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, the brown mare following with Kaniz sitting straight-backed and white-knuckled in the saddle. She’d gotten better over two days of riding, which is not the same as good. She held the reins like they owed her money. 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 midday light. A couple of guards at the gate stared. I didn’t blame them. They had a girl in a collar, a glowing egg and a talking saddlebag to look at.

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 same voice it used for the architecture, “I’ve watched that thing dissolve three hundred and forty-seven people, and it followed YOU out of the mountains like a lovesick HOUND. I am still waiting for my full account.”

I glanced back at the saddlebag. The eye blinked once, slowly, and went back to judging the architecture.

Kaniz was sizing up exits and the distance between buildings. I figured eight months in a stone fortress had taught her that. Her eyes tracked the market stalls and the people. I’d bet she’d never seen 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.”

Out of nowhere she asked, “Where do you live?”

That was the question, wasn’t it. I lived in a room at the Crooked Nail, with a bed that sagged in the middle and floorboards that creaked at 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, a mule, a mare, 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 gave me a confused look.

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. She had those soft curves under her apron and that look she always had, the one that said she’d already figured out whatever bullshit you were about to say before you said it. Her vertical pupils dilated, then contracted as she looked over the absolute circus that had just walked through her door. I couldn’t blame her. I hadn’t had a bath in ten days, Kaniz was in a thin shift and a metal collar, and the Tome had an eye.

“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, stopped on the collar, went over the wrist braces and the ankle cuffs, and came back up 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 went stiff and stood straight out, and my face went hot.

“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 and at Kaniz, and when her eyes landed on the collar again she grinned.

“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 and then on its eye, which 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. It had hot water and actual soap, and the door locked. I’d left the Tome on the nightstand upstairs with the saddlebag thrown over it, 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 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 and thorough, running her hands over her arms and shoulders one section at a time. 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 and closed it again. She had a point, technically. The shift covered her tits and her crotch, barely, as long as it was dry. When it got wet it turned transparent and clung to every curve she had, 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 and 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 I was getting hard under the water and doing my best to ignore it. “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 intensity as in Oakhaven, but she’d figured out the fork. Progress. The egg lay on the bench beside her, wrapped in the pillowcase and glowing. Everyone nearby was very carefully not looking at it.

I sat down across from her. Maple appeared with ale and stew. 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 kept eating, and without lifting her eyes from her plate, she said, “You’re not giving it to her.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“Good. It chose you. Things that choose you aren’t things you give away.”

I thought about Ripple in the Pit and the hand I’d extended, then about the egg beside her and the Tome upstairs, currently explaining the finer points of Crimson Empire sewage systems to an empty room.

Kaniz set her fork down. “You should have your own place.”

“I have a place. It’s upstairs.”

“The walls upstairs are wood.” She said it like the wood had let her down personally. “Rings pull out of wood.”

I stopped with the tankard halfway to my mouth. “Rings.”

“For chains.”

The man at the next table stared down at his bread and chewed.

“Maple likes me,” I said, too loud. “The Nail’s cheap, the stew’s good, and I can be out the window in three seconds if somebody comes through the door with a crossbow. I’ve lived here a year. I’m not moving.”

“Stone,” Kaniz said, ignoring me. “One wall would be enough.” She lifted her braced wrists over her head, right there in Maple’s common room, to show me the height, as calm as if she were telling me where she wanted a shelf.

My cock had an answer before my brain did. “I’m not buying a house. I’m nineteen. People who buy houses have beards and gout and strong feelings about drainage.”

“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. That’s not house money.”

She lowered her arms, went back to her carrot, and let me argue with myself. I was already picturing it: cold stone, iron rings, her wrists up over her head and that look on her face. So much for the Nail and its handy window.

“Fine,” I said. “A flat. Two rooms. Something with a door that locks and walls thick enough that the Tome can shout without the neighbors filing complaints.” I cleared my throat. “And one of them stone.”

“Yes, master,” she said.

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. Ten days away, two of them in a blood warlock’s fortress, and I’d actually forgotten how gorgeous Lily Winterbrook was. She had white-blonde hair braided with ribbons, blue eyes, tits I’d had my hands on every chance I got before I left and had been thinking about ever since, and that blue wool scarf she wore regardless of the weather. She crossed the common room with her hips swaying in that way she probably didn’t even know she was doing, nodding to Maple, scanning the tables until she found me.

When she saw me her shoulders dropped with relief, and then she gave me that particular smile she had, the one that looked sweet and promised trouble. It held right up until she noticed Kaniz sitting across from me, and her head tilted.

“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 touched mine under the table and her shoulder brushed my arm, and I could smell her, warm skin and the flowers she worked with all day. Occupational hazard. But fuck, after all that blood and tentacle musk, I could have buried my face in her neck and stayed there. “Who’s your friend?”

