They say the small survive by staying unseen. Jed is done being small.
Grayhaven runs on smoke and sea-coal, on work songs hummed by the folk no one sees. Jed—kobold, runner, tool-hand—knows every crack in the city’s stone. When a Blackenguard purge turns his life to ash, he breaks the oldest rule: keep your head down.
Names surface in the soot. One name burns brighter than the rest—Veynar. To reach him, Jed will have to live where the big folk hunt: alleys and gallows, markets that grind the small into feedstock. With quick hands, sharper tools, and the city’s shadows for cover, he begins to tip the balance.
For Scales Alone is a grim, fast-moving fantasy about debt and justice—where the law weighs nothing, and scales can be forced.
They say the small survive by staying unseen. Jed is done being small.
Grayhaven runs on smoke and sea-coal, on work songs hummed by the folk no one sees. Jed—kobold, runner, tool-hand—knows every crack in the city’s stone. When a Blackenguard purge turns his life to ash, he breaks the oldest rule: keep your head down.
Names surface in the soot. One name burns brighter than the rest—Veynar. To reach him, Jed will have to live where the big folk hunt: alleys and gallows, markets that grind the small into feedstock. With quick hands, sharper tools, and the city’s shadows for cover, he begins to tip the balance.
For Scales Alone is a grim, fast-moving fantasy about debt and justice—where the law weighs nothing, and scales can be forced.
The tunnels sweated with salt and life.
Stone here was never dry; it breathed with the sea, wept with it. Fissures exhaled tide-warm air that curled along the floor, carrying the hush of waves muffled by tons of rock. Every wall bore the record of claws—scratches layered over scratches, generations of small hands turning seabed into shelter. Smoke still clung to the ceiling. The warrens smelled of brine, singed rope, and the faint copper of scale-oil.
Morning meant rhythm, not sun. A hundred chores rose together: cooks banked coals with palms black as the pans; fish split clean under knives of sharpened bone; hatchlings skittered until a hiss sent them upright like proper folk, little claws ticking stone, tails twitching to keep balance. A hammerstone tapped leather somewhere down the main run—tap, turn, tap—steady as a second heart. A pair of elders shuffled by with nets over their shoulders, nodding toward Jed’s niche before vanishing into the side shaft.
Jed sat cross-legged in his stitch-niche, tail curled thick around his ankle, awl in one hand and a bone needle in the other. It was scarred from work, the tip blunted from years of scraping stone floors. He was stocky for his kind, broad-jawed, scales the dull gray of wet stone. His claws were worn smooth by thread, his shoulders carrying a quiet hunch, like someone who had learned not to expect ceilings to be kind.
Opposite him, Kep—three seasons old and restless as a dropped ember—twitched and kicked while Jed tried to finish his slipper. The boy’s pale tail lashed happily against the wall, slim and quick like the rest of him.
“Hold still, or I’ll stitch it to your foot,” Jed muttered, tightening his grip on the boy’s ankle.
Kep snorted a laugh and kicked again, his tail thumping the wall, pleased with himself.
“You kick one more time, you’ll wear thread burns for a week.” Jed didn’t look up, though his mouth quirked. He bent and pressed his muzzle briefly to the boy’s heel before setting the needle steady again.
At the mouth of the niche, Yarra sat plaiting net twine. Her scales were burnished copper, catching the dim with a warm edge. She was lean, sharp-frilled, her brow-crest giving strangers the impression she was always scowling. Her tail was long, the frill at its tip flicking when she was impatient. She glanced at her husband with dry humor.
“Threatening him before first meal?” she said.
“Not a threat. Promise,” Jed said.
“If he kicks wrong, you’ll put the awl through him,” Yarra said, not looking up. “You’ve seen it before.”
Jed said nothing, but his grip tightened.
The slipper came out neat. Kep stared at it like the tunnels themselves had bent to gift him magic, then smacked it proudly against the stone. A pair of hatchlings passing by stopped to giggle, only to scatter when an elder hissed at them to mind their steps.
First meal was salt fish shaved thin, algae cakes that hissed in a pan black with history, and a wedge of kelp bread scavenged from Grayhaven’s trash heaps. Yarra tore hers in half and shoved the bigger piece at Jed.
“Eat. You’re working yourself thin.”
“I sit all day,” Jed said.
