“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, squeezedinto 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,soumeteris a command. It meanssubmit.”
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.
