Hatcher didn’t sleep. He stared at the wooden beams that ran across the room of the cottage, listened to the witch who’d given them her hospitality tying bunches of dried herbs in the next room.
He knew she was doing this because he could hear the rasp of twine against the stems, just like he could hear the squirrel chittering in the tree outside and the scrape of a bear’s claws on the ground a half mile away. He was not the same man he’d been before the White Queen
(Jenny she was Jenny she was your daughter your only child turned into a monster because you didn’t watch over her the way a father should because you were too busy being a Big Man in Town)
turned him into a wolf, a wolf that was supposed to come at her call, but she couldn’t call anymore because Alice had taken off her head.
Now he was sometimes a man and sometimes a wolf, and even when he was a man it was hard to shake the wolf off entirely. There was always a part of him that was out in the night, running until all the terrible things he’d done fell away into nothing.
Hatcher knew he should let those terrible things go, let the foolish boy he’d been fade into the ghost he ought to be. But maybe that was a foolish thought, too, to think that he could leave his past like lost luggage, something forgotten in a train station.
I can’t forget. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I don’t deserve to.
But everyone deserves happiness, don’t they? Even me.
Maybe happiness doesn’t mean you’re absolved, though. Maybe happiness doesn’t mean you’re allowed to forget.
And there were good times, too. Or at least what passed for good times in that stinking stew.
Back when you were Nicholas, and you were going to be the greatest fighter in the Old City.
* * *
“Where do you think you’re going now, useless boy?” Bess said.
She didn’t say it, though; she screeched it out in that way that made Nicholas shudder and slam the door behind him without answering. It was a moot question anyhow—she knew where he was going and who he was going to do it with, but if he said it out loud she’d only use it as an excuse to have another screaming match and he wasn’t in the mood.
Soon he would have enough from his winnings to leave the old hag’s house anyway. Just a few more fights, he promised himself, though he’d also promised himself a sharp new pair of leather boots. It wouldn’t do to go around in the same pair he’d been wearing for the last three years, the soles peeling away and the laces broken beyond repair.
He fingered the shiny silver buttons of his new waistcoat and tried not to feel guilty over the purchase. What was so wrong with wanting to look smart instead of threadbare? When he’d come home wearing the garment Bess had nearly burned his ears off, shouting about the cost of feeding him for so many years and how the least he could do was contribute instead of fancying himself up like a peacock.
A peacock, he thought with contempt as he made his way through the maze of streets and alleys toward the fighting club. I’m no peacock. Peacocks are those rich sharps up in the New City, the ones with carriages and walking sticks and oil in their hair. I’m no peacock.
As he walked he heard his name being called by the various denizens of the neighborhood, shopkeepers and whores and gamblers and gangsters, all of them as familiar to him as his own hand. He’d grown up here, on these streets and with these people, a part of the filth that stained the Old City.
And I’ll always be filth, and proud of it. Nicholas would never be anything else, and he didn’t aspire to be. He only wanted to be free, and money meant freedom—the freedom to have his own roof and come and go as he pleased, the freedom to buy what he wanted when he wanted it.
He wanted new clothes and whiskey that hadn’t been watered down and a steak on his table every night, a real one, not scraps from the cheapest joint at the butcher’s.
To get to the fighting club he had to cross into the red streets. This was the part of the Old City where every inch was ruled by one gang boss or another, and they fought each other for supremacy. Some blocks changed hands two or three times a day, as the tides of battle turned or a third party came in to take advantage of the chaos.
Those who lived in the red streets kept their heads down and paid their tithes to whoever was in power that day. Life wasn’t any better or worse under one or another, and it wasn’t as if leaving was an option. The men who controlled the New City never allowed the garbage of the Old City to dirty their cobblestones, and there was only so much space in the Old City with the New City circling it like a shining silver prison. Besides, what good was it to move from one street to another street? There would only be another gang.
Nicholas didn’t care whether he walked in the red streets or not. He’d already gained enough of a reputation as a fighter that few would cross him, and he’d made it clear that he wouldn’t be bought by any gang. Putting himself under the thumb of a boss wasn’t his idea of freedom.
The fighting club was tucked in the basement of a whorehouse. To someone not from the Old City this might seem a strange place for a club until one realized that more than half the buildings in the red streets were whorehouses. The sight of half-dressed women, their lips smiling scarlet underneath hard eyes, was so common that Nicholas barely noticed it.
He hurried down the stone steps to the wooden door below. He knocked twice and a rough voice asked, “What do you want?”
“It’s Nicholas,” he said.
The door swung open. Pike, the doorman, grunted at Nicholas as he walked in.
“Boss wants to see you,” Pike said.
Nicholas checked his stride, but only just. Usually when the boss, a man called Dagger Dan with a warped ear and three missing teeth, wanted to see you it meant nothing good for you.
Dagger Dan was called so not because he was especially fond of knives (which might be presumed, with a nickname like that) but because his fists were so sharp in the ring that his opponents felt like they were being stabbed repeatedly. It was well-known that Dan used those fists liberally when one of the boys—Dan called everyone a boy, even the ancient men who hung around the club playing cribbage when they couldn’t fight any longer—was called in to see him.
