Twenty-Four - Felix
???
I leapt intothe flames of the node. Turning around, I balanced my front paws on the edge of the copper bowl. “I’ll take the contract now.”
Marc held out the paper until I could grip it between my teeth. His expression bordered on gleeful, and I wondered exactly what Isa had written into the contract. I had followed enough of her exchanges with the secretary to know what terms each refused to budge on, so either she or Marc had made a mistake. Which meant Marc was in trouble, for I had no doubt that Isa had tricked him into signing something in my favor.
For someone who had only read a handful of contracts in her life, Isa was astonishingly adept at understanding the convoluted language. She also had a keen mastery of the nuances of language. She wouldn’t miss a single instance of a word changing a necessity into a mere possibility.
I stepped back into the fire. The magic flared as the node imbued the contract with power. The paper between my teeth dissolved and a deep blue swirled through the flames.
Marc twitched as the power wrapped around him. He grinned. “Time for me to fulfill my end of the bargain.”
He pivoted toward the back of the great hall and walked away. I prepared to follow him, but Isa’s hand on my back warned me not to jump out of the node.
She kept her hand there, saying nothing, until the secretary’s footsteps faded away. Then she faced me, a glitter of nervousness in her eyes. “I need you to use the node to track Marc carefully.”
The request surprised me. Isa had done everything she could since yesterday morning to keep me from using any magic at all. I closed my eyes to better sense Marc’s presence, tracking him as he moved downstairs. “He’s going to the archives.”
“He is going to pull the contract most likely to give us the information we need to understand the curse from the shelves. I suspect he will then drop it and flee. You need to be certain you know exactly which part of the archives he is in at that point, so we can retrace his steps and find the scroll.”
My eyes snapped open. “What?”
Her hand fell back to her side. “I left him a loophole. He only has to pull the scroll from the shelf, not give it to you. He wasn’t going to sign if he didn’t think he was tricking us.”
“I can summon him again. When I pulled you from the archives, a scroll came with you.”
“Because I was holding it. If you don’t summon him at the exact right time, the scroll won’t come. Also, you can’t summon him. It was in the terms for his freedom. I still can, but timing remains an issue.” Isa shrugged. “So long as you can track him, I think we are better off not letting him know that we still have a way to find the scroll.”
Marc had entered the archives by this point, so I focused back on his location. I didn’t see a map of the castle in my mind when I used this power, so I wouldn’t know exactly what row of the archives he was in, only his position in relation to the node. Still, I had learned to match that sense to exact rooms throughout the castle. I should at least be able to memorize the spot and direct Isa to it, even if her route was made difficult by the maze.
Marc stilled, and I understood why Isa didn’t want to try summoning him in order to get the scroll. There was no telling when he picked it up. He paused in one spot for long enough that he probably checked a dozen scrolls, not remembering the exact location of the one he needed. Then he moved again, and not back the way he had come. A little farther on, he paused once more.
At the end of that interlude, he retraced his path, and I focused on the last location he had stopped, imprinting it into my memory. “I think I have the spot.”
“Wonderful. Once Marc gets upstairs, we can head down to the archives. If we are lucky, it will be on the floor when we get there.”
I leapt out of the node. “And if we aren’t lucky?”
“Then we’ll still have a very limited area to scour for a useful contract. If it is a Truth scroll, I might even be able to identify it by the sound of the magic.”
I checked my sense of Marc’s location, ignoring the building throb in my head that told me Isa had been right to advise me against using magic today. I wouldn’t let a headache deter me now. “He’s on his way to the third floor. I expected him to flee the instant he fulfilled his part of the contract.”
Isa followed Marc’s earlier path to the back of the great hall. “He no doubt thinks it is worth taking the time to pack his things. Even if he suspected that we knew he never planned to hand over the scroll, he still considers himself safe. You can’t hold him here.”
I walked at her side. “But you could still lock him in? Not that I necessarily want to. I’m just curious.”