“You bleed thread all day,” Yarra shot back, the corner of her mouth twitching.
“Thread’s mean!” Kep announced through a full mouth, crumbs spraying.
Jed tapped the boy’s tail with his own. “Chew slower. If you choke, I’m not cutting it out for you.”
Kep’s eyes went wide. “You would!”
“Try me.”
Yarra smacked Jed on the shoulder with the back of her hand, but her laugh carried down the tunnel. A neighbor across the way called for quiet, and Yarra called back something sharp that made the woman chuckle before returning to her nets.
Later, they passed the mark-stone at the bend where rock had split ages ago. Every family’s cut lived there: spirals, hash-marks, crude signs depending on the patience of the cutter. Jed’s was simple—one line with two short cuts through it, a tiny door. He’d carved it the day Yarra tied red thread around his wrist and called him hers, making her not just his wife but his bond-mate.
Inside it, smaller and new, was Kep’s mark. The boy pressed his small hand against the stone, pale scales glinting.
“That’s ours, right? All of it?”
Jed laid his broad hand over the boy’s. “Ours.” He fished a sliver of leather from his pouch and tied it around Kep’s wrist. “A stitch. For luck.”
“Luck’s for people who plan badly,” Yarra called, hauling a coil of nets past. Her grin softened the words.
The day’s rhythm carried them to evening. Songs rose to keep breath steady in tight places. Names were counted—hatchlings new, elders gone to the tide—because numbers could tame grief, if only a little.
Kep fought sleep until he lost. Jed tucked an old net under the boy so he wouldn’t roll off the shelf, brushing a knuckle along his brow. The child’s tail flicked once and went still.
Yarra hefted three nets across her back. “If the tide is kind—”
“—it never is,” Jed finished.
“Then we’ll be kinder.”
They started up the south shaft, hands finding old holds in the stone. The air thinned, cooled. Salt came sharp. Another smell drifted with it—smoke, but wrong.
Jed paused, nostrils flaring. Not kitchen smoke. Not sea-coal. Something harsher.
Yarra’s frill twitched. “Could be a fish fire,” she said quietly. “Could be someone foolish with kindling.”
Jed’s hackles prickled. “Could be dogs.”
They held each other’s gaze for a moment, both knowing the rules of their life: don’t borrow trouble, but don’t ignore it either.
Far above, the faintest echo reached them—a sound out of place in the breathing rock. A bark. Short, sharp, answered by another.
Jed’s hand found Yarra’s wrist. She didn’t tremble. “Back,” she said, steady.
This is a cracking read with a wonderfully built world and an admirable main protagonist. The fact that Jed is small, has scales and generally lives underground is immaterial. It starts in his warren home, far beneath the seabed level near to the fishing town of Grayhaven, where he is making a slipper for his son, Kep, and we realise in short order that Jed has scales. a tail and a muzzle and learn that he is a kobold. However, he is clearly a loving father and a craftsman working with thread, while his wife Yarra plaits net twine at the mouth of the rock niche where he works. They are clearly a loving family so the attack they suffer when men and dogs invade the warren is all the more horrific. Although their guards have spears and crossbows they are no match for the much larger humans and the smoke from the fires they have set, and Jed’s family and community are slaughtered. Jed survives by accident and vows revenge.
The plot is simple – Jed goes to Grayhaven to find the man who led the attack on his home, discovering he is the head of the Blackenguard mercenaries, and sets out to kill him. In the process he has to find shelter and is eventually befriended by a fish seller, Mara, and an elderly seaman, Brann. These two characters are skilfully delineated, such that initially you are not sure if Mara will accept Jed or not (he is often referred to as a rat) although Brann is clearly a more open-hearted type. The dialogue is crisp to the point of enigmatic and the descriptions of the town vivid and atmospheric - of dark alleys, of lanterns, of fishers with split knuckles and sea-worn boots, of the Watch which Jed must avoid.
But it is the prose that signals the difference between this book and other revenge novels. The sentences are almost all extremely short, speeding up the narrative, and containing only the vital information, but couched in highly evocative language. 'Scars twisted the Blackenguard's cheek .... His cloak would stink of men like him. Of fire. Of a scream Jed could not stop hearing. Mara’s gaze slid across him once – sharp and suspicious - then moved on.’
This is a short, sharp book written in exciting prose and with a gripping narrative. Well worth your attention.