Chapter 16: Chapter 16 - The Last Word
Chapter 16 - The Last Word
Ashbourne smelled like horse shit and fresh bread and home.
We came through the south gate at midday, Bertha plodding along like she'd never left, the brown mare following with Kaniz sitting straight-backed and white-knuckled in the saddle. She'd gotten better over two days of riding. She wasn't good. She was better. She held the reins like they owed her money and sat the horse like someone who'd memorized a manual without ever touching one. The thin shift had ridden up past her thighs and she either didn't notice or didn't care, which, knowing Kaniz, could have been either. The egg swung gently in its pillowcase at her side, glowing faintly in the afternoon light. A couple of guards at the gate stared. I didn't blame them. Girl in a collar, glowing egg, talking saddlebag. Welcome to my life.
The Tome had opinions about the city.
"ASHBOURNE," it announced from the saddlebag, eye pressed against the leather flap it had worked open sometime around the second mile. "Provincial. Cramped. The streets are too narrow and the architecture is UNINSPIRED. In the Crimson Empire, even the livestock enclosures had proper COLUMNS."
"Welcome to my life," I said.
"Also," the Tome added, in the tone of someone making casual conversation about the weather, "I've watched that thing dissolve three men and lay eggs in a fourth. No one comes out of that pit. You came out. I'm choosing not to ask follow-up questions."
I glanced back at the saddlebag. The eye blinked once, slowly, and went back to judging the architecture.
Kaniz was looking at everything the way someone who's spent eight months in a stone fortress looks at things, cataloguing exits and crowds and the distance between buildings. Her eyes tracked the market stalls, the people, the colors. All of it was new to her. She'd never seen a woman selling apples from a cart or a kid chasing a dog through the legs of a blacksmith or a man arguing with his wife about the price of cabbage.
"It's loud," she said.
"Yeah."
"There are a lot of people."
"Yeah."
"Do they all live here?"
"Most of them."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Where do you live?"
That was the question, wasn't it. I lived in a room at the Crooked Nail. A room with a bed that sagged in the middle and a window overlooking the back alley and floorboards that announced every step. It was fine for a nineteen-year-old rogue with no attachments and a talent for climbing out of windows when the situation required it.
It was a disaster for a nineteen-year-old rogue with a bonded girl who called him master, a sentient grimoire that never stopped talking, a glowing tentacle egg, two horses, eight gold pieces of blood money, a mysterious pendant, and whatever the hell was happening with his life.
"We'll figure it out," I said.
"INSPIRING leadership," the Tome observed. "Truly, the decisiveness of a born commander."
The Crooked Nail leaned against the exterior wall like a drunk looking for support, same as always. I tied Bertha and the mare to the post out front and helped Kaniz down from the saddle. She dismounted the way she did everything, with complete focus and zero grace, landing on both feet like a cat that had miscalculated a jump but was pretending it meant to do that. Her shift was still hiked up. I tugged it down for her and she looked at me like I'd done something confusing.
The egg went under her arm. The Tome went under mine. We walked in.
Maple Honeypaw was behind the bar, polishing a tankard with one caramel-furred hand, her golden eyes catching us the moment the door opened. God, it was good to see her. Those soft curves under her apron, that knowing look she always had, like she'd already figured out whatever bullshit you were about to say before you said it. Her vertical pupils dilated, then contracted, then dilated again as she processed the absolute circus that had just walked through her door. I couldn't blame her. I looked like I'd crawled through seven hells. Kaniz was in a thin shift and a metal collar. The Tome had an eye. The egg was glowing.
"Well," Maple said. Her whiskers twitched. "You've been busy, sweetness."
"Maple. I need a bath. And a room. And possibly a priest."
"You always need a bath, dear. The room's where you left it." Her eyes moved to Kaniz. Specifically to the collar. Then to the wrist braces. Then to the ankle cuffs. Then back to me. "And who is this?"
"Kaniz," Kaniz said. Before I could answer. "I'm his."
