Chapter Forty
I shuffle through the bustling Illusion kitchens and steal a jar of jam from the end table, where a faerie is bottling an array of preserves.
A loaf from the breadbasket by the door.
Glancing up, I see the red-haired cook staring at me.
The one who ratted out my mother years ago for five copper coins.
She grips her wooden spoon. As I stand in a worn robe over my nightdress, pockets bulging with stolen food, hair uncombed and face bruised, I know what she sees. Another night servant gone mad.
I raise my chin and stare down the cook, unblinking. “Hello.”
Her gaze flicks to the food in my hand, to my bulging pockets.
Do it, I think. Report me.
The cook takes a step back.
“Avery—” she stutters. “How—”
I leave the kitchens before she can finish.
I reach the Nest quickly. Leaning against Silas’s office door, I wait for the teller to return. After a few moments, he rounds the corner in a collared shirt and wool pants.
“Lunch?” I ask.
He stops. “What has happened to you?”
“I’ll let you infer.”
Silas stares, shaking his head. Then he is trundling toward me, unlocking his office, and shooing me inside.
I start pulling out the jams and cheeses and bread. “Do you have a knife and some plates?”
The halfling circles the room to take out utensils from his cabinet and joins me at the table. After several beats of quiet save for the scraping of metal, he asks: “Can you speak of it?”
I shake my head, scrutinizing the seeds of the raspberry jam that stick in the divots of the grainy bread.
“You are still woven with the oath.”
I look up. “Woven?”
“The oath—the Reign magic. It needs matter to weave into, as it cannot exist on its own. All oaths are a finesse of Reign work.”
“Even oaths sworn to Illusion?”
He nods. “That’s why every blood oath uses an enchanted item to seal the ritual. Every oath is Reign magic, even to the other Houses.”
Stunned, I put the bread down. “Why tell me this?”
Silas sighs. “Is there anything I can do to ease the pain?”
“My injuries are healing.”
“I meant from the fallout of whatever has happened.”
“I want what the halflings have,” I say. “The contract that stops your relatives from inheriting your unpaid debt.”
“There is no such thing.”
“Then how is it done? How have the halflings stopped debt from accumulating?”
Silas slathers more bread with jam, finishing off one slice, then another. “There’s no way to stop the inheritance of debt directly, but there’s a way to assuage the balance, sometimes pay it off entirely, but only after their life ends.”
“What do you mean?”
“Halflings set aside some of their income that, once deposited, cannot be withdrawn in their lifetime. It can only be used by the beneficiaries on their account to pay off the debt after their death.”
“A savings account for coin that will never enter your pocket, only the pockets of those you’ve left behind?”
“A risk that many faeries cannot afford.”
“One that they do not know about.”
“This is true.” He nods. “Most halflings maintain a savings balance similar to their debt. Part of the account must go to family, but the rest can go to anyone.”
“Let me open one.”
“It requires an up-front deposit of ten silvers.”
My heart sinks. I could borrow the money from Kassandra, but that’d put me in more debt that some distant cousin will inherit. I will never ask Briar for the gold coin back, but for a moment, I wish I had saved some for myself.
Then I remember—I slept through payday. I have not collected my last Reign paycheck.
“Let’s check my accounts,” I say.
Silas collects parchment and quill. The enchanted objects have me shivering—can the bird still feel its feather being used? Can the plants feel themselves being scratched again? It is all Reign magic. All of it. Like learning that the massive forest is really just one giant fungus.
“There should be one last payment from Reign,” I say as he presses the bloody nib against the parchment. His finger slides against the writing.
“There’s only a complaint.”
Sweat breaks out across my brow, and I close my eyes, breathing through the nausea. I should’ve known. I did know. The fallout from Reign will break apart everything I have managed to salvage these past few months.
“It’s just a copper coin,” Silas says, his words blowing out my despair like wind to a candle.
“What?” I open my eyes.
“There’s an attached message, addressed to you. One copper coin is the minimum fee needed to file a complaint.”
