My Captor Bites Back novel · Chapter 3 of 3
Chapter 3: The Binding Text
Sorin reveals the founding covenant to Elara and she forces the truth from the binding itself by cutting it, only to have a letter from Fenn surface from the book, commissioning her as a child.
Sorin unlocked the glass case.
Elara was standing three steps inside the library door, and she had not moved since she entered, and she did not move now. She watched his pale fingers turn the small brass key, and she listened to the lock give with a click that carried in the quiet.
The case stood on a reading table in the center of the room, long and low, between the high shelves and the night-blooming flowers on the windowsills. He lifted the lid and took out a document bound in dark leather, the pages yellowed at the edges, and he set it on the table between them.
She did not move toward it.
'You came,' he said.
'You locked me in a room at the top of a stair and then sent a man with a tray. What did you think I would do, climb out the window?'
'You tried the window.'
She had. She had tried it twice, and the second time she had found the frame sealed with something that was not wood and not glass, and she had not tried a third time because she was not stupid.
'I wanted to see the view,' she said.
Sorin looked at her for a long moment, then turned the document so it faced her, and stepped back from the table. He did not invite her to sit. He did not tell her to read. He simply waited, his hands folded behind his back, his dark coat buttoned to his throat, and Elara understood that the waiting was the invitation, and that he would stand there all night if she did not approach.
She approached.
Her boots were silent on the carpet, and she stopped at the table's edge and looked down at the page. The script was old, the letters hooked and angular, and it was not a language she had ever been taught to read.
She read it anyway.
Her eyes moved across the page without her permission, and her mouth shaped the words before she could stop it.
'By blood and by will the Voss line seals this court, and by blood and by will it may unseal it, and no hand that is not of the line may break what the line has bound.'
Her voice sounded strange to her. It sounded like a child reading aloud in a classroom, careful and slow, and she stopped.
The room was very quiet.
'You can read it,' Sorin said. It was not a question.
'What is this?'
'You know what it is.'
She did. The knowledge arrived not as a discovery but as a memory, the way a word arrives when you have not used it in years, and she looked at the page and she knew it was a founding covenant, and she knew the court it bound, and she knew the line whose blood had been pressed into the wax at the bottom, and it was hers.
'This names my family,' she said.
'It names you.'
'My family has been dead for two hundred years. The order raised me from nothing. I have no bloodline.'
'You have a mark on your wrist that says otherwise.'
She did not look at her wrist. She had spent her whole life not looking at it, and she was not going to start now because a vampire in a high-collared coat told her to.
'Read the clause,' Sorin said. 'The one beneath the seal.'
She read it.
The words were smaller there, cramped, as if the scribe had run out of room, and she had to lean closer to make them out.
'Should a willing Voss enter the boundary of Drache Court and survive thirty nights within it,' she read, 'the seal shall be dissolved.'
She read it twice.
She read it a third time, and each time the word willing sat on the page, and the ripples moved outward through everything she had believed about the last three days.
Willingly.
The word was underlined. The ink was darker than the rest, newer, and the line beneath it was not the careful stroke of a scribe but the quick, hard mark of someone who had read this page many times and wanted that one word to burn.
She did not say anything about the ink.
She filed it away, the way she had filed away the second cipher stamp on the dispatch band, the way she filed everything now, because information was the only weapon she had left.
'Thirty nights,' she said.
'Yes.'
'And if I survive them?'
'Then the court is unbound. The seal breaks. And I am free.'
She looked up at him. 'Free from what?'
'From the bloodline that made me.'
The words landed in her chest and stayed there, and she did not know what to do with them, so she did what she always did when she did not know what to do with a thing.
She put it down and stepped back from it.
'You are telling me I am a key,' she said.
'I am telling you what you are.'
'A lock.'
'Yes.'
The candles on the table burned without flickering, and the night-blooming flowers on the sills breathed their white scent into the dark. The order had sent her here to be broken open. Not to kill him. Not to die trying. To enter the court, and to survive thirty nights, and to break the seal, and then to be whatever was left when the breaking was done.