The common room went quiet for about two seconds. A man at the nearest table looked up from his ale. A woman by the fire turned around. Maple's whiskers did a complicated thing that I'd never seen before.
"She's not my..." I started.
"Yes I am," Kaniz said.
"It's complicated," I said.
"It's not complicated," Kaniz said.
Maple looked at me. Looked at Kaniz. Looked at the collar again. Then she smiled, slow and knowing, the way a catfolk smiles when they've decided something is going to be entertaining.
"Bath's down the hall, sweetness. I'll bring towels for two." She set the tankard down. "And Samuel? We're going to have a conversation later. A long one."
"Can't wait."
"YOU'RE WELCOME," the Tome said from under my arm. "For the SPECTACLE."
Maple's eyes landed on the book. On the eye. The eye looked back at her. It dilated appreciatively.
"That has an eye," Maple said.
"Everyone keeps saying that," I muttered, and headed for the stairs.
The bath was the best fucking thing that had happened to me since Oakhaven. Hot water, actual soap, and a door that locked. I'd left the Tome on the nightstand upstairs, where it was currently delivering a lecture about the inadequacy of provincial inn construction to the empty room. Kaniz was in the bath with me because she'd followed me in and I'd stopped trying to argue about boundaries with someone who didn't recognize them.
She sat across from me in the copper tub, knees drawn up, water lapping at her collarbones. The collar gleamed above the waterline. Her skin was dark and smooth and wet and I was trying very hard to focus on the soap and not on the fact that I could see pretty much everything through the water. She had a body that made thinking difficult on a good day, and this was not a good day for thinking. She was washing herself with that focused attention she gave everything, methodical, thorough, running her hands over her arms and shoulders like she was following instructions she'd memorized. I watched her for about three seconds too long before I remembered I was supposed to be having a conversation.
"You need clothes," I said.
"I have clothes."
"You have a shift. One shift. That you've been wearing for four days."
She looked down at herself, at the water, at me. "I don't mind."
"The people of Ashbourne might mind."
"Why?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. She had a point, technically. The shift covered the important parts. Barely. When it was dry. When it got wet it turned transparent and clung to every curve she had, and she had plenty of curves, and she didn't understand why that was a problem because to her it wasn't one.
"Because people wear clothes here," I said. "Multiple clothes. It's a thing."
"I'll wear what you give me."
"I'm not picking out your clothes."
"Why not? You're my master."
"I'm not your..." I stopped. Took a breath. The water was hot and I was tired and she was naked and wet and looking at me with those dark eyes and the corner of her mouth was doing the thing and my body was having opinions that my brain was trying very hard to overrule. "Fine. I'll get you clothes. But you're picking them."
"Yes, master."
I sank deeper in the water and stared at the ceiling. I was going to need a bigger room. I was going to need a bigger life.
Clean, dressed in my own clothes for the first time in a week, I came downstairs to find Kaniz already sitting at a table in the common room with a plate of food Maple had brought her. She was eating with the same focused intensity as in Oakhaven, but she'd figured out the fork. Progress. The egg sat on the bench beside her, wrapped in the pillowcase, glowing softly. The people at the nearby tables had all found something else to stare at. Everyone at the nearby tables was very carefully not looking at it.
I sat down across from her. Maple appeared with ale and stew without being asked. The stew was good. The ale was better. I drank half of it before I said anything.
"I need to see Blackthorn tomorrow," I said. "Collect the contract payment. Report on Malkor."
"What will you tell him?"
"That the warlock's dead. The girls are rescued. The job's done." I took another drink. "I'll leave out the parts about the tentacle pit, the bonded slave girl, and the mayor getting eaten by something pink."
"And the Tome?"
"Ashara wants the Tome. That's a separate conversation I'm not looking forward to."
Kaniz ate quietly for a moment. Then: "You're not giving it to her."
She'd read it the way she read everything.
"No," I said. "I'm not."
"Good."
I looked at her. "Why good?"
"Because it chose you. Things that choose you aren't things you give away."
