“Welcome home, Lorena Adler, to the longest-standing city in what’s left of the world, the Crown of the Shattered Continent, our capital of Cynlira, Mouth-of-the-River-of-Gods.” The Heir opened the curtains and stretched out, still sitting next to me. “Did you miss it?”
“Can’t say I did,” I muttered.
The Heir laughed, one gloved hand closing around mine, and nodded toward the tallest tower at the top of the palace.
“Deep beneath that tower, behind locked doors and down stairs older than this city, in a cavern with no other exit, is the Door my mother sacrifices mortals to,” he said. “The Vile are gone, but anyone who sees that Door is infected with their odd chaos. Noblewrought can barely stand to be near it, and I only know one who can look at it without flinching—my mother. It tempts us into opening it. It wants to be opened.”
“What happens if you don’t feed it?” I whispered.
“It opens a little bit more each time it is denied a sacrifice, but it demands more and more. It is very real, it is very dangerous, and it is the only thing keeping the Vile from this world.” He dropped my hand. “I want to destroy it. I want to create a stronger Door that doesn’t require sacrifices to stay shut. I want you to help me build that new Door and save the world.”
I pulled away from him.
This was the Heir to the Crown, the boy so dangerous his first instinct as a child had been to destroy people’s free will in Hila. There was no world where I believed he would undertake something so kind.
“It’s such a fascinating puzzle to unravel,” he said, already turning back to one of his books.
So that was his motivation—curiosity.
“Well,” I said, “at least you finally hinted at what I would be doing here.”
He chuckled. “I’m sure my collection of wrought will be more than happy to explain our work.”
It took us an hour to reach the royal grounds. I’d never crossed all of Mori so quickly. Outside, tall trees shaded the clearing we were in, and the sounds of a stable came from over a wall of holly bushes. The Heir nodded to me.
“We are in my private residence,” he said, glasses shielding his eyes yet again. “You will have to bow to me in public, you realize?”
“Of course, Your Majesty.” I didn’t bow.
He didn’t say anything and swept out of the carriage.
“Come.” Hana stuck her head in. “You will have a room with the rest of His Majesty’s researchers.”
These grounds were too opulent for me to comprehend. The gardens were so neatly ordered I could tell the time by where the shadows fell against the garlic stalks, and tulip blooms in every color lined the paths as markers. One building had a small greenhouse full of ripe fruits all to itself, and another had a shooting range of pockmarked targets and marked trees denoting the start of hunting grounds. Servants in plain clothes and soldiers in colors for families I didn’t recognize darted down the paths. Hana led me to the last door in a distant hall. The name plate had recently been pried off.
“This building belongs to His Majesty and houses those within his employ,” she said, holding out a key to me. “It only locks from the inside. Lock it at night. Vilewrought are particularly susceptible to the Door.”
“There are only two other vilewrought,” I said. “How do you know all vilewrought are susceptible and not just them?”
“They sleepwalk to it.” She crossed her arms over her broad chest. The silver bell necklace at her throat jingled. “They’re as deadly asleep as they are awake, by the way. Don’t get any ideas.”
I’d sleepwalked as a child, too, but it had stopped when I left the Wallows. I fiddled with the handle. My neighbor—Carlow by their nameplate—had left their door cracked. A meticulously kept room covered in a thick coat of dust lay beyond.
“Good luck with her,” Hana said. “Please don’t try anything. I’d hate to kill you.”
She said it so lightly I almost missed it.
“He’s killed thousands,” I said. “Does he really hold to his contracts?”
“As strictly as a wright,” said Hana with a laugh. “He’s got his own logic, so make sure you word your contract right.”
She pushed open the door to my room. The room was sparse, only a raised bed and writing desk. Hana lingered in the door.
“No one is to know you are dualwrought except for the others within the lab,” she said. “However, you will need a reason to be here.”
I ran my hand across the plain brown clothes—one dress, one linen shirt, one waistcoat, and one pair of trousers—laid out on the bed. So plain yet smoother than the homespun clothes I’d worn in Felhollow.
“I’m an undertaker,” I said. “Surely, he needs one of those.”
Maybe he wasn’t lying and the Door really did require sacrifices, or maybe his mother and he just liked killing. Either way, they left plenty of corpses behind.
“Of course you are,” muttered Hana. “The ones in Mori wear gray greatcoats.”
Bones and ashes: everyone’s final sacrifice to Death.
Undertakers in the Wallows had never bothered with the coat. We all knew them by name, since death came so often.
“Don’t bother with a real one,” I said. No one suspected some Wallows-born girl from the root end of nowhere of anything. It would be to my advantage. “If you have to, get me an old one.”
Within an hour, the Heir stood at the threshold of the room and carried a frayed gray coat. He had changed out of his black coat into the white one of wrought, the red sigil on the back identical to the one carved into his chest. The sigils were a holdover from before the gods left and denoted what kinds of magic a wrought could do. The bindings prevented any other.
