Chapter 11 - The Deed

Kaniz stood in the doorway with a candle in her hand and looked at me for a long time.

I was lying on my back on my own bed with my arms stretched over my head and my wrists buckled into my own belt, and the belt run through the iron ring she had stolen out of a dungeon. I was naked. Felix’s come was going cold across my chest and stomach, and my cock stood straight up out of the mess, red and furious and so hard it ached, twitching every time the shutter banged in the wind. Snow had blown in across half the floor. My boots lay where Felix had dropped them, one by the door and one under the table, and on the table, under the window, the Tome had its eye wide open.

“He used the buckle,” Kaniz said.

“I know he used the buckle.”

“He did not use a slipknot.” She came in and shut the door behind her with her heel, and her chain rang on the floor. “A slipknot is for a man who wants you to be able to leave. A buckle is for a man who wants you to have to ask.”

“Kaniz. Please.”

“FOUR TIMES,” said the Tome from the table. “He brought you to the edge FOUR times, boy, and on the fourth he did not even have the decency to finish what he started. I have watched a margravine of the southern coast keep a lover on the brink through an entire state banquet, eleven courses and a sermon, and even SHE let the poor man go at the cheese.”

“Nobody asked you.”

“I was not ASKED. I was PRESENT. There is a difference, and it is my entire existence.”

Kaniz set the candle down beside the Tome. She climbed onto the bed and knelt astride my thighs, right where Felix had knelt, and she looked down at me in the candlelight with her black hair loose over her shoulders and her shift riding up. My cock jumped toward her. It didn’t ask me first. It strained up off my stomach till I felt it in my teeth, and the ring rang on its hook, and Kaniz watched it do it with her head tilted and no expression on her face at all.

She reached past it to the washstand, wet the cloth in the basin, and cleaned my chest.

She did it slowly. She wiped Felix off me one stroke at a time, from my collarbone down, and she rinsed the cloth between strokes and wrung it out, and she went down my stomach to the edge of my hair and stopped there. She wiped all round my cock. She wiped my hips and the crease of my thigh and the place under my navel, and she didn’t once touch it, not with the cloth and not with her hand and not with so much as the hem of her shift, and by the time she was done I was shaking hard enough to make the bed creak.

“Kaniz.”

“Yes, master.”

“You know what I want.”

“Yes.” She dropped the cloth in the basin. “This was Felix’s night. He won it. I do not take from another man’s night.”

“He’s gone! He went out the window!”

“A debt is holy,” said Kaniz. “The Tome taught me.”

“I DID,” said the Tome, delighted.

She reached up over my head and unbuckled the belt. My arms came down so stiff that I couldn’t feel my hands, and the first thing they did when the blood came back was go straight for my cock, and Kaniz caught my right wrist in her fist before it got there and held it. She was strong. I always forgot how strong she was until she used it.

“Master,” she said. “They are waiting downstairs with your house.”

“It isn’t my house.”

“When it is,” Kaniz said, “I will finish this. In our house. Not before.”

My cock jerked at our house. It actually jerked, hard, in front of her, and I hated it for that more than I had ever hated any part of my own body. Kaniz saw it. Her eyes went bright, and she licked her lip, and she put my wrist down on the quilt beside my hip and let go of it, watching to see what I would do with it.

I lay there and left it where she’d put it.

“Your trousers,” she said, and handed them to me.

The common room of the Crooked Nail was empty except for the people waiting for me.

Maple had sent everybody home early. The regulars had been glad to go, with the Watch still in the lane and the grate wired shut, and the long room was dim and cold with half the candles out. Maple stood behind the bar with her ears laid back, drying a cup that was already dry. Fenwick sat cross-legged on top of the corner table beside his open folio, because the benches put his chin level with the tabletop, and his tall hat lay on the bench below him like a second, smaller gnome. Lily sat across from him with a candle and a long sheet of paper covered in writing and seals, her braid coming loose and one red ribbon hanging out of it, and the Tome lay on the bench beside her where Kaniz had put it, eye open, quivering.

They all looked at me when I came down the stairs, and I wanted to go straight back up them.

They looked at my face. They looked at my wrists, which had a red stripe round each of them from the belt. Lily looked last at the front of my trousers, where my cock was still making a tent, because a man can put his trousers on but he can’t make what’s in them lie down, and she looked back up at my face, and one corner of her mouth moved.

“We heard,” Lily said.

“Heard what?”

“The River fucking Bell,” said Lily. “Twice.”