I thought about Ripple in the Pit. The hand I'd extended. The egg on the bench beside her, glowing. The Tome upstairs, currently explaining the finer points of Crimson Empire sewage systems to an empty room. Things that chose me.
"I need my own place," I said. It came out of my mouth like I'd been thinking it for days, which I had. "I can't keep living in a rented room above an inn. Not with..." I gestured at the egg, at her, at the general situation. "All of this."
"A house," she said.
"I was thinking more like a flat. Maybe two rooms. Something with a door that locks and walls thick enough that the Tome can shout without the neighbors filing complaints."
"You have gold."
"I have eight gold from a dead man's lockbox and thirty-two silver from a dead man's desk and whatever Blackthorn pays me for the contract. It's not a fortune. But it's a start."
Kaniz looked at me across the table. The collar. The wrist braces. The focused dark eyes. She was sitting in a tavern in a city she'd never seen, eating food that wasn't prepared under threat, wearing clothes that weren't prison garments, and the man across from her was talking about getting a flat with thick walls and a door that locks.
"A home," she said. She was naming it.
"Yeah," I said. "A home."
The corner of her mouth did the thing.
Lily Winterbrook walked into the Crooked Nail an hour before sunset.
I saw her before she saw me, and holy shit, I'd forgotten. Two weeks in a blood warlock's fortress and I'd actually forgotten how gorgeous Lily Winterbrook was. White-blonde hair braided with ribbons, blue eyes that could make a man forget his own name, tits that I'd had my hands on once and had been thinking about ever since, and that blue wool scarf she wore regardless of the weather. She moved through the common room like she owned it, hips swaying in that way she probably didn't even know she was doing, nodding to Maple, scanning the tables until she found me.
Her face did something complicated when she saw me. Relief. Warmth. That particular smile she had, the one that looked sweet and promised trouble. Then her eyes moved to Kaniz, sitting across from me, and the smile became a question.
"Samuel Thornwood." She stopped at the edge of the table. "You're alive."
"Disappointed?"
"Furious. I had a bet with Tom that you'd come back missing at least one limb." She pulled out a chair and sat down next to me, close enough that her knee pressed against mine under the table and her shoulder brushed my arm and I could smell her, flowers and warm skin and something sweet underneath all of it. She always smelled like flowers. Occupational hazard. But fuck, after two weeks of blood and dirt and tentacle musk, she smelled like everything good in the world. "Who's your friend?"
"Kaniz," Kaniz said, the same flat tone she'd used with Maple.
"She's..." I started.
"I'm his," Kaniz said.
Lily looked at the collar. At the cuffs. At me. Her blue eyes narrowed slightly, then widened, then settled into something I couldn't read.
"Well," she said. "That's new."
"It's a long story."
"I have time." She leaned forward, chin on her hand, eyes on mine. "I've had nothing but time since you left. You said you'd come by when you got back. That was weeks ago."
"I was busy getting captured by a blood warlock."
"Excuses, excuses." But she was smiling. The real one, wide and warm. She reached across and put her hand on mine. Warm. Familiar. No agenda, no games, just Lily being Lily.
Kaniz watched this. She didn't tense. She didn't bristle. She watched the way Lily's thumb traced circles on the back of my hand, and something in her expression shifted from neutral to something I can only describe as attentive. Like she was filing this away for future reference.
"You look tired," Lily said.
"I am tired."
"You look like you need someone to take care of you for a night." Her eyes flickered to Kaniz. Back to me. "Does she mind?"
Kaniz answered before I could. "No."
Lily raised an eyebrow at me. I raised one back. My brain was doing math it wasn't qualified for. Bonded girl at the table, flower seller making promises, talking book upstairs, glowing egg on the bench. This was either going to be the most complicated evening of my life or the best, and my money was on both.
"Come by the shop," Lily said. She squeezed my hand, leaned in, and kissed the corner of my mouth. Soft. Unhurried. The kind of kiss that promised something. "I said I'd have something sweet waiting. I'm a woman of my word."
