Chapter 11 - The Tome Strikes

The door slammed open and hit the wall.

I craned my neck as far as the shackles let me, which wasn't far.

Malkor. He had run. You could tell by the way he was huffing and puffing and sweating through those red robes of his, white hair half-loose, sweat beading on his forehead. The dead heart at the top of his staff was swinging. He did not look happy.

He went for the girl. Staff up, moving fast, all of it aimed at her.

I was still on the board. I yanked at the shackles. They held. Yanked again. Was about to try something creative when both of them snapped at once, wrists and ankles, the sound of iron giving up. The Tome's fittings went dark across the room all at once. Whatever that cost it, it didn't ask me first.

I had one second.

I used it.

Malkor was six feet away, back to me, full attention on the girl. He was old and gaunt and probably had centuries of horrible magic in those bones, but none of that matters when someone gets behind you with nothing to lose and no clothes to slow them down.

I got behind him and wrapped my arms around his chest, throwing my full weight to the side. He was heavier than he looked. We hit the curved wall together and he got the staff around at my ribs, but I got inside it before he could do anything useful with it. He snarled something and cold fire cracked across my shoulder and I ignored it, grabbed him by the back of his robe, pivoted, and aimed us both at the hole.

I'd spotted it on the way in, an open dark hole set into the floor with the same smell coming up from it as the pit they'd thrown me in. Ripple's pit. Honestly, not the worst place I'd been dropped recently.

I shoved him in.

I don't have words to describe his face as he fell on the way in, nor do I want to.

From below I heard a crunch. Then another. Then a faint pink glow, brief, and then dark again.

I stood at the edge of the hole, naked, with a cut on my chest and someone else's blood drying around my feet. My shoulder ached where Malkor's spell had half-worked.

The girl was pressed against the far wall. She'd moved there at some point during all of that, but I hadn't noticed when.

Her collar went dark. Whatever enchantment had been powering the metal just died, right in front of me. She touched it with one hand and felt around the edge, like she couldn't believe it either. Malkor was gone, and his magic had gone with him.

Then something happened in my chest that had nothing to do with the cut. Warm. The way you feel when you swallow something too fast and it sits there and you don't know if it's going to move. It sat below my sternum and didn't go anywhere.

I looked at her. She looked at me. I waited for the collar to light up again, for the bond to snap back to Malkor or dissolve or do something useful. It didn't.

We both looked at the Tome.

The eye was barely open. It looked like it needed a week in bed. The whole book sagged against the lectern like holding itself upright was more effort than it could spare.

"Ah," it said.

"Absolutely not," I said.

"And yet," said the Tome.

I turned to the girl.

"The bond was supposed to dissolve," she explained as she tugged at her collar. "When the master died. That's what the ritual does. That's what the illustrations showed."

"I tried," the Tome croaked. "Twice I tried to correct you. That is what I did."

"You knew what it would do."

The Tome visibly exhaled.

Her jaw set. She looked at me.

I held up my hands. Still naked. Chest still bleeding a little from her cut.

"I don't own people," I said.

She looked at me. At the bracers on her wrists, where the runes had dimmed to nothing. At the manacles on her ankles. Her hand went to her throat and she tugged the collar, hard, fingers hooked under the metal. It didn't move. She tugged again. Nothing. Her shoulders dropped, just for a second, before she squared them again and looked at the hole in the floor where her master had gone, then back at me.

"And yet," she said.

The Tome made a sound. A very smug sort of sound. The smuggest sound a book has probably ever made.

I looked at it.

It looked back at me without blinking.

"You used the last of yourself to break those shackles," I said.

"I spent energy. I am not without resources." It said, its previous spark all but extinguished. "I have been chained to this lectern for years. Spending what I had to avoid remaining was not difficult."

"That's not what I'm asking."

The eye held mine. "No. It isn't."

I went to the lectern. The chains were slack, whatever binding had kept them tied to Malkor gone with him. I got both hands under the Tome and lifted it, which required more effort than I expected from something that was already spending down its reserves. It was heavy and cold against my bare skin, the cover against my chest, the eye looking up at me from an awkward angle.

"You're going to have to tell me your name at some point," I said.

"I have a name. It's quite long. We'll work up to it."