“Three times,” said Fenwick, “by my count. Though the third may have been an echo off the chimney.”

“The whole lane heard, love,” said Maple, and put the dry cup down, and picked up another one.

I sat down on the bench across from Lily, as far from the deed as the bench went. Kaniz sat down beside me, close, with her hip against mine and her chain over my knee. Under the table, she put her hand on my thigh. She put it high up, and left it there, warm, two fingers from where everything hurt.

“I said it,” I said. “I didn’t say I’d buy it. Saying a thing with Felix sitting on you doesn’t count. Anybody would say anything.”

“Of course,” said Lily.

“And there’s no road.”

“Uncongested access,” said Fenwick.

“It’s half a morning from the city.”

“The Guild wants the book outside the walls,” Lily said. “It’s outside the walls. That’s the one thing it was supposed to be.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“He has two thousand gold,” said the Tome, “in a SOCK. Under the floor. He thinks nobody knows.”

“That was private!”

“It is under the third board from the window,” said Kaniz, and squeezed my thigh. “The board squeaks.”

“It’s haunted,” I said, and I could hear how it sounded. I said it anyway. “It’s got two dead men in it who took my trousers and kept my smallclothes, and they’ll do it again every day for the rest of my life.”

“They are very polite to me now,” said Kaniz.

Lily put the deed down. She folded her hands on top of it, looked at me across the candle, and waited. She did that to me sometimes; she let me run out of things to say and kept looking at me, and I hated it, and every time it worked.

“The cult hears the book,” Lily said at last. “Your chandler told the Guild. They lie in bed and they hear it reading through the floor, and they go where it is. If the book stays here, they stay in Maple’s cellar. If the book goes, they follow it out of the lane.”

I looked at Maple.

She was drying the cup. Her furred hands were going round and round on it with the cloth, and her ears hadn’t come up once, and she was looking at the floor behind the bar, at the boards, at the stone under the boards, at whatever was under the stone. She had given me this place a year ago with nothing to my name. She had given me a key and a bowl of stew and never once asked me to pay on time. And somebody had cut her carter open over four brass bowls under her storeroom, because of me, because of the book on my table, and she was going to have to sleep in this building tonight.

My stomach dropped. I had run out of excuses a while before that and I knew it, but I had kept talking anyway.

“Read it to me,” I said.

Lily read it.

She read every word of it, slow, the same as she counted change at her shop, finger moving under the lines and lips pressed together, and every few sentences she stopped and looked at Fenwick, who sighed and explained.

“The property known as the River Bell,” Lily read, “together with its curtain wall, gatehouse, watchtower, yard, stabling for twelve animals, covered well, landing stage, and all rights in the old ferry chain.”

“I don’t want a ferry chain.”

“Nobody wants the ferry chain,” said Fenwick. “It comes with the landing.”

“Sold as seen,” Lily read, “with all fixtures, fittings, and resident parties, howsoever constituted.” She looked up. “Resident parties.”

“A term of art.”

“It means the ghosts.”

Fenwick closed his folio. He smoothed the cover with both his small hands, and folded them in his lap.

“The previous owners,” he said, “are bound to the property, Mistress Winterbrook. I have consulted the Exchange on this point more than once, at some length, because it comes up. Title to land carries title to what is bound to the land. When Kit and Jory died, title passed to the Exchange, and so did they. When Mr. Thornwood signs, it passes to him.” He looked at me. “All of it. Wall to wall, and everything inside the wall that cannot leave.”

“I’m not owning two dead men,” I said.

“And yet,” said Kaniz.

I turned. She looked back at me, perfectly calm, with her hand on my thigh.

“The cellar,” she said to Lily. “Read him the cellar.”

“Kaniz, I’ve read it to you four times.”

“Read it to him.”

Lily found the line. “Four cells with original ironwork, sound, with drainage.” She kept her eyes on the page and went pink. “That’s all it says.”

“There is a frame,” Kaniz told me, under her breath. “It does not say the frame, but there is a frame. It is not a fixture. It is a fitting. The gnome explained the difference. A fitting comes with the house if it is bolted down, and I went down to the cellar and I looked, master, and it is bolted down.”

Her hand slid up an inch on my thigh. My cock throbbed so hard against my trousers that I grabbed the edge of the table, and Fenwick looked at my knuckles, opened his folio again, and politely turned a page.

“THE TOWER,” said the Tome. “Read the TOWER.”