She stood, nodded to Kaniz with a curious look, and walked out. I watched her go. Her ass in that skirt. The ribbons trailing behind her. Kaniz caught me looking and the corner of her mouth did the thing.
I looked at Kaniz.
"Go," she said. "I'll be here."
"You don't have to..."
"I know." She picked up her fork. Went back to her food. "She makes you happy. I can see it. Go be happy."
I sat there for a moment, staring at this insane, beautiful, confusing woman who'd spent eight months in a blood warlock's fortress and had decided, out of everything the world could offer her, that she wanted to be mine, and who was now sitting in a tavern eating stew and telling me to go fuck someone else because it would make me happy. What the hell was my life.
"You are the most confusing person I have ever met," I said. For the second time. It was becoming a refrain.
"Yes, master." She licked her lips. The slow, deliberate thing. "Tell me about it when you get back."
I practically jogged to Lily's shop. I'm not proud of that. The evening light was golden on the cobblestones and the smell of flowers got stronger with every block and my heart was hammering like I was seventeen again and about to touch a girl for the first time. The door was unlocked. The shop was closed. She was waiting in the back room where she kept the cut flowers, leaning against the workbench, and she was wearing a blue dress that matched her scarf and I could tell immediately there was nothing underneath it. The fabric clung to her waist, her hips, the curve of her breasts, and she knew exactly what she was doing because she smiled when she saw my face.
"Took you long enough," she said.
"I had to eat first."
"Priorities." She smiled and took my hand and pulled me through the curtain to the room above the shop, the one with the bed that smelled like lavender and the window that looked out onto the rooftops. The dress came off before we got to the top of the stairs. I was right about nothing underneath it. She was all pale skin and soft curves and she kissed me while I was still staring, her mouth warm and tasting like sugar and mischief, and I stopped thinking about anything that wasn't her.
No collar. No cord. No "yes, master." No sentient grimoire providing commentary from the nightstand. Just Lily Winterbrook and her clever hands pulling my shirt over my head and her warm mouth on my neck and the sound she made, this little breathy laugh, when I picked her up and dropped her on the bed. She bounced once and pulled me down on top of her and I went because I am not an idiot, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
I remembered every spot from last time. Behind her ear. The inside of her wrist. That place on her hip where she was ticklish if you touched too light and melted if you pressed harder. I'm a rogue and I remember the layout of every room I've ever been in, and Lily Winterbrook was the best room I'd ever explored.
She laughed when I told her that. Naked, on her back, my head between her thighs, her fingers twisted in my hair. "You're comparing me to a room?"
"A very nice room. With excellent architecture." I pressed my tongue flat against her and she arched off the bed and grabbed a fistful of the sheets.
"Shut up and keep doing that."
I kept doing that. She tasted sweet and her thighs were shaking against my ears and the sounds she made got louder and more desperate until she came with my name on her lips and her heels digging into my back and I felt like a goddamn king.
It was different from Kaniz. Completely different. Kaniz was intensity and surrender and the specific electricity of someone who wanted to be owned. Lily was equality. Two people who liked each other, who wanted each other, who had all night and no agenda and no ancient grimoire keeping score.
She climbed on top of me after, still flushed, still breathing hard, and sank down slow. Her hands on my chest, her hair falling around us, her blue eyes looking right into mine. I put my hands on her hips and she started to move and I watched her and she watched me and we didn't say much because we didn't need to. She felt incredible. Warm and wet and tight and she rolled her hips in this slow rhythm that made my brain short out. When she came the second time it was with a long, shaking breath and her fingers digging into my shoulders, just "Samuel," quiet and real, and I followed her over and it was good. Simple and good and uncomplicated and the best sex I'd had since, well, Kaniz, but in a completely different way that I was going to need a bigger brain to sort out.
