Chapter 14 - Hero's Welcome

We came down the mountain at dawn.

I don't know how long the walk took. Hours, probably. The women moved slow, barefoot most of them, leaning on each other in the dark. The older woman with the gash on her forehead led them. She hadn't stopped moving since I'd opened the cell door and I got the sense she wasn't going to stop until something familiar was under her feet. The blonde girl from Oakhaven walked beside her, silent, eyes fixed on the valley below like it was the only real thing left in the world.

Kaniz walked half a step behind me. Always half a step. The egg glowed faintly against her chest and the ankle cuffs clinked on the rocky path and she hadn't said a word since the fortress gate. I'd tried once, somewhere around the second switchback, to ask if she was cold. She'd looked at me like the question was confusing. Genuinely unsure why I was asking.

The Tome was in a grain sack I'd found hanging from a peg near the gate. I'd put it in there somewhere around the first mile, when it started narrating the geological composition of the mountain pass in a voice that carried across three ridges. The sack muffled it to a dull, offended murmur. Every few minutes it would say something that sounded like a threat. I ignored it.

Oakhaven appeared through the trees as the sun crested the ridge. It was small. Timber and thatch, maybe forty buildings clustered around a well and a gathering square. Smoke from morning fires. A rooster somewhere, screaming about the day.

The blonde girl made a sound, something between a laugh and a sob that came out of her chest like she'd been holding it since the cell. She started running.

After that, things happened fast.

A woman came out of one of the houses and saw the blonde girl and went to her knees in the dirt. A man appeared in a doorway and dropped a bucket. Someone started shouting. Within minutes the square was full of people, half-dressed, some of them crying before they even knew what they were looking at. Seventeen women in rags coming down the hill, and the village figured it out in real time.

The headman found me. Old, weathered, hands shaking. He grabbed my arm and couldn't say anything for a while. When he finally managed words they were mostly "thank you" and "how" and "the warlock" in various combinations, none of them in a complete sentence. I told him Malkor was dead. He sat down on the edge of the well and put his face in his hands.

I'm not good at this part. The heroic return. I know how it's supposed to go. You stand tall, you accept the gratitude with humility, you deflect the praise onto the mission or the gods or whatever people want to hear. Ashara drilled it into me once. "You'll do something worth celebrating eventually," she'd said, "and when you do, shut your mouth and let them have it. The story isn't about you. It's about them needing one."

So I shut my mouth and let them have it.

But inside? Inside I was fucking flying. I'd done it. I'd actually done it. Killed a blood warlock, freed seventeen women, walked out of a fortress of horror with a sentient grimoire and a bonded slave girl and a tentacle egg and I was alive. Blackthorn was going to pay me. Ashara was going to want the grimoire, which was currently in a grain sack calling me a philistine, and I had no idea what I was going to tell her about that. But I was alive, and the sun was warm, and the blonde girl was crying into her mother's shoulder, and for about thirty seconds I felt like the hero they thought I was.

Then I noticed that about half the rescued women had cleaned up nicely. The dark-haired one with the cheekbones was taller than I'd realized. The redhead who'd been leaning on her the whole way down had freckles across her shoulders and a smile that could ruin a man's week. Under different circumstances, with different timing, in a version of this story where I hadn't acquired a bonded girl who called me master and a grimoire that critiqued my technique, I'd have been in trouble.

But that wasn't this story. And they'd been through enough without the guy who rescued them looking at them like that. I filed it under "things Samuel Thornwood will think about later, alone, possibly in the bath" and moved on.

The mayor arrived. I noticed him immediately because he was the only person in the square who wasn't crying. Tall, well-fed, a green coat that was nicer than anything else in the village. He had a smile that reached exactly as far as it needed to and no further. He clasped my hand, called me a hero, and said something about Oakhaven's eternal gratitude that sounded like he'd rehearsed it on the walk over.

"You've given us back our daughters," he said.

I smiled and nodded and something about it sat wrong but I couldn't name what. Not yet.

---

They threw a feast. Of course they did.

