This gauntlet was more than a piece of stolen armor. It was my brother’s education. Three years’ worth of food. Tickets out of Zilvaren, south, to where the reckoning winds that buffeted the dry-boned hills were twenty degrees cooler than here in the Silver City. We’d have enough money left over to buy a small house if we wanted to. Nothing fancy. Just something weatherproof. Something I could leave to Hayden when, not if, the guardians finally caught up with me.