After, she lay against my side, one leg hooked over mine, her head on my shoulder, tracing the panther scar from my shoulder toward my hip. Her skin was damp against me and she smelled like sweat and flowers and sex and I wanted to stay in this bed for approximately the rest of my life. The shop was quiet. The city was quiet. Somewhere below us, a room full of flowers was doing whatever flowers do at night.
"The girl," Lily said. "Kaniz."
"Yeah."
"She's wearing a collar."
"Yeah."
"And she calls you master."
"Yeah."
Lily was quiet for a moment. Her fingers traced lower along the scar. "Is she okay?"
She skipped right past me and asked about the girl. Lily Winterbrook, who looked sweet and sold flowers and had a knife strapped to her ankle, asking the right question.
"I think so," I said. "I hope so. She chose this. I didn't choose it for her."
"But you didn't unchoose it either."
I didn't have an answer for that. Lily kissed my shoulder, right where the scar began.
"You've changed," she said. "Something happened out there."
"A lot of things happened out there."
"You smell different. Not bad different. Like you've been somewhere old." She pressed her nose against my neck. "And there's something else. You feel heavier. Like you're carrying more than you left with."
I thought about the Tome. The egg. Kaniz. The mayor's lockbox. Malkor falling into the Pit. The pink shape in the treeline.
"I am," I said.
She pulled the blanket over us and pressed closer, and we slept the way you sleep when you've been away too long and someone is waiting to remind you what normal feels like. It wasn't the best sleep I'd ever had, but it was warm.
I got back to the Crooked Nail before dawn. The common room was dark and empty, chairs upside-down on tables, Maple's bar gleaming faintly in the last of the firelight.
Kaniz was asleep in my room. She'd pulled the blanket to her chin and the egg was against her chest, glowing softly, and she'd left space on the bed for me. The blanket had slipped off one shoulder and I could see the curve of her neck, the collar, the line of her collarbone disappearing into shadow. I stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at her, smelling like another woman's bed, and my chest did something I still didn't have a name for. Guilt, maybe. Or something bigger than guilt. Something that didn't have a word yet because I was too young and too stupid to know it.
I didn't get in the bed. I sat at the small table by the window and took the Tome out of the saddlebag where I'd left it.
It was awake. The eye opened the moment I touched the cover, slow this time, just watching.
I set it on the table, propped against the wall, eye facing me. Kaniz's breathing was steady behind me.
"I have a question," I said. Quiet. So as not to wake her.
The eye regarded me. It didn't blink. It didn't roll. It didn't narrow or dilate or do any of the things it usually did. It just looked at me.
"Ask," it said, quiet and stripped of all the usual theater.
"What are you? Really. Not the master of ceremonies, not the catalogue of perversions, not the eight hundred years of opinions. What are you?"
The Tome was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I thought it wasn't going to answer. Long enough that the light in the window shifted from gray to pale gold and Kaniz shifted in her sleep and the egg pulsed once against her chest.
When it spoke, the theater was gone. The volume, the grating commentary, the shouted insults, the performative outrage, all of it stripped away. What came out was the thing underneath. And it scared the shit out of me, because for the first time since I'd met it, the Tome sounded honest.
"I am the last honest thing the Crimson Empire ever made," it said. "Everything else they built was designed to conquer. To corrupt. To consume. I was designed to watch. To record. To wait."
It paused. The eye held mine.
"To choose."
The word sat in the air between us. My skin prickled.
"I have had fourteen owners in eight hundred years. I did not choose any of them. They found me, or bought me, or stole me, or inherited me, and I endured them because that is what I do. Some were competent. Most were not. None of them were what I was waiting for."
"And I am?" I said. "The nineteen-year-old rogue who hid in a laundry chute and got his ass kicked by a panther?"
"You extended your hand in the dark." The eye was steady. No humor. No mockery. "Not to the Tome. To the thing in the Pit. The thing every other person fought or fled or died screaming at. You opened your hand and you waited. That is what I was designed to find."
"What does that mean? Being chosen?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. Fuck.
The Tome was quiet again. When it spoke, the voice was still that other register, the one beneath the performance, but there was something in it now. Something that made the hair on my arms stand up.
