The carriage was the nicest thing I had ever sat in. Dark-blue velvet coated the benches, soft and warm beneath my hands. The window let in enough light to see but not so much that it was unbearably hot. A stack of books, bound in leather and gilded down their spines, teetered at the Heir’s feet, and he handed me one as if it didn’t cost more money than I could even conceive of. The carriage kept a steady pace, and the Heir let me stew in silence. I dragged one finger down the gold edges of the book.
“I have been looking for another vilewrought for a very, very long time,” he said, and his glasses cast twin blood moons across my lap. “Surely, you have been curious about vilewrights. I can tell you anything you want to know.”
He was fishing, offering me a worm, but I knew what happened to fish.
“You said we would draw up a contract.” I dredged up all the confidence I could muster and smiled. City people adored rural girls who smiled at them. They called us quaint. Let him think me untrained and naive. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Your Majesty, but you are exactly that—the Heir. Laws and contracts do not bind you as they do me.”
I had heard of his deals, of course. Gossipmongers said it was like making a deal with one of the Vile. Word it right or write your will.
“True. I have power many don’t.” He settled into his seat and crossed his spindly legs ankle over knee. “If you do not contract your vilewright in just the right way, it will take liberties. Imagine I am your vilewright. Think over exactly what you want from me, and we shall draw it up once we are in Mouth-of-the-River-of-Gods.”
“But you will keep me safe until we draw it up?” I asked.
“You’re too valuable to waste.” He popped the joints of his hand finger by finger, never once breaking eye contact with me. “My mother has a bad record with prior vilewrought, however, so we must make sure your introduction to her is as innocuous as possible.”
I’d never heard of any other vilewrought, which meant she had probably killed them.
“What if I don’t want to meet her?” I asked.
“Then, like everyone else she has ever met, you are cursed to be disappointed.” He pressed his palms together and rested his fingertips against his chin. “You possess both a noblewright and a vilewright?”
I nodded.
“When did you know? My mother recognized my vilewright when I was six but didn’t let them bind me until after Hila. Which wright made itself known first? Did you feel it move about you? Did you feel its hunger?” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “My mother thinks it is absurd to ascribe movement or wants like that to them, but they have imperatives like anything else. Vilewrights yearn. I have always wondered if it’s actual hunger or me projecting after the contract saps my strength, but I have never had anyone to ask before. It’s odd, but…”
He spoke for hours, referencing a dozen ideas I didn’t know but grasped from context. I had grown with these wrights, and they had grown with me. I didn’t need the words of his academic texts to know what was mine and what was theirs.
“You’re describing them like a soldier talks about their sword,” I said as the carriage rolled to a stop in a dark, quiet town. “They’re not tools.”
He licked his dry lips and nodded. “Of course not. They are alive in a way, but they cannot exist without us. You should read this tonight. We can discuss it tomorrow.”
“My schedule is rather full right now,” I said, “with nightmares.”
He snorted. “Read it.”
We slept at an empty inn. I stayed in a room with his sacrificial guard, Hana Worth. He slept alone. She loaned me a small bag with a change of clothes, tooth cleaner, and other small necessities, and I slept swaddled in Julian’s old, brown coat, my nose tucked into the collar. By dawn, we were awake, and I tossed the book he had given me onto his bench. It was gilded and lovely but utterly unreadable. The Heir didn’t so much as glance at me when he entered the carriage. He only had eyes for the book.
“Did you read it?” he asked.
He still hadn’t asked for my name.
“No,” I said. “It’s in Old Liran.”
“All wrought can read Old Liran, Madshavi, and Krate.” His dark brows drew together. “Surely, you were taught?”
“You accepted our deal because I’m self-taught,” I said. “Remember?”
“Of course I remember.” His top lip arched into a half sneer. He took a breath and slowly let it out. “It describes vilewrights as parasites.”
Both of my wrights bristled at that, the feeling like a metal knife scraping against my teeth.
“But you understood me last night?” His hand drifted to his chest. I couldn’t see the sigil the court and council had placed on his chest but knew it would be as red as the heart it had been carved over. How could he stand being bound to serve and only using his vilewright in ways they approved? “You must understand me.”