But Nicholas hadn’t committed any offense—at least, none that he could think of. Offenses ranged from poor fighting (which brought in less money at the pits), throwing a fight without the express consent of Dagger Dan, cheating Dan out of his share of the fighter’s take (Dan took a percentage, since he arranged the fights) and so on.
In general, if you made Dan less money than he thought you ought to, whether by accident or guile, you were called into his office and given a taste of why you should strongly reconsider your actions in the future.
Since Nicholas had no such stain on his soul he simply nodded at Pike and proceeded into the club with almost no trepidation whatsoever.
Pike sat in a kind of anteroom just inside the doorway. There was nothing here except a wooden stool for him to perch on and a hook for his coat and hat. The anteroom was always filled with smoke, for Pike puffed away continuously, rolling the next cigarette before the one that dangled from his lip was burned through.
An open doorway led from Pike’s station into the main floor of the club. There were three rings for practice fights—always occupied by fighters and frequently surrounded by the less ambitious among them placing bets on their favorites. Heavy sacks filled with sand were set at intervals for those who wanted to practice punching while the rings were full. Everywhere was the smell of stale sweat and blood and beer—most fighters drank beer between fights, since the water was frequently of questionable cleanliness. The remainder of the room was taken up by tables populated with older fighters, most of whom spent their time playing games that didn’t require their fists.
I’ll never be one of them, Nicholas thought. When I’m done fighting I’m going to be somebody, not an old man
clinging to the last best days of my life.
A few of the fighters called out to Nicholas as he passed, and he called back in a cheery voice that didn’t betray any of the (very small) amount of anxiety churning in the bottom of his stomach. Most of the men were at their own work, slugging away at the sandbags or sparring in the practice rings.
The vast majority of a fighter’s training happened outside the club, though, since the single best quality any fighter needed was the ability to stay in the ring as long as possible. There were no rules in a fighting pit except that if a fighter knocked down his opponent and the opponent stayed down for more than thirty seconds the one who hit him was declared the winner. So most fighters trained up their endurance, some of them hiking around the Old City several miles a day to increase their lung capacity and therefore their ability to stay in the ring long enough to deliver the final blow.
Nicholas himself would run in a loop early in the morning, in the small hours when all the criminals went to sleep but before the decent folk got up to set out fruit in their stalls or deliver the milk. His old boots would ring against the cobblestones as he circled around the streets he knew so well, three or four or sometimes five times, until his chest felt ready to burst open and his legs were on fire. Then he would return to the small bedroom in Bess’ house. He’d curl his hands in fists with the knuckles on the floor and brace on his toes and then press his body up and down as many times as he could, until he was exhausted or Bess called him to breakfast.
Dan’s office was on the far side of the room. A thug called Harp sat outside the office day and night, his massive size straining the chair that he perched on. Harp was well over six and a half feet, easily the largest man Nicholas had ever seen. There was no fat anywhere on his body, no hint of softness from the sharp cheekbones to the scarred fists. He wasn’t the smartest fellow in the Old City by a long shot, but he was unswervingly loyal to Dan and always willing to mete out punishment with fervor.
Harp nodded at Nicholas. “Dan wants to see you.”
Nicholas gave Harp his coolest nod in return, so supremely unconcerned it might have had frost on it. Harp reached out one of his enormous fists and banged on the office door once.
“Enter,” Dan’s voice called.
Nicholas pushed open the door. Only at that moment would he allow himself to admit that his heart beat faster than he liked. It wasn’t that he was frightened of Dan, exactly. It was only the uncertainty of the moment, and underneath it a burgeoning sense of outrage that he might have been falsely accused of some wrongdoing.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Sit, boy,” Dan said, gesturing at the wooden chair that he kept for visitors.
Dan didn’t have a desk. A desk, he once had told Nicholas, would only get in the way if he had to be “active,” as he put it. There was a large safe in the corner of the room where Dan kept cash and account books and, it was rumoured, the occasional stash of opium.
Nicholas was certain Dan wasn’t a full-time opium trader, just a dabbler who occasionally took advantage of opportunities that came his way. The fight boss would need permission from one of the bigger gangs just to lay hands on a larger quantity of product, and Nicholas didn’t think Dan was keen to be pressured by a hand higher than his own. Dan liked to be the one who did the pressing.
Other than the safe there was a large chair for Dan himself to sit in while he contemplated the state of his business. This wasn’t a plain hard wooden affair like the guest chair. This was an opulent stuffed thing, red shot through with swirls of gold thread, something better suited for the parlor of a nobleman—or perhaps a prostitute’s sitting room. Now that Nicholas considered this, he realized this was exactly where the chair had come from in the first place.
The walls of the office were papered with fight notices, many of them featuring Dagger Dan himself, although if Dan especially favored a fighter then one of those notices might make their way into these hallowed halls.
Dan himself wasn’t especially large—he wasn’t as tall as Nicholas, who topped up at six feet and at seventeen years old was still growing. But the older man had an outsize personality, a presence that made him seem bigger than he was. He was whippet lean, his body a slender knot of muscles tied to bone. His hair was red and mostly gone from his head and his eyes were blue and harder than diamonds, though at the moment they were thoughtful.