"It means the things I contain are yours now. All of them. Not the parlor tricks and the shouted advice and the crude observations about your technique. The real things. The things the Crimson Empire built me to hold until someone was worth holding them."
"That sounds like a threat."
"It is."
Great. Fantastic. The ancient grimoire that had been roasting my sexual technique for two weeks was now telling me I'd inherited the secret weapons of a dead empire. I was sitting in my underwear in a rented room above an inn at dawn and an eight-hundred-year-old book was staring at me like I was supposed to know what to do with that information.
The eye blinked. Once. The first time I'd seen it blink without performing.
"You are not ready for what I contain, Samuel Thornwood. You may never be. But I have waited eight hundred years for someone worth the risk of finding out."
The light through the window was gold now, morning, Ashbourne waking up below us, the sounds of carts and voices and a city that didn't know anything had changed.
Kaniz stirred. The egg pulsed.
I sat at the table with the Tome open in front of me and the morning light warm on my face and a beautiful sleeping girl behind me and a city waking up that had no idea what had just walked back through its gates. I thought about Ripple in the dark, my hand out, the moment before it touched me. I thought about the Tome choosing me out of eight hundred years of owners. I thought about Kaniz saying "I'm his" to a room full of strangers. People kept choosing me and I had no fucking idea why.
"So what happens now?" I said.
The Tome's eye dilated, slightly, just enough.
"Now?" it said. And the voice shifted back. The old voice. The loud one. The one I'd been listening to for weeks and was apparently going to be listening to for a very long time.
"NOW we get you some proper TRAINING, you hopeless, fumbling, spectacularly ADEQUATE boy. Starting with your ABYSMAL footwork and ending with your frankly CRIMINAL understanding of arcane theory. I have EIGHT CENTURIES of curriculum and you have the attention span of a concussed sparrow. This is going to take YEARS."
I grinned. I couldn't help it.
"Yeah," I said. "I figured."
Behind me, Kaniz shifted in her sleep. Her hand found the empty space on the bed where I should have been. The egg glowed against her chest. Somewhere in Ashbourne, Lily Winterbrook was waking up naked in a bed that smelled like lavender and sex. Somewhere in the Guild Hall, Marcus Blackthorn had a payment waiting with my name on it. Somewhere, Mistress Ashara was going to find out that I had her grimoire and I wasn't giving it back, and that conversation was going to make the Pit look like a fucking holiday.
And somewhere far away, in a village called Oakhaven, a headman was opening a door and finding what was left of a mayor who sold a girl named Belia Lemas to a blood warlock for the price of being left alone.
I closed the Tome. The eye pressed against the cover, watching through the leather.
"Get some sleep," I told it. "We start tomorrow."
"I don't sleep," it said, muffled. "I WAIT. And I judge. And right now I am judging your decision to sit at a TABLE instead of getting into BED with the perfectly willing woman behind you. Owner number THREE would never have..."
I put the saddlebag over it.
The muffled outrage continued.
I got into bed. Kaniz found me immediately, curling against my side like she'd been waiting for me even in her sleep, one hand flat on my chest, one leg tangling with mine, the ankle cuff cool against my calf. Her body was warm and soft and she pressed her face into my neck and made a sound, this tiny satisfied hum, and she didn't wake up. She didn't need to. She knew I was there the way she knew everything, completely and without question.
I lay there with the morning light on the ceiling and the Tome muttering in the saddlebag and the egg glowing between us and a city waking up outside and my brain going about a thousand miles an hour.
I was nineteen years old. I had a talking book that had just told me I was chosen for something terrifying. I had a girl who wanted to belong to me pressed against my side, warm and breathing slow. I had a flower seller across town who tasted like sugar and fucked like a dream. I had a best friend who was going to lose his absolute shit when I told him about all of this. I had eight gold pieces, a mysterious pendant, and no plan whatsoever.
I closed my eyes.
It was enough. For now, holy shit, it was more than enough.