“I have looked over the warrant for Willoughby Chase and can deliver several documents to you,” he said without looking up. “I admit, however, to not having committed much thought to the case overall yet.”
Of course he hadn’t.
“The contract only said you would allow me to look over everything, not that you would,” I said. “Julian, as a family member, is allowed access as well. I’ll get him to copy them and show me.”
“That won’t be necessary,” he said, straightening his already straight glasses. “Court documents may not be copied. Any information you need will have to be gleaned from them directly.”
“Well played.” I leaned back and crossed my arms. “I suppose this is what I get for assuming access to information included the ability to copy said information to facilitate better access.”
I had glossed over that aspect of the contract, and now I was paying for it.
“In that case, I will have to memorize what I read, and I won’t have time to work much tomorrow I’m afraid,” I said. “Until then, you can explain why you wrote the sacrificial summons for Will while sitting in that carriage.”
The Heir sighed. “I assumed you knew.”
“As well as I know Old Liran.” I rolled my eyes while he wasn’t looking. “I still want to know about that summons. The ink and wax were still wet.”
“They were.” He took a sip of tea and turned to me, glasses foggy. A coiled lemon peel dangled from the cup. “There was a warrant out for his arrest for lesser crimes, and I signed the sacrificial summons because he was the only councilor living in Felhollow. Once I realized that Felhollow was where the vilewrought ran to, I knew it was Willoughby Chase I was after.”
“What lesser charges?” I asked. “Why did it matter he was the only councilor from Felhollow?”
If it had been a day ago, I would have found the idea of Will committing any crime without good reason laughable, but Julian had spilled Will’s secrets. Will had funded a new factory in the Wallows a few years back with a few other councilors. Will wasn’t paying for healers and was instead letting workers go when they got injured. It wasn’t illegal, but it was infuriating. It was exactly what Northcott had done.
“I can’t tell you that,” said the Heir.
I exhaled loudly. “We had a deal.”
“I wanted the vilewrought,” said the Heir, which sounded true enough. “Chase stole her. That is crime enough. Worse, he deprived me of another vilewrought. Is that not enough to justify my actions?”
He adjusted his glasses.
“No, you’re not that petty.” I let him have this lie. He wasn’t telling me what Will had really done anytime soon, and I’d have to wait or find out on my own. “You love contracts, and you like rules. You’d not break the rules so flagrantly by arresting him on false charges simply because he annoyed you. You’d find a rule that would let you arrest him.”
Treason, the warrant had said, but what treason could Will of all folks get up to? It was the only crime on the warrant that made him a potential sacrifice. The Heir wouldn’t have tacked it on without being able to prove it.
“Perhaps.” The Heir inclined his head to me, fingers falling to his throat. He unknotted his red cravat twist by twist. “You should stay with me after his trial. If you don’t, my mother will almost certainly pursue and bind you.”
I watched his fingers rub at the pale skin of his collarbone and narrowed my eyes. “And you won’t?”
“We should consider the terms of our next contract sooner rather than later,” he said. “Tea?”
“Yes, please,” I said and twisted fully to him, crossing my legs at the knees. “What if I wish to return to Felhollow?”
“I would try to dissuade you, but you are your own person.” The Heir stood and stretched. “It is my mother you must watch out for then.”
He drew a book from his desk, licked the tip of his finger, and parted the pages with a slow press along the edges. The book fell open, splayed before him. His fingers curled around it.
“I would like your opinion on several things,” he said, voice low and deep in the back of his throat. He glanced at me over the rim of his glasses as if he were waiting for the answer to a question he hadn’t asked.
He hadn’t, had he?
“Is it about our contract?” I leaned forward and tried to see what book he was reading.
“It is a bedfellow of our contract, I would say.” His tongue wet his lips, and he gently laid the book before me. He dragged his finger down the inside of the spine till his nail covered the first letter of a line. “What do you make of this?”
“Wrought,” I read aloud, “are almost certainly the result of the union between the mortal and immortal souls, and their wrights are the remnants of the immortal souls left behind by the consumed Noble and Vile. These remnants, these wrights, attach to mortal souls at random, for this is the only way they may interact with our world. Through the union, both mortal and immortal are given new life.”
I raised my gaze to his, and one of his brows rose.
“Dualwrought are the rarest of all wrought because the likelihood of two souls attaching to one person is astronomically low,” he said, studying me as if waiting for me to react. “You are a singular creature.”
“Like your mother,” I muttered. “Tea?”
“Of course.” Instead of moving around me, he stood right next to me and reached one arm across the table. His thighs pressed against my knees. “You are nothing like my mother save for being dualwrought.”
“Don’t we have the same hair?” I asked absently, skimming through the book.
He snorted. “No. Physically, you are nothing alike. Mentally, you share nothing except cleverness. Emotionally, I doubt she could even comprehend you.”
“Lovely. I hate being comprehended.” I looked from his hands—pouring a perfect cup of tea far more slowly than necessary with his fingers tracing the curves of the pot—to his face. His cheeks were flushed.
He laid his hand on my arm. “Honey?”