Nicholas sat in the wooden chair, which had been placed directly across from Dan’s. He breathed out a tiny sigh of relief. If Dan had intended to interrogate or beat him then the chair would be in the center of the room, all the better to intimidate. Dan liked to walk around behind a fighter when he wanted to throw another man off guard, make him worry about where the blow was coming and when. The change of furniture position meant that Dan only wanted to talk to Nicholas, though he still had no notion of what the topic might be.
He waited. Whatever his inward feelings, Nicholas had realized from a very young age that showing his emotions was not productive. The more people knew about you, the more they’d try to take advantage. It had been hard work to learn how to keep his face smooth and noncommittal, perhaps mildly interested. He would never show if he was angry or sad or scared—especially scared, as a hint of blood in the air would make all the predators swarm.
Dan leaned back in his chair, crossed his ankle over the opposite knee—a king at his leisure. Nicholas sat easily in his chair—not slumped, not insouciant, not in any way disrespectful—but made certain that Dan saw he wasn’t troubled by this meeting.
“I like you, boy,” Dan said abruptly.
“Thank you,” Nicholas said. He was surprised by this, because Dan had never seemed to notice him especially, nothing beyond the usual “Well done, boy” that he gave out to every fighter who didn’t lose.
“I’ve been watching you. You keep your head down, do your work and do it well.” Dan’s eyes strayed to the shiny silver buttons on Nicholas’ waistcoat. “Have a bit of weakness for the flash, but who doesn’t? It’s better than some weaknesses. You don’t drink more than you ought or come in with your eyes red-rimmed from the pipe. And you’ve won every fight since you joined the club.”
Nicholas nodded. He wasn’t certain where Dan was going with all of this, but it was best to keep his mouth shut until the destination was clear.
“I’ve had an . . . opportunity, you might say, come my way. And I’ve been thinking hard on who I should give this opportunity to. There are plenty of fighters out in that club that have more experience than you. There are a few that are as tall as you are, but have more bulk on them and might stand a better chance against this particular opponent because of that. But I like you. I like the way you dig in, the way you won’t let yourself stay down if you’re knocked down. And I think you might be fast and agile enough to stay out of this man’s reach long enough to win.”
Nicholas knew very well that was his prompt, so he said, “Who is this fighter?”
Dan’s mouth quirked up for just a second, an almost-smile. “The Grinder.”
The Grinder. Nicholas tried hard to school his face, but he knew that a flicker of shock showed there.
“You’re surprised,” Dan said, and this time he really did smile. “As well you might be. A fighter of his stature doesn’t usually brawl with pit boys like you or me.”
Nicholas noticed that Dan had put them on the same footing, and that surprised him as much as anything else.
“The Grinder doesn’t fight in pits anymore, as well you know. He fights in a ring for the nobs of the New City. The trouble is, he’s just too good at what he does. Any fighter that goes up against him gets ground up like meat under those paws, and you know that’s where he got his name from. It’s not so interesting anymore for those rich boys to watch a fight when they know the outcome. Which means that more and more of the nobs are finding that they’d rather watch fights elsewhere, or spend their money o
n something besides gambling.”
“So the takes are shrinking,” Nicholas said.
Dan laid his finger on the side of his nose. “You’ve got the way of it. The Grinder has ground up every respectable fighter in the circuit and the few he hasn’t don’t want anything to do with him. They don’t want their careers ruined in one round. Grinder’s . . . agent came to me, offering good money for a strong fighter who might be able to go up against him, give the nobs the kind of bloody show they want.”
It was a funny thing, but Nicholas was certain Dan had been about to say “Grinder’s owner” instead of “Grinder’s agent.” He wondered who this man might be, and then thought it was better not to know what kind of person held such a fearsome leash.
“What do you say, boy? It’s a guaranteed number plus a piece of the take, as usual.”
“How much?” Nicholas asked.
Dan named a figure that Nicholas couldn’t have earned if he had a hundred fights that year. He was fairly certain his face didn’t change but his heart was hammering. So much money.
Nicholas sat back and clasped his hands together, trying to give the occasion the kind of due process it deserved. He shouldn’t jump at the chance just because he was about to make more money than he could ever make in his life. He shouldn’t be so willing to throw his body away just because this was the thing he’d been waiting for, the shiny gold ring at the top of the mountain, and all he had to do to pluck it off was fight.
But look who you’re fighting, you fool.
The Grinder. A man so fearsome that his name was whispered in the pits like the legend of some bogeyman, a killer who would come for you sleeping or awake.
When Nicholas was younger (and had managed to sneak some money out of Bess’ purse for the occasion) he’d seen the Grinder fight. This had been in the pits, of course—Nicholas would never have been permitted to enter the New City.
The Grinder had seemed as big as a mountain to young Nicholas, his shoulders as broad as some men were tall. His thighs strained against the seams of his pants and Nicholas had half expected those tremendous muscles to burst through the cloth. The Grinder’s arms looked like massive tree trunks and at the end of them were those already legendary fists, fists that pulverized the Grinder’s opponents better than any butcher’s hammer.
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