The spread was sparse by Ashbourne standards. Roasted goat, bread, root vegetables, a cask of ale that had been saved for a wedding. But these people had been losing their daughters for months, and now most of them were back, and the man responsible for taking them was dead at the bottom of a hole. They wanted to celebrate. I wasn't going to tell them not to.

I'd been given a room above the headman's house. Small, clean, a bed with an actual mattress and a basin of water. I'd washed the blood off my hands and changed into clothes someone had brought. Not a great fit. The previous owner was broader in the shoulders and shorter in the leg, but it was better than the dead guard's uniform and I wasn't going to complain.

The Tome was on the nightstand. Still in the sack. Still murmuring.

"You cannot keep me in a grain receptacle," it said.

"Watch me."

"I am a repository of eight centuries of accumulated wisdom. I have advised kings. I have witnessed the fall of empires. I have catalogued perversions that would make your provincial little mind weep with inadequacy."

"And right now you're in a sack."

"This is degrading."

"That's the idea."

It went quiet for a moment. Then: "The eye cannot blink in here. There is grain dust. It is excruciating."

I almost felt bad. Almost. Then I remembered the three-ridge geological lecture and left it where it was.

Kaniz had found water and a cloth somewhere and cleaned herself up. She was still in the linen shift and the collar and the cuffs. The shift was thin and she'd gotten it wet washing and it clung to her in ways that were making it difficult to think about anything else. I could see the shape of her breasts through the damp linen, the curve of her waist where the cord cinched it, the line of her hips. I hadn't found her anything else to wear and she hadn't asked. I was starting to realize she wasn't going to ask, and I was starting to realize I wasn't in a hurry to fix that, and I was starting to realize that made me a specific kind of person that I'd have to think about later. She sat on the edge of the bed, legs together, hands folded, waiting for me to tell her what to do. The egg sat beside her, glowing against the wool blanket.

"You can come to the feast," I said. "If you want."

"Do you want me to come?"

"I'm not going to order you to eat dinner."

"That's not what I asked."

I looked at her. She looked at me. The corner of her mouth did the thing.

"Yes," I said. "Come to the feast."

"Yes, master."

I was never going to get used to that.

---

The feast was in the gathering square, torches and lanterns strung between the buildings, tables dragged out of houses. I worked the room. Shook hands, accepted drinks, told a version of the story that was mostly true and significantly less embarrassing than the real one. In my version I infiltrated the fortress through cunning and skill rather than getting captured twice, fucked by a tentacle monster, drugged by a servant girl, and rescued by a talking book. Some things the people of Oakhaven did not need to know.

The goat was overcooked. The ale was thin and tasted like someone had described beer to a barrel of rainwater. The bread was the best thing on the table and it wasn't good bread. The whole square smelled like woodsmoke and charred fat. I ate all of it because I'd been living on adrenaline and tentacle residue for three days and my body had decided that calories were more important than standards. A farmer's wife brought me a second plate without being asked and I could have kissed her for it. Platonically. Mostly.

The redhead with the freckles was three seats down. She'd borrowed a dress from someone and it fit her well and she caught me looking and smiled and I smiled back and felt Kaniz's hand settle on my thigh under the table. She was letting me know.

Kaniz sat beside me at the main table and ate with the focused attention of someone relearning how utensils worked. She held her fork like a weapon for the first few bites, then figured it out. She tried the bread first. Then the meat. Then the ale, which she sniffed, tasted, and set down with a look that said she had opinions about fermentation that she was keeping to herself. When people spoke to her she answered in as few words as possible and they stopped asking.

"Who's the girl?" the headman asked me, halfway through the second cask.

"She was held in the fortress. She's with me now."

He looked at the collar. He looked at the cuffs. He decided not to follow up. Smart man.

The mayor gave a toast. He stood at the head of the table with his cup raised and the torchlight on his green coat and he said all the right things. Gratitude. Sacrifice. The bravery of those who venture into the dark so others don't have to. He said Oakhaven would remember the name Samuel Thornwood. He said the warlock's shadow would never fall on this village again.

He was good at it. Every word polished.

And something about the way he said "the warlock's shadow would never fall on this village again" made my stomach do a small, specific thing that I couldn't explain. Like he was closing a door rather than opening one. Like the toast was a period rather than a beginning.