“Yes, please.” I narrowed my eyes. “Why did you want me to read this?”
“I thought you might enjoy it. I did.” He did not remove his hand from me. “During our travels, we touched on the nature of wrights.”
Oh.
He set the cup before me, and I picked it up. He pulled away.
“Is it to your liking?” he asked, clearing his throat softly.
He was flirting with me. That could be useful.
“I did not mean to deceive you,” he muttered after I didn’t answer for a while, and he reached into his coat. A small brown paper envelope crinkled in his fingers. “I know how difficult it can be to live with gaps in your memories. A sacrificed memory cannot be reclaimed, but new memories can be made.”
I took the envelope and flipped open the flap. A sweet scent I didn’t recognize overpowered me. I tipped the five small flowers into my hand, their pale yellow petals like velvet against my skin, and frowned. Old memories—Julian barely twelve and laughing in a field of clover, my hands tangled in green vines at the edge of Felhollow, Mack kneading damp earth and tucking a seed beneath it—rose up in me, but none featured honeysuckle. My noblewright whined against me, its shivers oozing across me. The Heir took the empty envelope back.
“I can bring you Willoughby Chase’s ledgers and some of the evidence gathered against him in the morning,” he said, “but it cannot be removed from my sight.”
“Thank you.” I pinched the bottom of the honeysuckle with two nails and tugged, pulling out the thread of the flower with a bead of nectar. I touched it to the tip of my tongue.
The Heir glanced away, ears red.
Very useful.
“This,” I said and held up the flowers, “is far more to my liking. This is kind.”
Sex was all well and good, but there we
re so many other things to be done. Jules was a creature of habit, and I withered with boredom. I always preferred quiet evenings pressed to his side, discussing Felhollow or our friends or nothing at all, and liked to listen to the thump of his heart and huff of sleepy breaths. Intimacy, to me, was the way he curled his fingers around my wrist whenever we were near and how he knew what I was thinking with only a look. It was knowing that when I turned around, he would be there. But that wasn’t intimacy to Julian Chase. It was just…snacks. Small bites before the main meal.
He always used food and hunger to describe sex—he was a wolf, so hungry sometimes he was howling, he said—but no one died from lack of it, and I’d no desire to be devoured. The metaphor left much to be desired in terms of after.
Hunger could be sated, and I didn’t think my desire to be with him ever could. The Heir I had thought more like me based on the way he spoke of understanding, but perhaps I had been wrong.
“Your Majesty?” I asked softly.
He looked up.
“Can I say no to you without retribution?”
“Yes,” said the Heir. “Of course.”
“Of course.” I couldn’t keep all the scorn from my voice. “What am I to do if you accuse me of theft and get me arrested because I refuse you? If you make it hard for me to find a job? If no one of import deigns to hire the person the Heir is snubbing? Do you really think normal people can say no to the Heir? To any peer?”
He laughed, expression empty. “Would you like a lawyer to draw up a contract then? My last partner did.”
“For a relationship?” I raised one brow and smiled at the flush tinting the Heir’s cheeks. That was one way to put a partner at ease. “If you hurt your last partner, do you die?”
“Yes,” he said quickly. “If I hurt him, I die. I am not completely oblivious. I am aware of power and its many obstacles. He is a peer, but I am the Heir. We were not on equal footing, so I equalized it.”
“Everyone has to have one good quality, I suppose.”
“Please,” he said, but he was smiling. “I am powerful, rich, and not unattractive.”
I shrugged and said, “I shall add ‘humble’ to your list of qualities.”
“Humility is worthless. I know what I am.” He reached back, the long scar bisecting his throat white in the dim light, and tossed me a thin notebook. “Be sure to keep the list up-to-date.”
He knew what he was, not who he was? I opened the blank book and wrote a single word he would never agree with—insecure. He tried to peek.
“This is for me, not you.” I snapped the book shut and set it aside. “We work together. We have a contract detailing that work. You’re threatening to sacrifice my partner’s father. Let us not distract from what we need to do.”
He swallowed, disappointment darkening his eyes, and nodded. “Of course. You’re right.”
“I don’t want to muddy what we have right now,” I said.
At my last word, his eyes widened. He smirked ever so slightly.
“And I do have something I need from you,” I said and swiped a finger across the rim of my cup, gathering a drop of honey that had escaped on my skin. I pressed my finger to my lips and met his eyes. I could play his game. “Teach me how you write your contracts. I want to understand you and your vilewright.”
“Yes,” he gasped and swallowed. He held out a thick, worn book to me. “Here. These are some of my old contracts. They should help.”
“I’m sure they will.”
Eleven
By that evening, I had read through the first five contracts in his book. They all involved the odd red dirt from the Door, testing different ways to destroy it or parts of it. He hadn’t succeeded, the dirt reforming itself no matter what he sacrificed, and I traced the slightly frantic words of the latest contract. Carlow and Creek argued the whole time, their grumblings a reliable backdrop to my reading. Basil seemed to be the only person who remembered I was there.
