“This contract remains valid only as long as the signatory believes the world owes him recompense for wrongs suffered.”Ivalys reads the words aloud, and her truth-speaking gift makes them resonate, echo, fill the pit with sound. “Should that belief be proven false—should truth be spoken over the founding bargain revealing no debt was ever owed—all obligations reverse. All claims transfer. All power returns to its source.”
I stare at the contract. At the loophole that could bring the Ledger Master’s empire crashing down.
“He thinks the world owes him.” My thoughts are slow, sluggish from blood loss. “For what?”
“For not recognizing his brilliance. For failing to appreciate him. For treating him like he was ordinary when he believed he was extraordinary.” Ivalys’s gift shows her things I can’t see—the truth beneath the words, the intent behind the bargain. “He sold his soul for power because he felt entitled to it. Because he believed the world owed him greatness and refused to deliver.”
“And if you speak truth?—”
“If I can make him believe—make the contract magic believe—that no one owes him anything, that his grievance was never real...” She meets my eyes. “He loses everything.”
The document pulses in her hands. The blood-script flows across its surface, rearranging itself, terms shifting in response to the truth-speaker holding it. The thing recognizes what she is. Recognizes the threat.
“We have to get back up.” I try to stand. Fail. Try again. “Have to reach the throne room before?—”
“Before what?” Ivalys is already pulling me upright, her arm around my waist. “Before the Ledger Master comes for us?”
“Before he breaks your brother completely.” I lean on her more than I should. “Before he forces you to make a choice you can’t unmake.”
Her jaw tightens. Gror. Her brother. The boy transformed into a weapon, trapped inside a prison of contracts, screaming silently while his body obeys the Ledger Master’s commands.
“We need to climb.” Her voice is steel. “Can you do that?”
I look up. The pit stretches above us—hundreds of feet of shifting paper, unstable slopes, darkness broken only by the distant glow of the floor above. In my condition, with my injuries, the climb is impossible.
“Yes.” I meet her eyes. “I can do anything if you’re beside me.”
The words surprise me. Vulnerability makes me nearly inarticulate, and here I am speaking poetry to a woman in the bottom of a contract graveyard. But she doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t look away. She takes my hand—the one not attached to a broken arm—and squeezes.
“Then let’s go save my brother.”
∗ ∗ ∗
