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Let me tell you why I hated Ollivander.

First, that name sucks. And he got a cool nickname: Van. Not even remotely fair. There are no good nicknames to come out of "Leon." Can't even use Leo, because it makes me sound like a Sekhet, and I'm no thief. I can't even tell you how many Sekheti came through the Pit.

Second, Ollivander killed my boyfriend.

Okay, look. I'm not completely delusional. I get Blake fucked a kid and that's messed up. I get that I liked it and that's messed up too. But in the Pit, you didn't make friends--especially as a child--and when you did, you didn't question what form the friendship took. We were all desperate for something we couldn't define, something so commonplace in the world outside that smoky hellscape that you people took it for granted: connection. I'm not saying it was right or anything, just... that's how it was.

Maybe three months after Mom died, the Scrofa decided we were old enough to work. I could barely lift a pickaxe, but they set me to work all the same. Being so young, we only worked thirty minutes in the Maw and an hour and a half breathing before being put on the rock pile for two hours, then two more hours of rest. It would be another few years before we were put on the same work schedule as everyone else, but for now, we were on "light duty." They sometimes put those on the cusp of death from the Lumps on light duty, to squeeze out just a little more labor from them before they died. If you're curious, no. Mom was not one of those. She was on normal labor up to the moment the Lumps in her stomach hemorrhaged bile into her vital organs and she died screaming. Nobody stopped working. The guards just stood and watched as she writhed, and Nola and I tried to hold her down, crying for her to stop, until the guards got fed up and ripped her away from us and tossed her to her death.

Time was funny when you lived your life in the Pit. Days just kind of morphed into long stretches of horror and aching limbs and guts. You didn't count days of the week in the Pit, or even months. You counted seasons, and you only really counted two: summer and winter. Spring and fall just kind of warped into parts of those two, the same as the days warped the weeks and months.

It was our sixth winter when Mom and Blake died, at least as far as we knew. Some days had passed--maybe a couple weeks? I don't know. I know that about then, people started giving me weird looks, including Nola. It scared me, but you didn't show fear in the Pit, so I forced it to become anger instead. Even angry, I didn't dare try to start anything with one of the grown-ups, being so much smaller. Lepids rarely get very big, regardless of age. Bigger than Vulpins, but that isn't saying much. We can get pretty tall, but we're almost always scrawny. Fat Lepids are usually rich as Hells, and wealth didn't exist in the Pit.

I finally snapped when I accidentally struck my knee with my pick. Those things are damned heavy, especially for a six-year-old, and while I was trying to break down a small white rock, the pick head skipped off and the flat of it slammed into my knee. It honestly didn't hurt that bad (I didn't have the strength to swing it hard enough for a ricochet to cause real harm) but I was so frustrated I threw it down and spat a curse at it.

Nola stared at me in horror. "Leon!" she hissed. "Language!"

"Fuck language!" I snarled. "Who cares!"

Nola's lip trembled. "M... Mom cares."

"Mom's dead, stupid."

I regretted the words even as they were leaving my mouth, but I was so damn angry. It took a lot of years before I realized how scary it was that a kid so young could even get that angry. I wanted to hurt her for looking at me so funny all the time, for all of them looking at me funny. But I couldn't hurt them. I could hurt Nola. And holy shit, did I ever.

Her eyes welled up, and she balled her hands into fists at her sides; her ears twitched furiously back and forth. "I hate you. You're awful and mean. You're just mad because Van killed Blake for diddling you."

I started to retort, but froze as my anger-addled young brain tried to process that. "W-wait. What?"

Nola immediately looked uncomfortable. I think she knew she'd gone too far as well. "He d... diddled you." She tripped clumsily over the word. It was clearly unfamiliar to her.

"Uh. What's 'diddling'?"

Nola shrugged. "I dunno. The grown-ups keep saying it. Said that's why Van killed him."

My mouth went even drier than normal for this place. I thought I could feel my lips cracking as I swallowed. "No. No. Blake fell. Off the scaffolding." By the way, let me tell you what a fucking treat it was as a six-year-old to be forced onto the same treacherous, wobbly scaffolding that had thrown your only friend to his death mere months before. Just fucking tops. I pissed myself twice in my first shift, but after my second accident, one of the Scrofa cuffed me so hard my vision went blurry. He told me if I was going to piss on the job, to piss off the side of the scaffolding and not weaken the wood with unnecessary moisture.

Nola's lip quivered for a minute, and I thought she would break first and apologize, but she clenched her jaw at me. "No. Van killed him. And I'm glad. You deserve it."

Nola and I had fought before. Siblings do that, and in a place like this, even little kids got pent-up aggression. But we had never fought like this. I dropped my pick and launched myself at her, tearing at fur and snapping at any exposed flesh, trying to clamp down hard and rip into her with my incisors. We Lepids don't have the same size of incisors as our feral cousins, but they're still pretty damn big, and not so dull they can't pierce flesh with a little effort. For her part, Nola kneed me in the stomach and scratched hard across my face with her jagged little nails. I didn't know she'd taken to chewing them after Mom died to relieve anxiety, but holy shit did I discover it then. I felt three lines of excruciating, burning pain erupt over my right eye.

By the time the Scrofa pulled us apart and bashed us over the head with blackjacks, Nola and I were both a blood-soaked mess. I'd bitten her left arm twice and left two short but deep gouges there, and the vision in my right eye was a blurry red haze.

You might think those kinds of wounds would just fester until infection killed us, but the Warden was a lot smarter than that. Infections meant dead slaves--ooh, sorry, "prisoners"--and that meant lost profits while he dredged up new lifers to have transferred to his little slice of heaven. So all the guards kept rudimentary first aid with them, and soon after the Scrofa had our cuts slathered with foul-smelling salves and wrapped in bandages. Once they were done, the guard captain slapped us both, hard. He was nearly a hand taller than the other Scrofa, and almost as wide as he was tall. The slap nearly sent Nola cross-eyed, and I went tumbling to the ground from the force. "Next time," he snarled, "I throw one of you in the Maw. Maybe your sibling will figure out how to follow the rules."

Even at six, we realized how close we'd come to doing something truly awful. The guards didn't intervene in fights, usually. Most of the time they let them play out and dealt with the consequences after. If they intervened, they genuinely thought one of us was going to kill the other.

We spent our meal break staring at the stale heel of bread and watery vegetable broth in front of us and pointedly avoiding each other's gaze. My depth perception was off because my right eye was completely bandaged. I wanted to stay angry at Nola, but the thought of how badly I'd hurt her made my hands tremble. I couldn't even pick up my food--not that I was at all hungry.

And all the while, her words bored into my skull. Van killed Blake.

I looked up at the aging Lontramar, who sat alone near the entrance to the Den, gnawing on a particularly sad-looking little fish that seemed to be more bone than meat. He didn't seem to mind. His fur had been glossy and well-oiled when he arrived, but time away from water had turned the dark brown fur into a faded, patchy brown-gray, dry and brittle. His small eyes shifted from his meager meal and met mine.

I tried with every fiber of my being to channel all my hurt and hate into my glare. The old Lontramar just stared back impassively. Did he even have emotions? Or was he like the Scrofa here, that just killed people's friends because they felt like it? Why would this fucking old otter do that to me? What did I ever do to him? What did Blake ever do? Van broke the stare first, turning back to his fish with the same disinterest.

I decided, then and there, that I was going to kill Ollivander.