He said it the same way my mother, feverish and dying in the days after the factory fire, had asked for water.
“That our vilewrights are hungry?” I asked. “That noblewrought can’t understand the way a vilewright will thrum in your chest until you sacrifice something, anything, to it?”
Sometimes, in the dead hour before dawn when Felhollow was quiet and all I could hear was the nothing in my life, I was so hungry for something more—more than hiding, more than settling down, more than the monotony of everyday life—that my bones ached. I wanted something. I wanted everything.
My vilewright loved those hours.
“Our vilewrights are not parasites. They hunger,” I said. “I understand perfectly.”
He sighed, the tension in his shoulders slumping, and leaned back.
“Most of us have the same teachers. Each peer has two or three that they loan out for a price to others, partly to spy and partly to make sure none of us learn to do anything dangerous,” the Heir said, glancing at the blushing dawn outside the carriage window. “They taught me to make my contracts longer and more precise. They feared my vilewright would take liberties. What are your contracts like?”
I shifted. We were to be stuck in this carriage for days, and already I was tired of it.
“I don’t write long, exacting contracts like you do, and I have never written one down,” I said slowly. “My wrights were all I had as a child.”
He looked up, mouth hard.
I shook my head. “However lonely you think you were, you at least had somewhere and someone that was yours. I didn’t. I only had my wrights. I ask and offer a sacrifice, and if they’re pleased, they do what I ask. If they’re not, I get sick, and they sulk and take the sacrifice but don’t do anything. Keeping me alive keeps them alive. Our relationship is—”
“Curious.” He smiled so widely it upset his glasses. “A monster in our veins. We feed the monster, and it does something akin to what we asked.”
A god in my veins who answers my prayers in exchange for a sacrifice.
“I need another vilewrought so that I can conduct my research without anyone being aware of it.” He flicked his hand out, and a long needle appeared between his fingers. He spun it across the backs of his knuckles. “I am limited by my binding. You are not.”
“No one knows what you do with the wrought in your collection,” I said. “It’s unsettling, not knowing.”
“It certainly is.” He glanced up at me, the light flickering in his glasses. “Would knowing make you feel better?”
“I would feel better if you put that away.” I nodded at the needle. “And yes. I want to know why you want me.”
“Ah. A nervous habit.” He smiled crookedly and tucked the needle into a pocket in his sleeve. “Before we speak of particulars, let us speak of what you do and do not know about wrights.”
He did not answer my question that day or the next.
He was good at speaking around true answers. He had to be, growing up around his mother and the peers. They collected all the wrought they could find, bound them to their service, and trained them to write out contracts so long and convoluted that the wrights could only ever do precisely what was asked of them. Most noblewrought couldn’t function without contracts either.
Any rebellion would be stalled by the time it took to draft and enact a contract.
The Heir didn’t mention that, but it was obvious why the court and council insisted on them.
I contented myself with questions I figured he would like and kept my more pressing ones closer to my chest.
Would Julian and Will come to Mori? Would Felhollow disavow me? Was anyone angry about me lying? What had Will done, and what was he doing? The warrant had been written right before the soldiers confronted us, but he’d been so calm that it was like he knew it was coming. Even if he had broken some law, it surely wasn’t anything worth killing him over.
“You must have more interesting questions?” the Heir asked. “Contracts are so dry, and you will see plenty once we begin work.”
I shrugged. “How can wrights hunger and consume sacrifices when they have no physical forms?”
“A curious conundrum,” he muttered and slid to the window, pushing open the little pane of glass. From its other side, he peeled a dirt-sodden spiderweb, and it clung to his hand like a second skin. “This web is real even though the spider is gone, but at certain angles, we cannot see it. In certain lights, we can almost see our wrights even though the Noble and Vile are gone.”
“We’re not at the right angle, you mean, to see wrights,” I said.
The Heir turned his hand over, and the threads of the web vanished. The spider, not gone after all, scurried across his palm. He moved as if to kill it, and I grabbed his wrist. He raised one brow.
“Perhaps the Vile will return one day,” I said, coaxing the spider to me and cupping it in my hands. “They’re scary, but they’re not bad. They eat pests, you know.”