I filed it away.

Across the square, past the last ring of lantern light, something pink flickered at the treeline. I turned my head and saw nothing. I turned back and there it was again, brief and patient.

Kaniz followed my gaze. Looked at the treeline. Looked at me. Said nothing.

The Tome, when I'd asked earlier if it had noticed the pink shape in the trees, had claimed not to have seen anything.

I didn't believe either of them.

---

The room above the headman's house was quiet after the feast. Distant laughter from the square below. Someone playing a fiddle, badly. The sounds of a village that had gotten its people back and was determined to stay up all night making sure they were real.

I set the Tome on the nightstand and pulled it out of the sack. The eye blinked against the candlelight, watering.

"Finally," it said. "I was beginning to develop a rash."

"Books don't get rashes."

"This book does. This book has endured indignities tonight that would have caused a lesser grimoire to self-immolate."

Kaniz closed the door. Turned the latch. The click was small and specific and the room got smaller when she did it.

She stood with her back against the door and looked at me with something I hadn't seen before. Something that had been sitting behind her eyes since the fortress and was only now, in a quiet room with a locked door and no one trying to kill us, finding enough space to surface.

"We're alone," she said.

"We're not alone." I pointed at the Tome.

"I am not people," the Tome said. "I am literature."

"You're a nuisance."

"I am a WITNESS to the proceedings. This is my FUNCTION."

"Your function is to shut up."

"I have observed seven hundred and forty-three intimate encounters across fourteen owners. My commentary has been described as invaluable."

"By who?"

"By people with taste."

Kaniz walked across the room. She didn't walk the way she'd walked through the fortress, careful and measured. She walked like she'd decided something. She stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the soap she'd used to wash and something underneath it that was just her.

"I want this," she said. Quiet. Direct. Looking straight at me.

"Kaniz..."

"I've wanted this since the storeroom. Not the plan. Not the part where I had to drug you. This part. Just this."

She reached up and touched the collar at her throat. Ran her fingers along the metal. Touching it the way you touch something that belongs to you.

"Tighter," she said.

I blinked. "What?"

"The collar." She took my hand and placed it against the metal at her throat. Warm from her skin. Her pulse underneath, steady. "I want it tighter."

My hand was on her collar and my brain was doing several things at once, none of them compatible. The part that had been raised to believe people don't own people was screaming. The part that was nineteen and had a beautiful woman pressing his hand against her throat was on a completely different page. It was extremely, painfully, embarrassingly on board.

"That's..." I started.

"I know what I want." Her eyes were steady. Dark. Certain. "I've known for a long time. I just didn't have anyone to want it with."

"WELL WELL WELL," the Tome announced. "Look at his FACE. She's ASKING for it and he's standing there like a vicar who wandered into the wrong bedchamber. Boy, in the Crimson Court a willing submissive was worth more than GOLD, and you're about to waste it with your provincial HAND-WRINGING."

"Shut up," I said.

"I will NOT. This girl has better instincts than your last three predecessors COMBINED, and owner number nine had a duchess who used to BEG for the collar. Granted, that ended badly. Gardening shears were involved. But the FUNDAMENTALS were sound. Continue, girl. He'll catch up. The slow ones always do."

I looked at Kaniz. She looked at me. She was not embarrassed by the Tome. She was not embarrassed by anything. She was standing in front of me with my hand on her collar and her dark eyes on mine and she was waiting, patient and certain, for me to decide what I was going to do about it.

I tightened my grip on the collar, just enough.

Her lips parted. Her breath caught. Her eyes went half-lidded and she made a sound, small and involuntary, and leaned into my hand like I'd given her exactly what she'd asked for.

"Yes," she whispered. "Master."

I kissed her. Not the careful, deliberate kiss she'd given me on the board when she thought she had to kill me. Hard. My hand on her collar, pulling her into it, her mouth opening under mine. She grabbed my shirt with both hands and pulled herself against me and she was warm and solid and real and I could feel the metal of her wrist braces against my chest.

"Wrists," she breathed against my mouth.

"What?"

