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, her eyes fixed on the valley below.

Kaniz walked half a step behind me. She never closed the gap. The egg glowed faintly against her chest, 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, genuinely unsure why I was asking.

The Tome was in a grain sack I’d grabbed off a peg near the gate. I’d put it in there somewhere around the first mile, when it got its voice back and 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 threatened me. I ignored it.

Oakhaven appeared through the trees as the sun crested the ridge. It was small, about forty timber and thatch buildings clustered around a well and a gathering square. Smoke rose from the morning fires, and a rooster somewhere screamed about the day. After Malkor’s fortress, it was the prettiest place I’d ever seen, rooster included.

The blonde girl let out a laugh that cracked into a sob, one she’d been holding in since the cell. She started running.

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 came down the hill, and the village figured it out in real time. I hung back in a dead guard’s clothes with blood still on my hands, and for once nobody was looking at me.

The headman found me, an old man with weathered skin and shaking hands. 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 and accept the gratitude with humility, then deflect the praise onto whatever people want to hear, the mission or the gods. 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. I’d killed a blood warlock and freed seventeen women, and I’d walked out of a fortress of horror with a sentient grimoire and a bonded slave girl who carried 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 was the hero they thought I was.

By midmorning my eyes had started wandering, and about half the rescued women had washed up and 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. He stood out right away because he was the only person in the square who wasn’t crying. He was tall and well-fed, and his green coat was nicer than anything else in the village. His smile showed his teeth and stopped there. He clasped my hand and called me a hero, then said something about Oakhaven’s eternal gratitude that he had clearly rehearsed on the walk over.

“You’ve given us back our daughters,” he said.

I smiled and nodded. It sounded rehearsed, same as the gratitude speech, and it bugged me more than it should have.

They threw a feast. Of course they did.

The spread was sparse by Ashbourne standards. They served roasted goat, bread, root vegetables and 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. It was small and clean, with a bed that had an actual mattress and a basin of water. On my way up the stairs I’d passed a list of names pinned to the headman’s wall. I’d washed the blood off my hands and changed into clothes someone had brought. They fit badly, since the previous owner was broader in the shoulders and shorter in the leg, but they were better than the dead guard’s uniform and I wasn’t going to complain.

The Tome was on the nightstand, still in the sack and 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.”

It went quiet for a moment before it complained: “The eye cannot blink in here. There is grain dust. It is excruciating.”

I almost felt bad, until 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, so 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 and the line of her hips where the cord cinched the waist. 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 that I wasn’t in a hurry to fix that, which made me the kind of guy who liked his girl collared, and I’d have to think about that later. She sat on the edge of the bed with her legs together and her hands folded, waiting for me to tell her what to do. The egg lay 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, shaking hands and accepting drinks, and I 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. Woodsmoke and charred fat hung over the whole square. 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. She caught me looking and smiled, I smiled back, and Kaniz, sitting next to me, settled her hand on my thigh under the table.

At the main table Kaniz ate with the focused attention of someone relearning how utensils worked. She gripped her fork in her fist for the first few bites, then figured it out. She tried the bread first and the meat second. She sniffed the ale and set it 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 cask.

“She was held in the fortress. She’s with me now.”

He looked at the collar, then the cuffs, and 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, about gratitude and sacrifice, and about the bravery of those who venture into the dark so others don’t have to. He said Oakhaven would remember the name Samuel Thornwood, and that the warlock’s shadow would never fall on this village again.

The man was good at it, and every word was polished.

And when he said “the warlock’s shadow would never fall on this village again,” my stomach tightened. It sounded like he was shutting the door on the whole business before anyone could ask questions.

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 looked where I was looking, then looked at me and kept her mouth shut.

I didn’t believe for a second that she hadn’t seen it.

The room above the headman’s house was quiet after the feast. Distant laughter drifted up from the square below, and someone played a fiddle, badly. It was the sound 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 and turned the latch.

She stood with her back against the door and looked at me with plain, open want. It looked like she’d been holding it back since the fortress, and now, in a quiet room with a locked door and no one trying to kill us, she let it show.

“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 crossed the room with long, certain steps. She stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the soap she’d used to wash and her own warm skin under it.

“I want this,” she said, 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, running her fingers along the metal 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, which was warm from her skin, her pulse steady underneath. “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 to her throat was on a completely different page. It was painfully, embarrassingly on board.

“That’s...” I started.

“I know what I want.” Her eyes were steady. “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. The Tome rolled right off her, same as everything else. She was standing in front of me with my hand on her collar and her eyes on mine, waiting for me to decide what I was going to do about it.

I tightened my grip on the collar, just enough.

Her lips parted and her breath caught. Her eyes went half-lidded and she made a sound, small and involuntary, and leaned into my hand. My cock answered before the rest of me had finished arguing.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Master.”

