the lot with its headlights off, and the tall man, the one who'd saluted, lingered a moment at the gate.He was in his late thirties, I guessed. Lean, with a long jaw an

Detective Ramona Ruiz didn't look like a woman who needed help from a teenager. She was somewhere in her forties, compact and weathered, with a gray-streaked braid and a jacket that looked as though it had survived a fire. She had a paper cup of what I guessed was terrible coffee in one hand and a manila folder under her arm, and she looked at me across the table in the Millhaven Police Department's third-floor conference room the way you'd look at a tool you weren't sure you wanted to use."Mr. Hensley," she said."Alex is fine.""Mr. Hensley," she said again, patiently. "I'm going to be straight with you. I didn't ask for this meeting. The chief did. He's seen the video from Brookfield, and the one from Kessler, and a lot of the other ones. He's under pressure from the mayor, and the mayor is under pressure from, let's say, the general mood. Everybody in this town loves you. I'd like to understand why that's making my job harder."I'd had an answer ready for that in the car. It left