“A square watchtower of four stories,” Lily read, “with parapet. Stair sound to the third landing.”

“The THIRD?”

“The fourth landing,” said Fenwick, “has unrestricted natural light.”

“I have been promised a TOWER and I am being sold THREE QUARTERS OF ONE!”

“You aren’t being sold anything,” I said. “You’re a book. I’m the one being sold things.”

Lily turned the page. Her finger stopped. “And the price.”

“Read it,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.

“One thousand nine hundred gold.” She looked at Fenwick. “It was four thousand last spring. It says so on your own listing.”

“The price has been revised,” said Fenwick, “to reflect the enthusiasm of the resident parties. And the absence of the road. And the Exchange’s strong wish to stop paying a man to visit it.”

“And your commission is a hundred and fifty.”

“It is the standard rate.”

“And you owe me forty-two gold,” said Lily, sweetly, “for apology bouquets, since the spring. On credit. Eleven of them were for the same lady, and two of them were for her husband.”

Fenwick went perfectly still on top of the table.

“Ninety,” said Lily. “For the commission. And we call the bouquets settled.”

“Mistress Winterbrook…”

“And you’ll add a line.” She took the pen out of his ink pot before he could stop her and wrote in the margin, small and neat, reading it aloud as she went. “The seller undertakes the return of the purchaser’s smallclothes, in good order, within one day of possession.”

“I cannot warrant the conduct of resident parties,” said Fenwick.

“Warrant it anyway,” said Lily, and turned the deed round and slid it across the table to him with the pen on top, smiling her market smile. I had watched her sell a lord a dead rose with it.

Fenwick stared at her for a while. He initialed the margin.

He turned the deed round again, toward me, and set the pen down beside it and pushed his ink pot across the table until it stood by my wrist.

It was a long sheet of paper with a woodcut of the River Bell in one corner, the wall and tower with the little bell over the door, and a line at the bottom with nothing on it. My mouth went dry.

I had never owned anything bigger than Bertha. I had come to Ashbourne with a dagger and a mule, and everything I’d owned since then fit in one small room above a tavern, and I had liked it that way. A room was a place you could leave. A room didn’t have walls you had to defend, or a well, or a ferry chain nobody wanted, or two dead men who would be mine.

“What if I hate it?” I said.

“Then you’ll hate it with a roof on,” said Lily. She reached across the table and put her hand on top of mine, on the pen, and her fingers were cold and smelled of the shop. “Samuel. You want it. You shouted it through a floor. You don’t have to like that you want it.”

Kaniz’s hand moved up the last two fingers on my thigh. It closed round me through my trousers, hard, all the way round, and held on, and didn’t move at all.

I signed it.

My hand shook, and the S came out too big and the rest of it came out too small, and I pressed so hard on the last letter that the pen spat ink across the woodcut of the bell. Fenwick sanded it. He folded it in thirds along the creases, poured red wax on the fold, pressed his ring into it, and held it out to me across the table.

“Congratulations, Mr. Thornwood,” he said. “You own an inn.”

The Tome screamed. It was a long high scream of pure joy, and it went on until Maple threw a dishcloth over it.

Maple came out from behind the bar. She brought a bottle of the good wine, the one she kept on the top shelf for the Guild Master and the occasional baron and had never once poured for me, and she set it down on the table in front of me with four cups. She went back into the kitchen. A minute later, I heard her blowing her nose.

Fenwick climbed down off the table by way of the bench and put his hat on.

“One more thing,” he said. “Your staff will have felt that.”

“My staff?”

“The resident parties. They felt it when title passed to the Exchange. The Exchange’s man was found in the river the next morning, alive and very cold, and without his trousers.” He tucked his folio under his arm. “I would expect them to be waiting for you.”

Kaniz leaned against my shoulder. She put her mouth right against my ear, and her hand was still round me under the table, and I felt her lips move.

“So will I,” she said. “Tomorrow, master. In our house.”

I didn’t sleep.

Kaniz slept beside me on her side with her back to the wall and her hand round my right wrist, and twice in the night I tried, and twice her fingers closed before my hand got anywhere near, without her waking up. The second time she said “No” in her sleep, perfectly clear, and turned over and kept hold.

The brewers lent me the carter’s wagon in the morning, with his two horses and nobody to drive them.