I kissed her hard, with my hand on her collar, pulling her into it while her mouth opened under mine. On the board, when she thought she had to kill me, she’d kissed me careful and deliberate. This time she grabbed my shirt with both hands and pressed herself to me, 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. “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 from the board when she’d whispered “guess I don’t have to kill you”.

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 across the braces and she tested it and pulled against the resistance. Her shoulders dropped and her breath slowed. My guess was she’d been wound tight since long before the fortress, and now she let it go.

“Good,” she said, almost to herself. Her eyes came up to mine, and she said, “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 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. I carried her to the bed and put her down on it, and she looked up at me with those dark eyes, 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 metal on her wrists and ankles, and I stopped for a moment because the candlelight was on her skin, brown and warm. The metal caught the light everywhere she wore it, and she was watching me look at her. I figured she’d been waiting a long time for someone who found her 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 for real, her bound wrists against the pillow and her body shaking with it. I hadn’t heard her laugh since the storeroom. It was good, bright and surprised, and I think it caught her off guard as much as me.

“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 moaned low in her throat, and it 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. Her breasts were round and full, with dark, hard nipples, 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 and pulled back to look at her. “Hey,” I said. “I need you to hear this.”

She opened her eyes, confused and 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, naked on a borrowed bed with her wrists bound above her head and the collar at her throat, and she smiled the real smile, not the corner-of-the-mouth thing.

“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, and 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. 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. She bit her lip, and her hips rolled into my fingers while her bound hands clenched above her head.

“More,” she begged. “Please.”

I gave her more, two fingers inside her and my thumb working her clit until her eyes rolled back, my other hand gripping the collar. She was tight and hot and slick, and every sound she made went straight to my cock. She was vocal and honest, with 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. 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. I pushed into her, and we both made sounds that the Tome would probably catalogue for future reference.

Her pussy gripped my cock like she was afraid I’d leave, and I pushed deeper until she took all of me. Her back arched and her bound wrists strained at the cord, and she whispered “yes, yes, yes” with her eyes closed and the collar catching candlelight.

I fucked her slow at first, my hand on the collar, pulling just enough, and she answered every thrust. 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 when I bent down and took one in my mouth again 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 and 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. I grabbed her hips and pushed back into her from behind, and she moaned into the pillow while her thighs trembled against mine.

“TWO,” the Tome said. “Progress.”

I gripped the collar from behind and fucked her harder, pulling her head back. She loved it. She swore and begged in the same breath, her hands clenching in the sheets as she pushed back and met every stroke. The muscles in her back worked under that brown skin, and the metal cuffs clinked at her ankles.

“Your CADENCE is improving. Adjust the angle slightly to the left.”

I adjusted the angle slightly to the left. Kaniz groaned, which 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. She gave a sharp inhale with her bound hands clenching, and a shudder ran through her whole body. It was quiet and private, nothing like the storeroom. All those months of wanting it, and the first time anyone touched her, in the storeroom, she’d been working the plan to drug me. That thought made my chest ache, and I wasn’t ready for it.

I turned her over again. She was flushed and breathing hard, her eyes glassy, and I kissed her and she kissed me back, sloppy and desperate. I pushed back inside her and she wrapped around me, and when I put my hand on the collar 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, with 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 and her eyes bright. The cord on her wrists had left faint marks on the skin above the braces. She looked at them like they were a gift.

“Thank you,” she said.

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

Every piece of metal she’d come in with was still on her. I ran my thumb along the edge of the wrist brace where it met her skin. The metal was warm, and the skin underneath was faintly red where the cord had pressed. My fingers itched. I’m a rogue. I pick locks. It’s what I do. “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.

“No.”

“Kaniz, you’re not in the fortress anymore. You don’t have to...”

“They’re mine.” She looked at the braces and touched the collar the same way she had when she’d asked me to tighten it. “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 knew I’d lose this one. “Fine, keep the collar,” I said. “But the braces and the cuffs are just metal.”

“They’re not just metal.” She held up her wrist. “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 and closed it, and then I 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 lay on 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, the Tome muttering on the nightstand and the distant fiddle still playing badly in the square below, and I should have been content. The job was done, the warlock was dead, the girls were rescued, and 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 finding Bertha and riding back to Ashbourne with a talking book and a tentacle egg, and absolutely no plan for any of it.

I stared at the ceiling.

I kept hearing the mayor’s toast.

You’ve given us back our daughters.

Seventeen women had come out of the cells. Two had died there, and one was missing.

He’d said “our daughters.” He’d raised his glass to all of them without asking how many there were or for any names. His village had been losing girls for months, and when they came back, he didn’t count.

The headman had a list. I’d seen it pinned to his wall, names written in shaky handwriting. It named every girl reported missing and every family that had come to him.

The mayor hadn’t asked to see the list.

Kaniz’s breathing had slowed and she was close to asleep, her hand 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, and when she spoke it was barely above a breath: “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 was still waiting.

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.

Sleep came eventually.