“What happens when a slave gets into the Blackguard, Kip?”

“They’re freed, sort of.”

“They’re purchased, for a fortune. And as soon as a scrub passes the test, their contract goes into escrow until final vows. If you free me now, you get nothing.”

“I don’t want to own you, Teia. It doesn’t feel right. Do you even want to be in the Blackguard?”

“Of course I do!”

“I don’t even know if I should believe you. You can’t tell me that you don’t, can you?”

“What? I’m a slave, not a liar, Kip.”

He scowled. “It’s more complicated than that, and we both know it.”

She looked at him like he was crazy for a long moment, then the façade crumbled. One second she was all breezy confidence and happiness, and the next she looked terribly vulnerable and frightened. “Kip… I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Ever since you said you’d free me. You know that the first thing I felt was angry—at you? Because as soon as you won me, I stopped getting my lessons in how to draft paryl. I’ll get them again, but I’ll have to wait years. Nothing in my life changed except that, and I was mad at you. Stupid, huh? Kip, part of me tells me to take those papers and run to the registrar. To take my freedom while it’s sitting there in front of me. It tells me slave owners are notoriously fickle. Sorry.”

“No offense taken,” Kip mumbled.

“My family’s in debt, Kip. My mother did some bad things, and my father lost everything, including me and my sisters. He was a trader like I said, but his creditors won’t let him go on another voyage because they’re afraid he’ll flee, so he’s stuck working as a day laborer. With what he’s earning now, there’s no way he can pay off what he owes. He can’t afford to buy inventory to trade at home. If I take those papers now, I’m condemning him to poverty, and my sisters to early marriages to the first poor men my father can convince to take them.”

“What happened?” Kip asked.

“Please don’t ask me that.”

But I already did ask—Oh, because she’s my slave, if I insist, she’ll have to answer. Kip said, “Forget it then. Sorry. You have a plan?”

“Hold on to my title for a few more weeks. Then when I go through final vows, you give me a fifth of what the Blackguard pays for me. That way, we both get something—and you’ll need the money as badly as I do. I want to be a Blackguard anyway, Kip. There is nothing in life I want more. This way, the Chromeria pays us for it.”

“That’s… sort of… brilliant,” Kip said.

“And what’s the downside?” she asked.

I don’t get to find out if you like me for me or if you like me because you need the money—until after final vows. But that was purely selfish, wasn’t it? He wanted her to pay for him to feel good about himself.

“See?” she said. “But… I want you to swear something to me, Kip.”

“Anything.”

“Swear that you won’t sell me back to… that you won’t sell me. To anyone. I’ll serve you in our off hours, I don’t care. I’ve been a slave for years, I can do it for a few more weeks, just promise that.”

“I swear to Orholam,” Kip said, “on one condition.”

She looked dubiously at him.

“That you take half of what we get for your contract.”

“Kip, you’re a terrible negotiator.” She grinned, and Kip was struck again by how different she was from Liv. Liv had lived in bitterness over her station, which had been unjust, but it hadn’t been as bad as being a slave. Maybe it was that Liv had seen how close a gloriously easy life had been, so she felt the sting of its loss. Or maybe Teia was simply naturally more positive, but if he had to go through bad and unfair stuff, he hoped that in the future he could be more like Teia and less like Liv. The thought somehow loosened something inside of Kip and he found himself both less angry with Liv and less interested in her. “I accept,” Teia said. “Now, quit grinning… to work!”

Chapter 83

Dazen passed the first unlit torch in the tunnel without touching it. A torch could be a trap. He pressed on through the tight confines of the tunnel, breathing deeply to try to keep himself calm. The tunnel wasn’t that tight, and the blackness wasn’t the dark. He could go through worse. He would go through worse, gladly, to get out of here.

No going back. Never.

Perhaps a hundred paces later, he came to another torch, and he paused. The light of his green luxin ball was feeble, and it was consuming his only luxin. He didn’t know how long it was going to have to last him. Hopefully only minutes, but just in case…

He studied the torch like it was a serpent. The tunnel was too tight to comfortably carry a normal torch with the attendant open flames and dripping pitch. To carry a normal torch without burning yourself down here, you’d have to hold it directly in front of you. In his usual profligately drafting way, his brother had made lux torches, made of a mundane shaft of wood. The ends had panels of imperfectly drafted yellow, covered completely by a thin layer of luxin or glass or even waxed leather. Sealed against the air, the yellow luxin lay dormant. When you wanted light, you simply peeled back the sealant and had a perfect, single-spectrum yellow light source. Depending on how much air was allowed through and how well the yellow had been drafted, the lux torch could last from an hour to four hours. Hideously expensive to buy and horribly difficult to craft; his brother had liked to draft them to show off his superchromacy.

This one was his brother’s work, no doubt. Of course, his brother must have done most if not all of the work on this prison himself. The lux torch was set in a simple iron bracket. Dazen squinted at the little piece of iron as if it held the mysteries of the universe. But it was just iron. The fit didn’t look particularly tight. It didn’t look like there was any way it could be some kind of a switch so that when he lifted the torch it would pop up and trigger a trap.

But it felt wrong.

Dazen cursed. And then he cursed some more. He liked hearing the sound of his words echo down the tunnel, disappear into the distance, rather than simply bounce back at him from a few feet away.

“A little dumb to be hollering when you’re trying to escape, don’t you think?” a voice said.

Dazen felt a shock run down his spine. For one long instant he thought it was all over. Then he recognized the voice.

“Dead man,” he said.

“But not as dead as you’ll be soon, I think,” the dead man said.

“I thought you were back in your wall, where I left you. I don’t need you out here.”

The dead man chuckled from the darkness. “Thought you could lose me so easily? You’re an amusing little man, Gavin Guile.”

“No, you’re Gavin. You’re the dead man. I’m done with that. I’m done with losing. Now go away, I’m burning light here.”

“Bet the torch is trapped.”

Dazen snarled. “I know the torch is trapped!”

But he didn’t know the torch was trapped. That was fear, paranoia. But he couldn’t shake it. Cursing quietly, over and over and over, he studied the torch. He couldn’t touch it.