I carried everything down the back stair myself: the chest from under the window, the black lockbox from the catacombs, the armor stand that caught on every corner, the four ritual knives in a bucket, and the rope I had always meant to coil properly. By the sixth trip I had my shirt off in the snow, and by the tenth I had steam coming off my back, and on every single trip Felix watched me from the wagon seat, where he had been sitting since before I came down. He was wrapped in his black coat with his boots up on the footboard, eating one of Maple’s sausages out of his hand.

“Lift with your knees,” he said.

“Get down and lift with yours.”

“I don’t lift,” said Felix. “I never lift. You know that.” He bit the sausage. “You’ve packed the knives on top of the rope. The rope will want to be under the knives.”

“Then come and move it.”

“I’m supervising.” He watched me heave the chest up over the tailboard, and his violet eyes went down my bare back and stayed at the waist of my trousers. “It’s a very good view of the supervision.”

Kaniz carried the egg. She wouldn’t let me touch the crate. She brought it down the stairs in her arms, wrapped in two blankets, and the crate was so warm it steamed in the cold, and she climbed up into the back of the wagon with it and set it down between her knees and kept both hands on it. She had taken the iron ring down off the lamp hook over my bed first thing that morning and threaded it on her wrist chain, and it clinked against the manacle when she moved.

The Tome rode on top of the egg crate in the middle of everything, shouting directions at the horses. Bertha came tied to the tailboard and ignored it.

Maple stood in the door of the Nail as we left and pushed a basket of pies into my arms. She held on to the basket till I tugged it out of her hands.

“Room’s yours till spring,” she said. “If it goes wrong.”

I couldn’t answer her. I nodded, and put the pies on the seat, and shook out the reins.

Lily came at the last minute, on a pony from the livery with a spade tied across the back of the saddle and a sack hung off the horn. She had closed the shop for the day, and said so twice so I would know it was a sacrifice. She rode alongside the wagon out through the east gate, where one of the guards made the sign against the evil eye at the egg, and I didn’t blame him.

The gate of the River Bell was standing open when we came round the bend in the river, and the path through the yard had been swept again.

It had been swept wider. Two nights ago it had been one person wide. Now it was wide enough for a wagon, straight from the gate to the inn door, every flake of snow brushed off the stones and piled in a neat bank on either side. Every shutter on the front of the inn stood open. Smoke came out of the kitchen chimney, and nobody I knew of was alive in there to light it.

As the wagon went in under the gatehouse, the bell over the door rang. It rang once, all by itself, deep and long, out over the frozen river, and the Tome shrieked, Kaniz put both arms round the egg, and I nearly dropped the reins.

The bell stopped, and nobody came out.

I drove up the swept path and stopped by the door. I sat on the wagon seat and waited for a ghost to rise up out of the snow, or for my belt to fly off, and nothing happened at all. Felix straightened on the seat beside me and looked round the yard with his head on one side.

“They’re shy,” he said. “How charming.”

The common room was clean.

The dust was gone. The tables had been wiped and the chairs set straight round them, four to a table. The hearth had been swept out and a fire laid in it, dry wood and kindling, ready, unlit. On the bar, under the carved birds, the cup Jory had turned right side up for me had a second cup beside it. On a row of hooks behind the bar, where I had seen nothing on my last two visits, hung fourteen iron keys.

I stood in the doorway and looked at the keys. My scalp prickled.

“THE TOWER,” said the Tome, from the wagon. “Somebody bring me to the TOWER.”

“No.”

“I have been PATIENT. I have been carried across this county in a saddlebag. I have been offered a pit and denied it. I have been sold three quarters of a tower, boy, with my own eye I watched you sign for it, and I will be carried up to the top of it this INSTANT.”

“You’re going where I can see you,” I said.

I went and got it out of the wagon. I carried it up the stairs to the gallery and along to the warm room above the kitchen, with the wide bed in it, and put it on the table under the window, and opened the shutter so it could see the yard. It had a perfect view of the tower from there, a square block of gray stone at the corner of the wall, with its parapet against the white sky.

“You are a small, mean, cowardly man,” it said, “with a small, mean, cowardly soul.”

“The cult can hear you. Anybody on the road can see the top of that tower. I’m not putting you on a parapet with a candle next to you so they can find you in the dark.”

“They will find me ANYWAY.”

“Then they can find you in here, with me.”

The Tome shut its eye so hard that the leather round it creased, and I knew from long experience it would say nothing else for about an hour.

Felix was lying on the bed.