The Crown had been bound to Life and Death and forced to serve her nation as a healer and undertaker. My similarity to her was already too great for me to stomach.
“May I enter?” the Heir asked.
“Am I allowed to refuse?” I pulled out the chair at the desk. “Your Majesty.”
“It is important for powerful people to establish clear boundaries. My father never did.” He stepped into the room and laid the coat on my bed. No sigil decorated its back. From the bag over his shoulder, he pulled a thick stack of papers. “This is the structure I use for all my contracts.”
The closer he came, the angrier my noblewright grew. It was a fuzzy stuffiness in my ears, like staying underwater too long.
“Did your father teach you these rules?” I asked, trying to shake my noblewright’s fury away.
“In a way.” The Heir straightened his glasses. “Did your life in the Wallows teach you how to use your wrights without such contracts?”
“Do you treat your vilewright like you treat conversations? An equal exchange of information, like our wrights?” I asked.
“There is no such thing as an equal exchange, especially between wrought and their wrights.” He snorted. “They’re not sentient. They don’t infer or know. They obey.”
Wrights didn’t demand a sacrifice equal to their action. They always demanded more. To destroy a life, a vilewright couldn’t simply sacrifice one life, and it was trite to say wrights obeyed when they were the ones setting the sacrifices.
“I wasn’t speaking literally.” I sighed. “My wrights know I trust them. They can infer what I need them to do. Perhaps yours can’t and require long contracts because they know you don’t trust them. My wrights and I understand each other.”
If I died, they died.
“Surely, they don’t always do what you want,” said the Heir.
“What we want and what we need aren’t always the same.” I kept the chair between us, but he still didn’t sit. “We survive.”
It was why I could do so much so quickly. The Heir couldn’t do something like he’d done at Hila unless given permission by the court and council.
A tingling weight settled over my shoulders. His gaze flicked up, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“I think,” I said slowly, “you offended my vilewright.”
“It’s not a person.” He held out the papers to me, but his gaze remained glued on the space above me. “It can’t get offended.”
I sat and read over the contract in silence. He pulled a book from his bag and made notations in the margins. I looked through the contract three times, picking through the wording, and made sure to mark anything that could be interpreted in multiple ways. If he knew how to be specific for his vilewright, he knew how to be vague to his advantage.
“What does this mean?” I asked, having already worked it out but wanting to know if he would lie. I pointed to one section of the contract. “‘Except for the rights granted in section twelve of this contract, the former party shall retain rights to knowledge developed during employment and will not be held accountable for damages in perpetuity.’”
“Anything you develop during the course of working for me shall be my property,” he said and adjusted his glasses with two delicate fingers. “It is simply protecting my research.”
What a poor liar he was. I drew a line through the sentence, and he winced.
“I will have to rewrite the whole thing now,” he said.
He didn’t have to do that, but he was so peculiar about this. “You and I both know that line means you own everything I create and it’s not your fault if I’m injured forever. At the very least, you’re paying if I get hurt.”
Still, he hadn’t explained what his research with the Door involved.
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me exactly what I’ll be doing and if it’s dangerous?” I asked. “How long will I do it? I’m not signing this, you know, with that line about length of employment to be determined by former party. What if I can’t help you with your work? Is our agreement null?”
“You are far too useful to be put in harm’s way.” He never approached the desk and never sat.
I nearly snapped the quill. As if my worth were tied to my usefulness.
“I have some questions that must be answered before I agree to anything,” I said, “and I want your answers in writing.”
He pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, the ghostly watermark of Felhollow shadowing the center, and handed it to me.
“You know, Will Chase is the reason you have nice paper like this,” I said.
The Heir hummed. “So long as I have paper, its acquisition isn’t pertinent.”
“Of course it isn’t.” I wrote out the majority of my wants—Will and any of his companions would have safe passage to Mori, Will would stay in his lodgings in Mori until the trial, we would be granted access to the evidence against him, and if he was innocent, he and the Felfolk would face no retribution. We simply had to prove his innocence to the court and council. “What if you break the contract?”
The floorboards creaked, and I turned. He loomed over me.
“I never break my contracts,” he said, hands clenched around the back of my chair.
I leaned away from him. “You’re the Heir. You can do whatever you want.”
“If either of us break this contract, my vilewright will extract a price,” he said.
This was what made the Heir so dangerous. There were so few vilewrought, and he was the only one who could instill pieces of his wright into materials. He could have contracts extract a price or explode incendiaries long after the contract was written. His designs left no survivors.
Once the contract was written and we signed, we would be bound to obey it. We would be bound to follow the contract through.
He ground his teeth together. “I would be more worried about Chase if I were you. What if he runs?”
“He won’t,” I said. He loved me. “What if I can’t help you?”
Even through his glasses, I could see the eye roll.
“What if he’s guilty?” he asked.
