I pulled a sheet of paper from the desk drawer and gestured for Marc to make use of the normal pen and inkwell. He wrote quickly, not bothering with archaic contractual language to disguise his intent.
I read over his terms and began crossing bits out and adding others. It didn’t even occur to me to ask Felix for his opinion first.
The paper went back and forth until it was mostly a mess of scratched out lines with only a few words here and there left untouched. Marc didn’t bother to try to hide any favorable terms for himself, he simply rejected any terms that favored the duke. Accepting the contract back for the seventh time, I thought about exactly which clauses he had crossed out. Then I thought about what Felix needed.
My pen hovered over the paper, an idea forming. Marc would never sign a contract that required him to hand over the scrolls he had found to Felix. He was toying with us, pretending he might eventually sign, while pushing to see if I might make a mistake. If I offered him a contract with a loophole in his favor, he’d sign it.
“This is getting hard to follow. Let me copy over the bits that neither of us has rejected.” I pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and began writing. I pulled phrases from Marc’s version, piecing together the mess we had made into a single, simple contract. One that had two new terms. The first was an extra guarantee for Marc’s freedom to leave the castle, promising him that Felix would not use Rose Castle magic to pull him back once he departed. The second was a variation on a clause Marc had tried and I had rejected earlier.
It was a risk to only require him to divulge the location of a single scroll. I had to believe, based on his attempt to work a similar clause into the contract earlier, that he wasn’t worried about the contents of all the scrolls he had found falling into Felix’s hands. I had made sure that the scroll in question would be the one most likely to help us understand the curse. But if I wanted to fool Marc, asking for all the scrolls wouldn’t work.
“Here.” I passed the contract to the secretary. “Only one scroll, and plenty of assurances for your freedom once you collect it for His Grace. Is that good enough?”
Marc read over the terms. I knew the instant he saw the loophole I had snuck into the final sentence. He reread the last section, no doubt looking to see if I had left him a second loophole, allowing him to pull a less useful scroll in order to fulfill his end of the deal. Finally, the lure of the opening I had left overruled his caution.
“I’ll sign this.”
Felix walked closer to Marc and dipped a claw in the open inkwell. “Let’s get this done with, then.”
I think the secretary and I both held our breaths as he signed his name without taking the time to read over the contract. Marc probably felt smug that the duke was signing a flawed contract. He probably relished the idea of Felix railing at me in the aftermath.
All I could think about was how much trust Felix had just shown. He knew I couldn’t work against him, but that didn’t guarantee that the contract I wrote was faultless. Yet he would pass it through the node, letting the magic bind him to the terms without even looking to see what they were.
It was foolish.
It was exhilarating.
An emotion I couldn’t name shivered through me. It wasn’t gratitude or pleasure, though they were a part of it. It was at once complex and simple. Something to puzzle over.
But not now. Marc added his own signature to the contract, plucked it from the table, and stood. “Shall we go to the great hall and make this official?”
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.”