She held her arms up. The braces glinted in the candlelight. "Tie them."

I didn't have rope. I had a belt. I looked at her wrists, at the metal braces, at the cord from her shift that she was already untying and holding out to me.

"You planned this," I said.

"I've been planning this for eight months. You're the first part that went right."

"EXCELLENT improvisation with the cord," the Tome observed. "Though if you tie her wrists like THAT, she'll lose feeling in three minutes. Figure-eight configuration, boy. Even the DULLEST apprentice in the Crimson Court knew that much. Watching you handle rope is like watching a drunk try to saddle a horse."

"I swear to every god in this world," I said, "if you don't shut up."

"I am providing GUIDANCE because you clearly need it. She deserves COMPETENCE and you are giving her ENTHUSIASM. These are not the same thing."

Kaniz held her wrists together, the cord dangling between us. She was smiling. The real smile, the one I'd seen exactly once before, when she'd whispered "guess I don't have to kill you" on the board. She didn't mind the Tome. She didn't mind any of it. She was getting exactly what she wanted and the talking book was just ambiance.

I tied her wrists. Figure-eight, because the Tome was right about circulation even if I'd rather eat my own boots than admit it. The cord pulled taut against the braces and she tested it, pulled, felt the resistance. Her whole body changed. Shoulders dropped. Breath slowed. Something behind her eyes that had been wound tight since the fortress, maybe since long before the fortress, loosened.

"Good," she said. Soft. Almost to herself. Then, looking at me: "Now do what you want with me."

I probably should've thought twice about a bonded woman asking to be restrained by her bond-holder in a borrowed room above a village headman's house while a sentient grimoire watched.

I didn't.

I picked her up. She was lighter than I expected, or I was stronger than I thought, and she wrapped her bound wrists behind my neck and her legs around my waist and I carried her to the bed and put her down on it and she looked up at me with those dark eyes and her tied wrists above her head and said "please."

I pulled the shift over her head. She was naked underneath except for the collar and the braces and the ankle cuffs and I stopped for a moment because the candlelight was on her skin, brown and warm, and the metal caught the light at her throat and wrists and ankles and she was watching me look at her with an expression that said she'd been waiting for exactly this. Someone looking at her like she was something worth looking at.

"COMMENDABLE restraint," the Tome said. "Most of my previous owners would have been considerably less composed at this juncture. Owner number six didn't even remove his boots."

"Face down," I told it.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Face down. On the nightstand. Now."

"You cannot be serious. The PRIMARY spectacle is about to commence and you want me to observe the WOOD GRAIN?"

I grabbed the Tome and flipped it face down on the nightstand. The eye pressed against the wood and it made a sound of pure, theatrical outrage.

"This is CENSORSHIP. This is an ATROCITY. I have rights. I have PAGES."

"You have a wood grain to look at."

"I can still HEAR everything. My auditory faculties are not dependent on visual orientation. I will be providing commentary REGARDLESS."

"Then comment at the nightstand."

Kaniz laughed. Actual, genuine laughter, her bound wrists against the pillow, her body shaking with it. I hadn't heard her laugh before. It was good. Bright and surprised, like she hadn't expected it either.

"Come here," she said. Still laughing. "Stop arguing with the book and come here."

I came there.

I kissed her neck first, below the collar, and she tilted her head back to give me more of it. Her skin was warm and clean and I could feel her pulse hammering under my lips. I kissed lower, between her breasts, and she made a sound that went straight through me. Her tits were perfect. I'm sorry, I know there's a more refined way to say that, but I was nineteen and she was naked and bound on a bed and her breasts were round and full and the nipples were dark and hard and when I took one in my mouth she arched off the mattress and said "yes" like I'd answered a question she'd been asking for years.

But I stopped. Pulled back. Looked at her.

"Hey," I said. "I need you to hear this."

She opened her eyes. Confused. Wanting.

"You're not doing this because of the bond. You're not doing this because you think you have to. If you want to stop, we stop. If this is the collar talking, or whatever Malkor put in your head, or some obligation you think you owe me because I opened a door..."

"Samuel."

"...then we don't do this. I'm serious. I need to know this is you."