“Kaniz,” Kaniz said, in the tone she’d used with Maple.

“She’s...” I started.

“I’m his,” Kaniz said.

Lily looked at the collar and the cuffs, then at me. Her blue eyes narrowed, and I couldn’t tell if she was angry or just curious.

“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 ten days ago.”

“I was busy getting captured by a blood warlock.”

“Excuses, excuses.” But she was smiling, the real smile, wide and easy. She reached across and put her hand on mine, warm and familiar.

Kaniz watched this with her shoulders loose. Her eyes followed Lily’s thumb as it traced circles on the back of my hand, and she leaned in to watch. I’d bet she was filing this away for future reference.

“You look like you need someone to take care of you for a night.” Lily’s eyes flickered to Kaniz and 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 in over its head. 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, and took her time about it. “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, my eyes on her ass in that skirt and 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 and 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 telling me to go fuck someone else. What the hell was my life.

“You are the most confusing person I have ever met,” I said, for the second time.

“Yes, master.” She licked her lips, slow and deliberate. “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. My heart was hammering. 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. I could tell immediately there was nothing underneath it. The fabric clung to her hips and 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 naked and pale and gorgeous, and she kissed me while I was still staring, her mouth tasting like sugar. I stopped thinking about anything that wasn’t her.

There was no collar here, no “yes, master,” and no sentient grimoire providing commentary from the nightstand. It was just Lily Winterbrook, with 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, and 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 and on her back, my head between her thighs and 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 clit 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.

Kaniz wanted to be owned. Lily just wanted me, as much as I wanted her, and we had all night and no agenda and no ancient grimoire keeping score.

She climbed on top of me after, still flushed and breathing hard, and sank down on my cock, slow, her hands on my chest and her blue eyes looking right into mine. I put my hands on her hips and she moved. We looked at each other the whole time and hardly said a word. She felt incredible, warm 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 came right after her. It was simple, and it was the best sex I’d had since, well, Kaniz, but in a completely different way that I’d have to sort out later.

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 belly button. Her skin was damp against me, and I wanted to stay in this bed for approximately the rest of my life. The shop and the street outside were 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 and she calls you master.”

“Yeah.”

Her fingers traced lower along the scar. “Is she okay?”

She’d skipped right past me and asked about the girl.

“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 and the pink shape in the treeline. “I am,” I said.

She pulled the blanket over us and moved closer, and we slept. I woke up a few times in the night, and every time she was warm against me.

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 glow of the banked embers. I took the stairs slow, because the floorboards in this place creaked at every step and I didn’t want to wake anybody.

Kaniz was asleep in my room. She’d pulled the blanket to her chin and the egg was against her chest, glowing, 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 and the collar, with 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 went tight, and I told myself it was guilt.

I didn’t get in the bed. I sat at the small table by the window and pulled the saddlebag off the Tome.

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, keeping my voice low so I wouldn’t wake her.

The eye held still on me, with none of the usual rolling or dilating. I liked it better when it rolled.

“Ask,” it said.

“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 stayed quiet for so long that I thought it wasn’t going to answer. The light in the window shifted from gray to pale gold, and Kaniz shifted in her sleep.

When it spoke, it kept that low, plain voice, 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.”

“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, without any humor or 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, it was in the same low voice, and the hair on my arms stood 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.”

The ancient grimoire that had been roasting my sexual technique for four days was now telling me I’d inherited the secret weapons of a dead empire, which was fantastic news. I was sitting in a rented room above an inn at dawn, and the book was staring at me and expecting me to know what to do with that information.

The eye blinked once.

“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, and Ashbourne was waking up below us with the sounds of carts and voices.

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, a beautiful sleeping girl behind me and a city outside 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, and about the Tome choosing me out of all its owners. Kaniz saying “I’m his” to a room full of strangers was in there too. People kept choosing me and I had no fucking idea why. “So what happens now?” I said.

The Tome’s eye dilated.

“Now?” it said. And the voice shifted back to the old one, the loud one I’d been listening to for days 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, and in the Guild Hall Marcus Blackthorn had a payment waiting with my name on it. 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.

Back in Oakhaven, the headman had probably found what was left of the mayor by now, the man who sold a girl named Belia Lemas to a blood warlock for the price of being left alone. I couldn’t make myself feel sorry for him.

I closed the Tome. The eye stayed against the cover, watching through the leather. “Get some sleep,” I told it. “We start after I see Blackthorn.”

“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.

It kept complaining through the leather.

I got into bed. Kaniz found me immediately, curling against my side with one hand flat on my chest and one leg tangled 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 tiny satisfied hum without waking up.

I lay there with the morning light on the ceiling and the Tome muttering in the saddlebag. The egg glowed between us, and my brain was 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 lying against my side, 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.