I hadn’t heard him come in. He was lying on his back in the middle of Kit’s wide bed in his black coat with his boots crossed at the ankle, looking up at the carved headboard, and when I turned round he spread his arms out to either side to show me how far short of the edges his hands came. I hated how good he looked on it.

“It’s adequate,” he said.

“It’s mine.”

“It’s yours.” He rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand and looked at me. “I’ll want a room for visits. South-facing, with a lock. Not this one. This one has a book in it.”

“You aren’t living here.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Felix, getting up off the bed and walking past me out onto the gallery.

He went through the whole inn after that. I wasn’t following him; I had a wagon to unload. Every time I turned into a room with something heavy in my arms, Felix was already in it, standing in its darkest corner with his back to the wall. He was in the angle under the gallery stair, where the light from the windows didn’t reach. Each time he said, “Not this one,” and walked out.

“What are you doing?”

“Testing the corners,” said Felix.

“For what?”

He watched me from the dark under the stair. “For standing in,” he said, and smiled, and went to look at the next one.

Lily was in the yard.

I found her down by the stables, at the long empty stretch of snow between the stable wall and the inner face of the curtain wall, where she had stood and turned in a circle on our first visit with a look on her face I hadn’t been able to read. She had her spade. She had put her foot on it and was leaning her whole weight on the handle, and the blade had gone into the snow and stopped against the frozen ground underneath with a dull clank.

She was small and determined on top of the spade, with her coat buttoned to her chin, and her ass stuck out behind her in her wool skirt as she bore down on the handle. It was a good ass, small and round and pushed out at me in the cold, and it had nothing to do with anything, and I looked at it anyway, because it was Lily’s and it was there.

“It won’t go in,” she said, without turning round. “It’s frozen a foot down.”

“I could dig it.”

“You don’t know how.”

“I could learn.”

Lily stopped leaning on the spade. She turned round, and her blue eyes went over my bare chest and back up to my face.

She took the sack off her saddle and four red ribbons out of it, the same red as the one in her braid, and walked to the four corners of a long square of snow, tying a ribbon at each: an iron hitching ring on the stable wall, a drainpipe, the bracket of a lamp on the curtain wall, the handle of her own spade, which she drove upright into the snow as far as it would go. The ribbons hung still. The square they made was longer than her whole shop, and nearly as wide, which was a lot of digging.

“There,” said Lily. “In spring.”

“I’ll dig it in spring.”

“I didn’t ask you to.” She came back across the snow and fixed my collar, except I wasn’t wearing a shirt, so she fixed nothing and spread her cold hands on my bare chest instead, and I hissed through my teeth, and she smiled. “It’s a good yard, Samuel.”

I kept my mouth shut, because anything I said right then would have been stupid.

She had a shop and a long cold ride back to the city on a hired pony, and she wasn’t going to sleep here tonight or any night, and I knew it. I put her up on the pony. She leaned down out of the saddle and kissed me, long, with her hand at the back of my neck, and while she was doing it I saw Kit.

He was up in the gallery window over the door, gray against the dark of the room behind him, with his half-laced shirt and his hair in his eyes, watching me, not her. He didn’t come any closer. When Lily straightened up in the saddle, the salt in her coat pocket rattled, and the window was empty.

I watched her ride out under the gatehouse till she went round the willows and I couldn’t see her anymore.

Kaniz found me in the kitchen. She had put the egg by the common-room hearth in its crate, and she had unpacked my clothes into the chest in the warm room and hung my second-best shirt on a peg, and now the sun was down and the wagon was empty and I had run out of things to carry.

She took my right wrist in the same grip she had kept on it all night, and without a word she walked me through the common room to the cellar door.

The cellar stair was stone and went down steep. At the bottom there was a passage lit by one lantern that she must have lit earlier, and off the passage, in a row, four cells with iron-bound doors standing open. The cells were bare stone with drains in the floor. Each one had iron rings set into the walls at different heights, and I counted them without meaning to. Kaniz walked me past the first three doors to the end one.

The frame stood in the middle of the last cell. It was thick oak, bolted to the floor and the ceiling at all four corners, with leather cuffs on chains at the top and at the bottom, and a padded crossbar at the height of a person’s hips, and my cock worked out what it was for before I did.

“It is bolted down,” said Kaniz. “You see?”

I saw.

She let go of my wrist and stepped into the frame with her back to me. She lifted her arms over her head, one at a time, and fitted her wrists into the top cuffs, over her own manacles, and stood there with her arms up, her shift hanging off her, looking at me over her shoulder.

