Chapter 2: Three Years and a Borrowed Name

The hunger came in three stages, and he learned to think of it that way because naming things had always been how he managed them.

First there was the hunger that was simply cold and inconvenience, the kind a missed supper produces, the kind he'd endured during Samhain vigils and long campaign rides with Cei and thought himself tested by. That lasted approximately four days after Vel, which told him something humbling about the life he'd been living.

Then there was the hunger that thought. That one sat behind his eyes and conducted a running inventory of everything edible within a twenty-foot radius: the heel of bread on a trader's cart, the marrow smell drifting from someone's window, the half-gnawed bone a dog had abandoned in a ditch and which he'd walked past three times before he stopped counting how many times he'd walked past it. That hunger lasted the better part of two months, and it changed the way he moved through markets — low and quiet and attentive in ways that a king's education had not covered but that turned out, inconveniently, to be native knowledge.