The curse hit all five of them at midnight on the winter solstice, which was, Tev would later reflect, an aggressively clichéd time for a prophecy to activate.
He was sitting in the back room of a tavern in Ashenmere when it happened, running a game of bone dice against a merchant who was sweating considerably more than the room temperature warranted. The stakes were not inconsiderable. Tev had been having a very good night.
Then something drove a spike of cold light through his left palm.
He swore, loudly, in four languages. The merchant yelped and overturned the table. Tev pressed his hand to his chest, fingers spread, and watched through watering eyes as the light faded — leaving behind a mark. A shard-shaped mark, silver-white against his brown skin, glowing faintly at the edges like a coal that hadn't quite decided whether to die.
*Well,* he thought, once the pain had subsided to a manageable throb. *That's new.*
---
He found the first of the others three hours later.
The girl was in the city's eastern quarter, in an alley between a chandler's workshop and a building Tev did not require assistance identifying. She was pressed against the chandler's wall, holding her right hand out in front of her with the focused intensity of someone who very much wanted it to stop doing what it was doing.
Her mark was in the same place as his. Same shape. Same light.
She looked up when she heard his footsteps. She was young — nineteen, twenty, perhaps — with the kind of face that had learned watchfulness early. Her clothes were expensive but worn with a deliberate carelessness that suggested she was trying to look like they weren't. A noble's daughter who'd learned to move like she wasn't.
"Does yours hurt?" she said, without preamble.
"Less than it did," Tev said. "Give it another hour."
She studied him with quick, assessing eyes. "You're a thief," she said.
"Retired," he said.
"No such thing." She pushed off the wall and pulled her sleeve down over the mark. "My name is Asha Veldren. Lord Hadon Veldren's third daughter, which means I'm the one he can afford to lose. I've been studying the Shattered Crown for two years, which is apparently how I ended up —" she gestured at her covered hand "— whatever this is."
"Tev," he said. "No family name worth mentioning. I touched a shard fragment three months ago on a job. Didn't think anything of it at the time." He paused. "I've been having very strange dreams since then."
"About a god being torn apart," she said, flatly, like someone confirming directions.
"About a god being torn apart," he agreed.
She looked at her covered hand, then back at him. "There are going to be more of us."
"I know."
"We should find them before someone else does."
He considered this. He was not, historically, a person who worked with others. He was particularly not a person who worked with nobles' daughters who looked at people like they were assessing the structural integrity of a building they were about to enter without permission.
"Lead the way," he said.
---
The third was a monk, which surprised both of them. He was sitting cross-legged outside the Temple of the First Flame, very still, looking at his marked hand with the serene expression of someone who had been given information he had always suspected was coming.
His name was Brother Osalan. He was forty-three, had been with the Temple for twenty years, and had been studying accounts of the Shattered Crown since he was a novice, an interest his superiors had tolerated as a harmless obsession.
"I always believed the shards were dormant," he said, when Tev and Asha had identified themselves. "That the curse was a metaphor — a theological construct describing the absence of divine completeness rather than a literal fragmenting." He looked at his hand. "I'm revising that position."
"Can you fight?" Asha asked.
"I'm a monk," he said.
"That's not a no," Tev observed.
Osalan smiled slightly. "I know seventeen ways to kill a man without raising my voice. The Temple teaches violence as a last resort, not an impossibility." He rose to his feet with the fluid ease of someone who practised regularly. "Where are we going?"
"To find the other two," Asha said.
---
The fourth was in a prison.
This created a logistical complication that Tev navigated with professional fluency, Asha financed with aristocratic efficiency, and Osalan prayed about quietly while waiting outside. The prisoner — Davan, who refused to give a second name — was a soldier who had been awaiting execution for the past six weeks on charges Tev assessed as "politically inconvenient" rather than actually criminal.
He was large, scarred, and looked at the three of them with the resigned expression of someone who had expected tonight to be his last and was now recalibrating.
"The curse," he said, when they explained, looking at his marked hand. "I thought it was a fever dream from the dungeon damp."
"It wasn't," Asha said.
"I gathered." He flexed his marked hand, testing it. "If I come with you, I'm not your soldier."
"None of us are anyone's anything," Tev said. "We're five people with the same problem."
Davan looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and picked up the sword they'd brought.
---
The fifth found them.
She was waiting in the inn where Asha had secured rooms — sitting at the table in the common area, three empty cups in front of her, playing patience with a deck of cards that had been annotated in a cramped, precise hand. She was older than the others, perhaps fifty, with grey-streaked hair and the kind of calm that comes from having survived several things that probably should have killed her.
Her name was Sera Nighthollow. She was a cartographer. She had mapped the suspected locations of four of the five crown shards over the past decade, as an academic exercise, which she now understood to have been something else entirely.
"I have a map," she said, looking up from her cards. "I assume that's useful."
"Extremely," Asha said.
"Good." She set down the jack of shadows on the queen of flames and looked at all four of them in turn. "I should tell you that the shortest route to the first shard passes through the Hollow Reach, which is actively contested territory between House Mavar and the Free Armies, and that three of the four other shard locations are in the sovereign territories of kingdoms that want nothing to do with each other."
"So we'll be unwelcome everywhere," Davan said.
"Almost everywhere," Sera said. "I know a few places that don't care either way." She swept the cards into a pile and stood. "When do we leave?"
Tev looked at the other three. Four strangers and a cartographer with a curse in their hands and a dead god's shattered crown to reassemble.