A spent key.
A used lock.
She had been trained for twelve years of service to be a weapon, and she had been a weapon, and now she was a key, and both things were things that other people used and then threw away.
'Fenn knows,' she said. Her voice was flat.
'Fenn has known since before you were born.'
She nodded. She did not ask how Sorin knew what Fenn knew. She did not ask how long Sorin had been waiting for her, or what he wanted from the unsealing, or whether he had known she would come through the window on the east side and not the door.
She asked the only question that mattered.
'Why show me this now?'
'Because you asked for the truth.'
'I asked for the truth about why the order sent me.'
'This is why.'
She looked down at the covenant again. The wax seal at the bottom was cracked and dark, and she could see the impression of a crescent moon pressed into it, the same crescent that sat on her wrist. She had been carrying this document's signature on her skin for her entire life without knowing what it was.
She had been told it was a birthmark.
She had been told it was a training scar.
She had been told a dozen things, and none of them had been true, and she had believed all of them because she had been a child, and then because she had been a soldier, and soldiers did not ask questions about the marks on their own bodies.
'You are angry,' Sorin said.
'I am not angry.'
'You are.'
She looked at him, and she let him see nothing at all.
'I am a hunter,' she said. 'I have been angry for twelve years. It stopped being interesting a long time ago.'
She reached for the covenant.
Sorin went very still.
'What are you doing?'
'Testing a claim.'
She picked up the document with both hands. The leather was dry and cool, and the pages were brittle at the edges, and she held it over the nearest candle flame.
The fire did not catch.
'It will not burn,' Sorin said.
'So I see.'
She tried to tear it.
It did not tear.
She pulled the page with the clause between her fingers, hard, and the page held, and the old paper did not so much as crease. She threw it on the table. The book landed flat and did not bounce. It simply lay there, solid as a stone, and the candlelight slid off it like water off oil.
'You cannot destroy it,' Sorin said.
'But I can leave it.'
'Yes.'
'And if I leave, the seal holds?'
'Yes.'
She picked up the covenant again and held it to her chest.
'Then I will make you a trade,' she said. 'I will stay the thirty nights. I will read whatever else is in this book. I will do it willingly, and the seal will break, and you will be free. But in exchange, you will tell me everything Fenn told you about me. Every report. Every letter. Every word. When I ask, you answer, and you keep nothing back.'
Sorin was silent for a long moment.
'You would break the seal for information?'
'I would break the seal for the truth.'
'And if the truth is worse than the lie?'
'Then I will know it.'
He looked at her for a long time. Then he nodded.
'Agreed.'
She set the covenant down on the table between them, and she did not step back from it this time. She stood at the table's edge and watched Sorin turn the page, and then the next, and the next, his pale fingers moving over the old paper with a kind of reverence that made her skin prickle, and she watched him turn the pages of her own bloodline's history as if he had read them a thousand times.
He probably had.
He turned the last page, and something slid free from between it and the leather back cover.
It fell to the table, a single sheet of paper, thinner than the others, folded once, and the paper was not old.
The paper was modern, white and crisp, and Elara looked at it.
Sorin did not touch it.
'That is not part of the covenant,' he said.
'Then what is it?'
'I think you should read it.'
She did not want to. Every instinct she had, every year of training, every night spent learning to read a room before she entered it, told her to leave the paper on the table and walk away.
She picked it up.
She unfolded it.
The handwriting was familiar. She had seen it on mission briefs and training orders and disciplinary reports for as long as she could remember, and she would have known it anywhere.
Fenn's handwriting.
The date at the top of the page was the year she turned six.
The letter was short. It was addressed to no one, or to someone whose name had been left off, and it began with a single line that made the room go very quiet.
It was a commission.
A child, to be raised for a specific purpose. The purpose was not named. The child was.
Her name was Elara Voss.
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