“I could, if I knew the correct Truth to invoke.”
I spun around and flicked a strand of node power, causing the doors behind us to slide closed. “The invocation is ‘Let this door be locked to all but the correct key.’” The lock clicked into place. “And to unlock: ‘Let this door unlock as though the key was turned.’”
Isa studied the unlocked door for a long moment. “Let this door be locked to all, including its key.”
Before I could point out that she had changed the invocation, the lock clicked. Then Isa hummed and a brass key materialized in her hand. She inserted it into the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. She smiled at me.
“I hope you know how to unlock it now. I’m going to be very annoyed if I always have to use the front door to enter the great hall.”
Isa shrugged. “I’m sure we can find the correct strand of node power, eventually.”
I flicked a claw against the strand I would usually use to unlock a door. Nothing happened. I growled.
Isa laughed. “Let this door unlock and be controlled by its key.”
The key twisted as the lock opened once more. I sent it back into the drawer of my desk with a flick of power. “How did you guess the correct invocations?”
“They follow a pattern. I’ve tested several the past few days.” Isa started walking again. “I bet there are several variations on the Truths you know about that you’ve never tried because you stop at what works. Duke Valois clearly wasn’t one to stop after a single success, though.”
“I wish you had been around when I was a boy. I bet we could have gotten up to quite a bit of mischief together.”
Isa smirked at me. “Are you implying that you no longer get into mischief?”
“Merely conceding that you are unlikely to go along with my schemes at this point.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t go along with mine.”
“I will gladly be your accomplice,” I told her with complete honesty.
???
Unsurprisingly, Isa’s planworked perfectly. It took a few false turns and a bit of backtracking before she reached the section of the archives Marc had pulled the scroll from, but once there, she found the scroll within minutes. At least, she found a Truth scroll, signed only by Duke Valois, that we assumed was the correct one. If it didn’t have any helpful information, we’d come back and search more thoroughly.
Despite the relative ease with which we found the scroll, by the time we exited the archives, I could sense Marc making his way down the hill. I debated if I wanted to ask Isa to summon him and lock him up again before he reached the border of castle lands. The first time, my reason for not letting him leave had merit. Now that we had the scroll he had hidden from me, however, I suspected Isa might object to imprisoning him again. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure what locking him up would even accomplish. He couldn’t tell anyone about the curse—his first contract protected me from that—and what other damage could he do now that he wasn’t actively hindering my search for answers?
I let Marc go. I had made a mistake in trusting him, and dwelling on it wouldn’t help. At least that mistake had brought me Isa. Without Marc, I never would have bargained with Edwin Cardh for his younger daughter’s aid. As guilty as I still felt, I couldn’t regret signing that contract. Whether she helped me break the curse or not, meeting Isa was a boon I probably didn’t deserve.
“Let’s take this to the spire room,” Isa said, brandishing the scroll at me.
“Excellent idea, but let’s use my spire, not the one over the library.”
“Why? The library room is so comfortable.”
“Mine is better. I promise.” I led the way upstairs and through my suite. We climbed past my private study to the top level of the tower.
“You don’t have any furniture in here,” Isa exclaimed when she stepped into the room. “How is this more comfortable?”
The spire room was my escape from all duties. When I had decorated it, I hadn’t wanted a desk or even chairs in my rarely used haven. It was also the room I had taken to using when I slept since my transformation.
Cushions, pillows, and blankets covered the floor. I could throw myself down anywhere and feel like I landed on a cloud. I leapt into my favorite nest of blankets over a velvet pillow. “No judging until you try it. Sit down and then tell me that a chair is better.”
Isa lowered herself onto a cushion, her spine straight as steel. I waited, and sure enough, she slouched down, pulling a pile of pillows behind her and relaxing within a minute.
“Told you.”
“Fine, you were right. Now let’s get to work.”
Work was exactly what I had set out to ban from this room, but it was worth bringing it in now. The scroll in Isa’s lap was potentially a breakthrough that could lead to breaking the curse. Seeing her so comfortable in my domain also satisfied me on a level I didn’t want to inspect too closely.