“He’s not,” I said and stood. “Here. Write your new contract then.”
He took a seat at the desk and opened up a fresh pot of sky-blue ink. He wrote out the contract in painfully precise penmanship, quietly asking me questions as he went before adding an addition or changing the original wording of his contract. I stood behind him, leaning against the desk, and told him everything exactly as I wanted it worded. On the third page, he thinned out his ink with water.
“Did your mother sacrifice your ink supplier too?” I asked.
His shoulders tensed and his fingers tightened. “You could say that.”
“That’s everything for me,” I said. Julian, Will, and the rest of Felhollow would be safe unless they broke any existing—the Heir had balked when I added that specification—laws, and if Will was guilty, he would be sacrificed. He wasn’t guilty.
Will had always been as cleanly cut as they came, and he had Julian to think of. He would never have put Julian in danger. He wouldn’t do that to us.
I’d also slipped in a line making sure no more sacrifices came from Felhollow. We were so few and too far out of the way to make that worth it. The Heir agreed.
“Then we have a deal,” he said. “A copy will be delivered to you tomorrow morning. For now, I simply need biographical information and a piece of you to make sure the signatures are appropriately binding.”
“That’s a lot of pages to say you’re using me,” I said, pulling out a few strands of my hair.
The Heir peeled back his glove and nicked the back of his hand with the nib. “You are capable of using your wrights without restriction, and you are using me as much as I am using you. Unless I have misunderstood?”
“No,” I said, “you’re just being very upfront about it when that contract was anything but.”
“Good,” he said, dipping his quill in his ink once more. From this angle, I barely caught his smile. “You currently reside in Felled-Noble-in-the-Hollow, yes?”
“We just call it Felhollow these days.”
He jotted down the full name and said, “Your birth date?”
“I’m a seventeen-year-old child of winter. Not very specific after that.” I shrugged at his sigh. “It was probably the first day of Byrdaffin, and that’s what I always say, but might’ve been the second to last day of the year. You’ve got five days to pick from.”
He looked up, quill dripping ink on the page. “My mother kept extensive records for my siblings and me.”
“My mother worked sixteen hours a day in the Northcott munitions factory, and paper was expensive.”
It hurt that I could remember such a simple fact but not her face or voice. I’d sacrificed them all to keep Felfolk alive over the years. I’d kept my memories of the peer she’d worked for. Sixteen hours per day for ten years she’d worked for Lankin Northcott, and all she’d gotten for her troubles was killed in a perfectly avoidable accident. Northcott hadn’t wanted to pay for upkeep, so my mother and a dozen others had paid with their lives.
One day, I’d pay Northcott back.
“A Wallower with connections to Felhollow and a dualwrought daughter?” he asked. “Someone with no cunning would assume you used your wrights to get where you are.”
And I prayed, Take the stain from the paper and the ink from the quill if needed. It’s his favorite. Destroy his memory of what I said about my mother.
Surely, that would be enough for only sixteen words. My mother was mine and mine alone. I had few memories
of her. The Heir could keep thoughts of her out of his head, or I would make him.
My vilewright lunged, the Heir flinched, and then he dipped his now-empty quill into the bottle and let the ink refill it. “We’ll say the first day of the year, then.”
I smiled.
This was why the concept of nonphysical sacrifices was such a revolution and never taught to anyone. It was why they’d bound the Heir as soon as he returned from Hila. No one knew when a wrought was using them, and they didn’t require the wrought to act. Blood left a stain. Sacrificing a feeling didn’t reveal anything.
No one had known what Alistair was doing in Hila until it was already too late.
With no binding and using nonphysical sacrifices, I could use my wrights without anyone the wiser.
To use the Heir’s blood as a sacrifice, I’d have to stab him. To use his memory, I only needed to be near him.
The Heir signed his name in the blood from the back of his hand, offered me a fresh quill with a sharp nib, and had me sign in my own blood as well.
“I will need your assistance with the sacrifice,” he said once I was done.
I glanced at him from the corner of my eyes. “What did you have in mind?”
“I need either quite a bit of blood,” said the Heir, “or a very treasured memory. Perhaps something to rival whatever memory of mine you destroyed earlier? I’m assuming it was about your mother.”
I stiffened. He smiled.
“My first taste of honeysuckle.” I held out my hand to him. “It was summer, I was ten, and it was my first time out of Mori.”
“That will do.” He took my hand, bare fingers cool and dry against mine, and chuckled. “You’re wasted on Felhollow.”
I knew that, but obscurity there had been better than danger here. Though now I could help do something.
“Is Willoughby Chase really worth dying for?” the Heir asked, rising from the chair, my hand still clasped firmly in his. A crack in his lips bled when he grinned. “Destroy a memory of mine again and you’ll forget you even have a wright.” He dropped my hand and turned away. “Lock your door behind me. There are worse things in this palace than me.”
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