She looked at me with those dark eyes. Bound wrists above her head, collar at her throat, naked on a borrowed bed. And she smiled. Not the corner-of-the-mouth thing. The real one.

"This is me," she said. "This has always been me. The collar didn't make me want this. I wanted this before there was a collar." She lifted her bound wrists and hooked them behind my neck and pulled me down to her. "Now stop being noble and fuck me."

"FINALLY," the Tome said from the nightstand. "The CONSENT VERIFICATION is complete. I was beginning to worry he'd lecture through the entire encounter. Proceed."

I proceeded.

I ran my hands down her body, slow, because I could. Because last time in the storeroom I'd been drugged afterward and strapped to a board and I hadn't gotten to appreciate any of this properly. Her waist was narrow and her hips flared and the skin below her navel was soft and when my hand slid between her thighs she was wet and ready and she gasped and pressed into my palm. I stroked her there, watching her face, and she bit her lip and her bound hands clenched above her head and her hips rolled against my fingers.

"More," she breathed. "Please."

I gave her more. Two fingers inside her, my thumb working the spot that made her eyes roll back, my other hand on the collar, gripping. She was tight and hot and slick and every sound she made went straight to my cock. She was vocal. Quiet and honest. Little gasps and whispered instructions that told me exactly what she wanted without pretending she didn't want it.

"Inside me," she said. "Now. Please, master."

I pulled my shirt over my head and stripped off the borrowed trousers and her eyes went down my body and she licked her lips, the slow deliberate thing she did, and I was so hard it hurt. I settled between her thighs and she wrapped her legs around me and I pushed into her and we both made sounds that the Tome would probably catalogue for future reference.

She was tight. Warm. She gripped me like she was afraid I'd leave and I pushed deeper and she took all of me and her back arched and her bound wrists strained against the cord and she whispered "yes, yes, yes" with her eyes closed and the collar catching candlelight.

I fucked her slow at first. Deliberate. My hand on the collar, pulling just enough, and every thrust drew another sound out of her. She wrapped her legs tighter and pulled me deeper and I could feel every inch of her and she was perfect. Her ass was perfect. Her tits bounced with every thrust and I bent down and took one in my mouth again and she cried out and her whole body clenched around me.

"ADEQUATE pacing," the Tome noted. "Though I observe a fixation on the missionary configuration. The Crimson Empire recognized a minimum of seven variations per encounter. You are currently at ONE."

I pulled out. Flipped her over. She went willingly, eagerly, pressing her face into the pillow with her bound wrists stretched above her head and her ass in the air and I grabbed her hips and pushed back into her from behind and she moaned into the pillow and I could feel her thighs trembling against mine.

"TWO," the Tome said. "Progress."

I gripped the collar from behind, pulled her head back, and fucked her harder. She loved it. Every thrust pushed a sound out of her that was somewhere between prayer and profanity and her hands were clenching in the sheets and she was pushing back against me, meeting every stroke, and I could see the muscles in her back working under that brown skin and the candlelight on the metal cuffs at her ankles.

"Your CADENCE is improving. Adjust the angle slightly to the left."

I adjusted the angle slightly to the left. Kaniz made a sound that confirmed the Tome's assessment. I hated everything about this and I was not going to stop.

She came the first time with her face in the pillow and her body going rigid around me, a sharp inhale and her bound hands clenching and then a shudder that ran through her whole body. Quiet and private, like she didn't know how to be loud about it yet. I realized no one had ever made her come before. All that theory, all those years of the Tome whispering in the dark, and nobody had ever actually touched her until three days ago in a storeroom. That thought did something to my chest that I wasn't prepared for.

I turned her over again. She was flushed and breathing hard and her eyes were glassy and I kissed her and she kissed me back, sloppy and desperate, and I pushed back inside her and she wrapped around me and I put my hand on the collar and she came apart a second time with my name and "master" and "please" all tangled together, her back arching off the mattress, her legs shaking, the collar pulling against my grip.

I followed her over. Hard enough that my vision went white for a second, buried deep inside her, her legs locked around my waist, her bound wrists hooked behind my neck, her forehead pressed against mine.