I moved over to Isa’s side. “Let’s see it.”
She unrolled the scroll and began to read.
Aspekts of Binding
He who doth contain the binding, in primary form, if he giveth of hisself unto another in harte or body, by thought, deed, or word, shall confer the inherent aspekts as follows:
The more Isa read, the more apparent it became that this scroll was the answer to how Lady Cecily had used node power. I barely followed the archaic language, but I knew that much. Aspekts of Binding meant a node-tie.
“Tsy save me,” I muttered when she finished reading. “People have been able to gain access to the Truthholder node without a blood-tie for hundreds of years and we didn’t know.”
“I wonder when the knowledge was lost. And how no one stumbled across it accidentally. If I’m reading this right, your mother had a node-tie because she married your father.”
“Why would Valois write this, though? He specifically says only the primary tie-holder can grant these aspekts of binding. He wasn’t married, nor did he have a lover at that point in his life from what I’ve read in Sebastien’s journals. His daughter-in-law wouldn’t have gained a node tie until after he died, when her husband became the duke. And what difference would it have made? She could invoke the Truths he created just by living in the castle.”
Isa let the scroll roll up, tapping it against her leg. “Proxies.”
I blinked at her. “Proxies?”
“In the Contract of Inheritance, it mentions that you have to assign a proxy if you plan to leave Rose Castle grounds for an extended period. Instead of a sibling or cousin, the primary tie-holder could assign the power of proxy to their spouse thanks to the aspekts of binding. I bet that was why Valois wrote it.”
“He wouldn’t have kept it a secret then. So why did the knowledge that the title-holder’s spouse would have a node tie fade away?”
Isa raised a brow. “Because this scroll doesn’t specify that a spouse gets the aspekts of binding. ‘Harte or body, by thought, deed, or word,’” Isa quoted. “It doesn’t take wedding vows to trigger this Truth. If everyone knew about it, then any time a random person showed signs of having a node-tie, everyone would know about their relationship with the primary tie-holder.”
“Huh.” That should have occurred to me sooner. After all, I hadn’t married Cecily, and she had gained a node-tie. “I wonder if that is the real reason the family customarily doesn’t hire maids. Not because the castle stays clean through magic, but because my ancestors couldn’t hide their affairs successfully. Or I bet there was a generation where almost every maid gained a node-tie, which would be disconcerting at the least.”
“I don’t think it ever would have been that bad.”
“You have more faith in my ancestors than I.”
“No, I read the scroll more carefully. Only one person can gain the aspekts of binding at a time. Though I suppose it would be equally disconcerting to always know who had shared the duke’s bed most recently. That would have only happened with an unmarried duke, however. I think.” Isa unrolled the scroll once more. She scanned the page, then tapped one paragraph. “Yes, I think this means that marrying someone would trump everything else.”
I read the part she pointed out and shook my head. “I’ll take your word for it. Did you see anything that explained how to retract the aspekts of binding once given? I didn’t, but that doesn’t mean much.”
She shook her head. “No. Apart from conferring the aspekts on someone else, I saw nothing about removing them.”
“Damn.” I tried very hard not to let my mind wander the path of how I could transfer the binding from Cecily to Isa. Stuck in the form of a cat as I was, the first option felt so wrong to contemplate, even if I imagined myself as human in those fantasies. Like every other time my mind had wandered such avenues, I reminded myself to save that thought for after the curse was already broken.
The other obvious way to confer the aspekts of binding on Isa wasn’t much better. Finding someone to perform a marriage between a cat and a woman probably wasn’t impossible—especially not when the cat was also a duke—but if I let myself believe it was a step toward breaking the curse, then the contract binding Isa would force her to cooperate. I had to remind myself that Cecily had already made use of the node. I didn’t need to break her node-tie, just the curse.
I would not force Isa to do anything against her will ever again.