My spine prickles. “What is it?”
Silas furrows his brow. “Soumeter.”
My body stiffens and suddenly I am being skinned alive, my nerves sanded down, coated over with thick lacquer, squeezed into a tight space. The wriggling, black parasite burrows under my grain, contorting around my essence until we are one and the same—the blight and me.
And the word. The word they shout as they slap me, the command that feeds and feeds the leaching magic as it clamps further into my pith, as it rips me into forced movement. The word that steals my will.
Soumeter.
“What is that?” I hear another voice ask—the voice of the moth.
Your voice, I tell the fragmenting mind. That is your voice. You are in the office with the creature that may be half a friend.
“A word from the old Reign language,” Silas says. “The language used to enchant all objects.”
“Soumeter,” I repeat, the friend repeats, the others demanded, all cards shuffled in a deck of time that now stacks upon itself, thousands of moments happening all at once. “What does it mean?”
“Translated directly, it means to bow,” the half friend says, the stranger.
Maxian wants me to bow to him—I have done that hundreds of times.
“Is that all?”
The teller shifts. “More commonly, soumeter is a command. It means submit.”
My mind shatters, screams.
Soumeter.
Submit.
Submit to me.
Hands. I imagine delicate, familiar hands with red painted nails, calloused hands that push aside my hair, dark hands that craft beautiful things, tattooed hands that hold me, long strong hands—the original hands—that molded me.
Together, they sift through the splinters of two lives, the tree’s and mine.
They pluck up and sort the memories in a meadow, memories outside a fighting pit, inside a golden palace, beneath one fae and on top of another, fragments of the sharpest feelings.
And I would do the same for their owners—that is what I’m here to do, after all.
To repair what I have shattered and soothe what I have not.
“Avery?” Silas is asking.
Avery, yes I am she. Avery, the Night Crest. Avery, the Mad.
“There is something else here in your account.”
“Yes?” I say, and as I say it, my mind comes together, a complete, if disorganized, creation.
I am here, even if I am hurting. I am here, through the work of others and myself and that should be celebrated.
I no longer feel that my mind is fully my own.
That there is something else out there, calling to me, and I to it.
But it is not terrifying, like an oath in my mouth or tattoos on my skin.
It’s not ownership at all, but rather companionship.
“A tip from a Rose Tunes.”
I blink, my mind quieting. “Do I know a Rose Tunes?”
“She’s from Reign. She left you a tip of three gold coins.”
“Three gold coins?” I balk, slamming fully back into my body. “Is there a message?”
Silas squints. “It seems like nonsense.”
“What does it say?”
“Three gold coins to Avery. I never did say apple.”
Your word? I asked a naked, rose-colored fae beneath me. Utter it once and everything stops.
I-I’m not sure.
How about “apple”?
“Apple” it is.
My face flames.
Silas looks up. “I know this is overwhelming. If applied to your debt now, you could be free of all dues in a few short years.”
A sentence that I’ve craved my entire life. The game has declared that I’m special; I worked hard enough and earned this freedom. But it is like the Prize of the Pith—a glittering distraction for the few. What is liberation, if not for all?
“It’s also enough to open the account,” I say. “And then some.”
“Are you sure?”
“You said I could assign multiple beneficiaries?”
“As long as a percentage goes to a relative, yes.”
“Must I know the name of the relative who inherits my debts?”
The teller shakes his head. “You just need to specify in the contract that next of kin will get fifteen percent.”
“Draw up the contract.”
Silas does. Once the account is opened, I request that the money be placed into it, then half my income from now until my death. Any remaining unclaimed income will also be placed into the account. The longer I live, the larger the account grows.
I had to flee Reign, but I had somewhere to land, somewhere to send Lila.
Perhaps it is pride, or a desire to repay balances.
Yet it feels like something else, something more solid.
It feels like security. Security, as all of the money goes to my loved ones, save one silver toward my current debt, and one for art supplies for a friend.
I will aid my family for as long as I live. And I will aid them after I die—no matter how near that fate is.