“Master,” she said. “Buckle them.”

My hands did it. I would like to tell you I thought about it first, but I didn’t, I was already behind her, and my fingers had found the buckles and pulled the straps tight, both of them, before my head had said a single thing about it. Kaniz shivered. She spread her feet apart on the stone, and the bottom cuffs hung open by her ankles, waiting, and she didn’t ask for them. She bent forward over the padded bar as far as the top chains let her, and her shift rode up over the curve of her ass, dark and full, bare in the lantern light, and she stayed like that.

“In our house,” she said. “I promised.”

I got my trousers open and shoved down round my thighs, because I had been hard since Felix took my second boot off a whole night and a whole day ago and couldn’t have waited any longer if the cellar had been on fire. I took her by the hips and pushed into her, and she was slick and hot and ready, she had been ready for hours, and she cried out, and the chains rang over her head.

I lasted about seven strokes.

I would like to say more, but it was seven. I drove into her seven times, hard, with my hands digging into her hips and every one of them banging her against the padded bar, and on the seventh I came so hard my knees went, and I had to hold on to the frame. I came for what felt like a full minute. A night and a day of Felix came out of me all at once in long, hard jerks, and I made a noise I had never made before, and I bent over her back with my forehead between her shoulder blades and shook.

Kaniz waited till I was done, with me still inside her.

“Again, master,” she said. “Properly.”

I did it again, properly.

It took a long time the second time. I had her slow, at first, holding her hips and pulling her back onto me and watching her take me, every inch, and listening to the sounds she made, low and steady and delighted, yes, yes, master, over and over, while the chains swung over her head. I put my hand up her back under the shift and held her by the collar. She liked that. She liked it so much that her knees buckled and she hung from the cuffs, and I went harder, and the frame creaked in its bolts, and she came first, with a long shaking cry that went down the stone passage and back. I came a while after, deep in her, with my teeth in her shoulder, and the iron ring on her chain clanged against the frame with every thrust till I stopped.

I stayed bent over her back afterward, breathing, with her sweat on my chest. I could feel her heart going through her ribs.

“Seven,” said Felix.

He was standing in the corner of the passage, in the dark beyond the lantern at the far end, with his back to the wall and his arms folded, and I had no idea how long he had been there.

“The first time,” he said. “Seven. I counted.”

“Eight,” said Kit’s voice, from inside the wall.

“It was seven and a half,” said Jory’s. “The last one didn’t finish.”

I straightened up so fast I hit my head on the top of the frame.

They came out of the wall of the cell side by side, gray and see-through in the lantern light. Kit was bright-eyed and grinning, with his shirt open to the waist. Jory had his arms folded and his collar open and he looked wide awake and pleased with everything for the first time since I’d met him. They stopped in front of the frame, one on either side of Kaniz, who was still bent over the bar with her ass in the air and my come running down her thighs, and who turned her head and looked at them with complete calm.

“You signed it,” Kit said. He couldn’t stand still. He was bouncing on his bare feet a foot off the stone. “Last night. At midnight. We felt it. The whole house rang. The bell went for an hour, and every door on the gallery came open, and Jory fell off the bar.”

“I did not fall off the bar.”

“He fell through the bar. It’s the same thing.”

“We felt it,” Jory said to me. His voice was even and pleased, an innkeeper reading out a good night’s takings. “Like a hand on the back of the neck.” He unfolded his arms. “Whoever owns the River Bell owns us. That’s you now. Everything we do in this house is yours to allow or yours to forbid.” He glanced sideways at Kit. “We’ve talked about it all day.”

“We cleaned,” said Kit. “Did you see? We cleaned everything. We hung the keys up.” He drifted closer to me, close enough that the cold came off him onto my bare stomach, and looked down at my cock, which was wet and half-hard and not hiding from anybody, and back up at my face, delighted. “We’ve never been owned before. We were the owners. It was terrible. It was all accounts.”

“It was all accounts,” Jory agreed.

“So.” Kit looked from Kaniz in the frame to me to Felix in the dark at the end of the passage, who hadn’t moved and was smiling. “Master,” said Kit, trying the word out in his mouth. “What do you allow?”

“‘Master’ is my word,” said Kaniz, from the frame.

Nobody answered her. All four of them were looking at me: the slave in the cuffs and the two dead men I owned and the one man in the world I didn’t, and I stood in my own dungeon with my trousers round my thighs, and I had owned the place for less than a day, and I had no idea what I allowed.