Page 27 of Connor and the Dragons

Sky and Moerrven stood to leave when the lamps lit. Sky hugged everyone twice. Moerrven bowed his head to Connor with a small dry “good hunting,” and at the door Sky mentioned that he’d found a shop that sold nice leather goods if we needed anything. Moerrven was quite enjoying the flogger Sky had bought.

Moerrven shooed his husband out the door, muttering something about how a man shouldn’t just casually reveal that his husband enjoys being flogged. So Sky was in charge. Fascinating, given their size difference.

I looked at Connor, who was a few inches shorter than me, but not considerably smaller, and decided it worked. He was standing by the door, his hand on the closed latch.

“Mirrors,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He crossed back to the table, took off his bracelet, and pulled a fresh page toward himself, and started writing, fast, the family list at his elbow, the lamp pulled close, pencil sounds in the quiet, and Kessrin watched him from the other side of the table with his tea going cold and his cheeks going pink.

CHAPTER 11: KESSRIN

Connor had not stopped writing since Sky and Moerrven left. He had said good night to them with his eyes already on a fresh page, muttering about mirrors and names, and an hour later he was still at it, the family list at his elbow and three names underlined so hard the pencil had gone through the paper.

I brought him tea he did not notice and looked over his shoulder, which I had learned he permitted.

“The mirror cipher,” I said. “The historical one you mentioned at dinner. Text written in reverse, read against the glass.”

“Mm.” He was trying the middle name on the list against a string of symbols, forward, the way he had tried everything for a week. “Party trick. Too simple. Nobody protects an archive with a party trick.”

“Too easy to crack?” I asked. “Couldn’t there be more to it?”

He nodded. “Too easy to crack when used alone. But… perhaps…”

Connor went very still. Then he slipped his bracelet off again, wrote something backwards, and fit it against a ten-symbol string he had circled four days ago, and letters began to spill out of it into the words on either side, one, then four, then a cascade, his substitution table filling line by line while he muttered to himself, faster and faster. Half the guesses he had made and abandoned over a week began agreeing with each other all at once, and he kept saying so, in increasingly unprofessional language.

“It’s layered,” he said. “It’s two ciphers. They mirror the whole page first, then encipher it, so the text runs right to left underneath the substitution.” He was grinning while he wrote. “Fuck, I forgot this was fun. At home you feed every possibility to a machine and it hands you the answer while you go get coffee. I have not done one of these by hand since my second year.” He underlined something twice. “You don’t even need a key to do the first step. You need a mirror. Kess. Look.” He read it aloud, slow, in plain Liminian. “Entrusted to the keeping of House Harrowgate, as are all such objects.” He looked up at me, and his grin was young and vicious and beautiful. “You’re absolutely brilliant.”

Oallian threw up his hands. “Finally! Now on to the sex?”

Connor did not so much as look up. Now that he had a way in, he wanted every page within reach at once, and the table was far too small for that. He carried the ledgers and his transcriptions over to his bed and laid them out in rows, and when he ran out of blanket, the overflow went onto the foot of the other bed, on top of the stack of cushions I moved down to the floor each night to sleep on. My bedding was now somewhere beneath the Harrowgate ledger. I was not going to ask a man in that state to move his papers, so I sat in a small wooden chair and pulled out my latest crochet project.

Before long, Connor was sitting cross-legged in the middle of one of the big beds with documents spread around him in a fan, working through the enciphered pages line by line. He had a pencil behind his ear and another in his hand, and every so often he made a small satisfied sound at a page, and I found I was watching him instead of my crochet.

Oallian stood and started pacing. He was fully dressed, but I knew that underneath his trousers, he still wore the straps Connor had fastened around his cock. And days buckled into that cage had not distressed him at all.

“I have been thinking all day about how my cock has an owner now,” he announced to the room as he sprawled back on the bed. “I find I like it very much.”

“Perhaps I could teach you some crochet,” I said, realizing belatedly how ridiculous that sounded. I cleared my throat. “Pip taught it to me, and it is a good distraction.”

“A distraction? Like another cock contraption, but made of yarn? That might have some appeal.”

“I was thinking a scarf.”

Oallian lifted his head and looked down at his crotch. “A cock scarf? That seems a little excessive, don’t you think? My cock is generally quite warm.”

Across the room, Connor choked on a laugh.

“I’m quite enjoying that Connor can decide how hard I am allowed to be. He adjusts the straps and my cock must obey.” He beamed at me. “It keeps the mind wonderfully occupied. I recommend it.”

“Ah.” I was at a loss for words, because now all I could think about was how much I wanted to touch Oallian’s caged cock, just to see what it was like.

“You’re talking a lot for a man whose mind is wonderfully occupied,” Connor said.

“I am just sharing, in case either of you wants to know. I am a kept thing,” Oallian said, to the ceiling, with enormous satisfaction. “Days now. I have never been kept before. I had no idea it would suit me so well.”

“Kessrin,” Connor said, without looking up from his page. “Control him.”