When I could see again she was breathing hard, her skin damp, her eyes bright. The cord on her wrists had left faint marks against the skin above the braces. She looked at them the way someone else might look at a gift.

"Thank you," she said. Like I'd done her a favor. Like she was grateful.

I untied her wrists. She let me, but her fingers lingered on the cord when I pulled it away, like she was reluctant to let it go.

The braces were still on. The cuffs. The collar. I ran my thumb along the edge of the wrist brace where it met her skin. Warm metal, faint redness underneath where it had pressed during the cord work. My fingers itched. I'm a rogue. I pick locks. It's what I do. I'd tried once already, back in the fortress corridor, and she'd stopped me cold.

"I could get these off," I said. "All of them. Give me two minutes and a hairpin."

She pulled her wrist away from my hand. Not fast, not angry. Deliberate.

"No."

"Kaniz, you're not in the fortress anymore. You don't have to..."

"They're mine." She looked at the braces. Touched the collar. The same way she'd touched it before, when she'd asked me to tighten it. Ownership. "He put them on me. I'm keeping them. They mean something different now."

I wanted to argue. The rogue part of my brain was physically offended by locked metal on a person who didn't need to be locked. But she was looking at me with absolute clarity and I remembered the corridor, the way she'd said those are mine, and I understood that this wasn't a conversation I was going to win. She'd decided, and it was hers to decide.

"The collar stays for the bond," I said. "Fine. But the braces and the cuffs are just metal."

"They're not just metal." She held up her wrist. The brace caught the candlelight. "They're mine. They remind me where I was and who I belong to now. You don't get to take that."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"You are the most confusing person I have ever met."

"Yes, master."

"ADEQUATE," the Tome pronounced from its face-down position. "Genuinely adequate. I mean that sincerely. I have witnessed encounters that would make a mortician weep with boredom and this was not one of them. There is POTENTIAL here. Raw, unrefined, desperately in need of my guidance, but potential nonetheless."

"High praise," Kaniz said. She was curled against my side, her head on my chest, one hand resting on my stomach. The collar was warm where it pressed against my skin. Her fingers traced small circles on my ribs, the metal of the wrist braces cool against my side.

"It is," the Tome said. "I do not distribute it freely."

I lay there with Kaniz's weight against me and the Tome muttering on the nightstand and the distant fiddle still playing badly in the square below and I should have been content. Job done. Warlock dead. Girls rescued. Blackthorn owed me money. Ashara was going to be furious about the grimoire but Ashara was always furious about something and at least this time I'd earned it. I had a girl curled against me who thought I hung the moon and I had nowhere to be tomorrow except riding Bertha back to Ashbourne with a talking book and a tentacle egg and absolutely no plan for any of it.

I stared at the ceiling.

The mayor's toast.

You've given us back our daughters.

Seventeen women in the cells. Two dead. One missing.

He'd said "our daughters." He'd raised his glass to all of them. He hadn't asked how many. He hadn't asked for names. A man whose village had been losing girls for months, and when they came back, he didn't count.

Everyone counts. The headman had a list. I'd seen it pinned to his wall, names written in shaky handwriting. Every girl reported missing. Every family that had come to him with empty rooms and unmade beds.

The mayor hadn't asked to see the list.

Kaniz's breathing had slowed. Not asleep, but close. Her hand was still on my stomach, the circles getting smaller.

"You're thinking," she murmured.

"Yeah."

"About the feast."

"About the toast."

She was quiet for a moment. Then: "He didn't count."

I looked at her. She wasn't looking at me. Her eyes were closed, her face pressed against my chest.

"No," I said. "He didn't."

"People who don't count already know the number."

I stared at the ceiling. The fiddle had stopped. The village was going quiet. Somewhere in the dark outside, at the edge of the lantern light where the trees began, something pink waited with a patience that had nothing to do with time.

Kaniz's breathing evened out. I pulled the blanket over her and she shifted closer, one ankle cuff hooking around my calf, and I didn't move it.

I lay there and thought about a man in a green coat who didn't count his daughters and a toast that closed a door instead of opening one.

Sleep came eventually. It wasn't restful.

---