“None of us really formed a bond with our noblewrights like you have with yours,” they said. They’d been asking me questions every few minutes and taking note of my answers in the margins of an old tome on wrights and wrought, going so far as to define what I meant by prayer. “It’s why unbound and untrained wrought are interesting. You work differently. Your wrights work differently. It’s fascinating.”
I didn’t feel fascinating; I felt picked apart.
“How do you know it’s not your bindings that require such specific contracts?” I asked. “To let your employer know exactly what you want?”
“We don’t,” said Carlow darkly. “Which is why I find myself dead so often. I don’t like being told what I can and can’t do.”
She could create the most wonderful things, from bridges that folded up on themselves to let boats pass beneath to hinges that allowed prosthetic hands to work more nimbly than ever before. She couldn’t heal so much as a paper cut, though, and she pushed the boundaries of what she was allowed to do until her binding bled and oozed. She couldn’t alter oxygen—it was too dangerous to allow the noblewrought to mess with something so important—and even iron was hard for her to work with. Changing the composition of metals to better suit her needs left her exhausted and sobbing. Ink and blood almost always stained her clothes.
“If not for your curse, you’d be dead five hundred times over,” said Creek. “Your utter disregard for yourself is a thorn in my side.”
“Why?” she asked. “Because I’m not dying fast enough? Perhaps putting up with you is the sacrifice I make.”
“And what a good lesson that is—just because you cannot see the sacrifice or price doesn’t mean it’s not there,” Creek said, coaxing an avens flower the same blue as his eyes from the dirt on his desk. It grew so quickly, dirt scattered across the floor. “You must always consider how your wrights interact with our world and how others perceive them. Seeing something doesn’t mean it’s here. Seeing nothing doesn’t mean nothing is here.”
He gestured to the stool in the corner, grinning when it squeaked and spun as if someone were sitting in it.
“If only Delmond Creek were neither visible nor here.” Carlow sighed, stretched, and stood. “Or dead for good.”
“I don’t think this lab could take any more deaths,” Creek muttered and turned a page.
Carlow inhaled.
No one spoke of the last wrought who had worked here, but it was clear they were dead and that Carlow and Creek had not forgiven each other for whatever had happened.
Basil cleared their throat. “We’re supposed to be teaching Lorena. That’s what His Majesty asked us to do today.”
“I don’t have any questions as of yet, so it’s fine,” I said, and Basil shot me a look. “I mean, will he be here today?”
“Most likely,” said Carlow, creating a metal wire thinner than a strand of hair and studying it through her goggles. The right lens, I’d learned, was a monocular. “His mother makes him attend court and council meetings, but he’s probably bored of them by now. He’ll go back to being here every day soon.”
I shook my head. It was unthinkable, being so powerful and calling that power “boring.”
“Do you think when he’s the Crown, we can call him the Vile Crown?” Carlow asked. “Like the old ones?”
The most powerful of the Noble and Vile had been called Crowns and ruled over their weaker fellows, and we had borrowed their terms after they were banished.
“How infuriating do you think it is for them to know we use the term Crown?” She whined and rubbed her eyes. “I hope it’s very. I hope they seethe every day thinking about us weak little mortals calling our leader the Crown.”
“I’m sure they do,” said Creek, rolling his eyes to the ceiling.
“You know, the rumors say some of the Vile Crowns weren’t evil, just unpredictable and powerful,” said Basil. “The Crowns could e
ven possess dead mortals and take control of their corpses.”
Carlow scoffed. Basil, bless them, had a penchant for taking things apart, history, and telling the same story over and over. Their eyes lit up when they did, though, so it was hard for even her to be mad. She must’ve heard this history many times from them.
Creek chuckled. “Powerful? Vilewrights are fragments of Vile souls and grant unimaginable abilities when used properly. Imagine what a proper Vile Crown could do and you’re still thinking too small.”
“Powerful enough that I’m still cursed even after they’ve been gone for centuries,” muttered Carlow.
“Yes.” Creek, smile falling, tucked a pale-blue bud behind Carlow’s ear. “Perhaps they were so powerful they forgot what eternity and death meant to mortals.”
She shook her head. The bud tumbled to the floor, rolling away under her desk.
“Rumors say the Noble weren’t nice either.” Basil tugged Creek away, pointing to his stool, and said, “Sit down and shut up, or I’ll attach you to it.”
Creek sat.
“They cursed folks too,” I said, hiding my laughter with my hand. “Felhollow’s named after one, you know. It was killed there after killing a bunch of townsfolk after they made a deal with the Vile to save themselves from the plague. The Noble didn’t care about mortals. They only cared about keeping the balance between life and death.”
“Death is the only discerning god, the stories tell,” said Basil, “and will take everyone no matter who.”
I let out a bark of a laugh, and Basil startled.
“Take it from an undertaker,” I said. “Death’s only as discerning as we are.”
Sure, it took rich folk in due time, but it wasn’t peers dying every day from exhaustion, disease, and accidents. They could pay noblewrought to heal them. My mother hadn’t even been able to pay for her funeral plot, much less healing.
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