"Right."

I tucked it under my arm. Turned around.

I'd expected something complicated. Relief, maybe. Or the resigned face people make when a plan goes sideways. What I got was a smile. Not the corner-of-the-mouth thing she'd been running all night. A real one, wide and bright, and then she dropped to one knee and pressed her forehead to my thigh.

She stayed there. I heard her exhale. Long and slow and completely unheld.

"Master," she said. Then added more quietly. "Finally."

She tilted her face up and I caught her doing something. Breathing deep, right at my hip, eyes half-closed, slow and deliberate. Like she was fixing the smell of me somewhere behind her eyes. Not subtle about it.

I stared at her.

The Tome made a sound. A long, low, deeply satisfied sound.

"I'm not—" I started.

"I know what you're going to say." She stood. Still smiling. She crossed the room toward me and stopped a foot away, looking up at me with those dark eyes that were not nervous, had never been nervous, not once in this entire evening. "Eight months in this fortress," she said. "Eleven people in that pit. The bond transferred instead of dissolved." She tilted her head. "And you're cute. And you're nice. And I have plans."

"Plans," I said.

"For you." She ran one finger down my sternum, slow, from the collarbone to the cut. The same way she had on the board, except now her eyes were lit up instead of sad. "I want to kneel at your feet every night. I want you to lock this collar tighter so I feel you even when you're gone. I want to wake up knowing exactly where I belong." She looked up at me.

She raised her wrists slightly. The braces still on, metal dull in the low light.

"These feel wrong now," she said. "Without your hands on them." Her fingers traced the edge of one brace. "When you have something to tie them with, I'd ask for that. It keeps the bad dreams away."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Filed that entire paragraph under things to think about when I had clothes on and wasn't actively bleeding.

The Tome said, quietly: "I like her."

"You're not helping," I said.

"I was not trying to help. I was observing."

I looked at her. She looked at me. "I don't own people," I said.

"And yet," she said.

She said it like it was funny. Like it was the best part of the whole situation.

The Tome laughed loudly. Its eye crinkling. I thought seriously about throwing it into the hole after Malkor.

I'm a good person. I have opinions about slavery, correct ones, held sincerely.

The problem was that she'd pressed her forehead to my thigh and said "finally" like she'd been waiting for me specifically. She'd told me she wants to wake up knowing where she belongs. She'd asked me to tie her wrists. And she was looking at me right now, licking her lips, with an expression that said she considered this entire situation a personal victory.

I was supposed to be horrified. I knew what the correct reaction was. I'd been raised around enough decent people to understand that owning a person is wrong, full stop, end of conversation, no caveats. And I believed that. I believed it the way I believed gravity worked and fire was hot and you don't steal from friends.

But somewhere in the part of my brain that I wasn't proud of, the part that noticed her collar and her wrists and the way she said "master" like it was the first honest word she'd spoken all night, somewhere in there was something that did not object as loudly as it should have. I was going to need to sit with that. I was going to need to have a long, honest conversation with myself about what kind of person I actually was, and I was pretty sure I wasn't going to enjoy the answers.

But not tonight. Tonight I was a good person having a deeply complicated evening, and I had women to rescue.

"The brooch," I said.

Her hand went into the front of that little linen thing and produced it. She turned it over in her fingers, watching the light catch the metal, then set it in my palm and put her lips to my knuckles.

"Yours," she said. "So mine too, now."

I decided not to examine that logic very closely.

"Kaniz," she said. "Kaniz Delight. The warlock called me that."

"Samuel. But you knew that."

She looked up at me. Licked her lips. "Yes, master."

She fell into step behind me, half a step back and to one side, ankle cuffs making their small sound on the stone.

I stopped at the ritual dish. The blade was still there, blood-sticky, short and sharp. I picked it up. Not a fighting weapon, but I wasn't planning on fighting.

"The women," I said. "Where are their cells. Which way?"

"Up," she said. "Two levels. Then the main corridor, east." She watched the blade in my hand. "There are guards between here and there."

"How many?"

"I don't know. A few."

I looked at the corridor. Dark stone, no torches past the chamber door, shadows pooling deep and long in every direction.

"Stay with the book," I said. "I'll come back for you."