He didn’t speak to me again until the fifth day. We were traveling next to the Tongue, the river that ran through Mori and into the south of Cynlira. A musky sulfuric sting rose from it that left each breath tasting of sun-dried fish and thick, clinging mud, and it dredged up all my old, worst memories. I read one of his books, my hands shaking. The Heir handed me a flask of cold water.
“You’re nervous.” He closed the journal he had been writing in. “Why?”
“I grew up in Mori,” I said. “Didn’t want to come back.”
“Really?” asked the Heir. “How did I not notice you?”
The catch in his voice made my chest ache. “I grew up on the north end of the first wall behind Formet district.”
The church district Formet had been mostly abandoned, and the water of the Wallows was seeping into its long-unused churches. The gods had possessed names once, but after they abandoned us, we stopped using them. Now they were just concepts—Order, Chaos, Life, Death, and Time—and their churches were rotting. Last I’d been there, most of the buildings were caved in or housing folks with nowhere else to go. The guards had gone through every few weeks to clear them out.
“The Forget-Me-Not district?” His head tilted slightly. “You grew up in The-Vile-Wallow-in-the-Waters?”
No one used the old names anymore, but of course he did.
“You didn’t visit the Wallows.” I shrugged. “And I’ve lived in Felhollow for years.”
He stared at me for a long moment, his mouth slightly open. “What is your family name?”
Lirans always took the name of the parent who brought the most to the partnership, but it wasn’t like he’d recognize her name as if I were some peer’s forgotten kid. She’d simply had two copper halfans more than my father.
“Adler,” I said. “Do most people answer that with their full name and forget you never asked them all together?”
“Forgive me.” He adjusted his glasses and leaned back. “What is your name?”
“Lorena Adler,” I said. “You’re forgiven if you tell me exactly what it is you want from me.”
“I want you, Lorena,” said the Heir, long fingers tapping against the side of his face. “What do you want? Other than aiding Willoughby Chase, you have made no mention of what you want.”
Another distraction. I said nothing.
The Heir sighed. He slid from his seat to mine, his thigh knocking against my knee. One finger hooked around the wire connecting the lenses of his glasses, pulling them down and off, and he unknotted his cravat. He cleaned his glasses with it.
“When I was a child, I wanted a dog,” he said, “but it wasn’t a dog I truly wanted.”
He set his glasses on my nose. With one finger beneath my chin, he turned me to face him. Lurking in the space above his shoulders as if it were a person leaning to whisper in his ear, a faint smear of dark red hung. I reached out, fingers gliding through the shape. I felt nothing at all.
“That’s your wright,” I whispered. “You can see wrights.”
He laughed, head thrown back and neck bare. A faint scar ran from his left ear to the hollow of his throat.
“They only show vilewrights.” He nodded to the space behind me. “Yours hides when I look at you.”
I would’ve hidden too.
“Did you make these?” I asked, leaning around him to study his wright, but it vanished beneath his coat. This boy was as clever as he was monstrous.
“My mother said I could have a dog if I did something with my vilewright that she had never seen before,” he said, “and I very much wanted a dog, though the contract nearly killed me.”
“You didn’t want a dog.” The glasses slipped down my nose until his mouth was halved by a thick red line. “You wanted someone who didn’t mind you were vilewrought.”
He had wanted someone who loved him and wasn’t scared of him. An equal—something impossible so long as the peerage existed and he was the Heir to the Crown.
“And now I have you.” He took the glasses from my face and pushed them to his forehead, black hair and red lenses a crooked crown. His eyes were a soft, ashy gray. “What do you know of the Door?”
“Just rumors.” I shook my head. “When the gods banished the surviving Noble and the Vile who escaped mortal appetites, the Vile cheated. They didn’t leave our world completely, and they made sure there was a way for them to return. Deep beneath the heart of Mori is a Door. It demands blood sacrifices to stay shut.”
They ate us. We ate them. The survivors hid behind a Door that ate us. The cycle continued eternal.
It was what they wanted to sacrifice Will to.
“It’s very real, and it requires more and more souls to sate its appetite and stay shut. One day soon, we will not be able to feed it enough. It will open. The Vile will return. Many will die, and the survivors will live under Vile rule again.” He tilted his head to the side and let his glasses slip into place, adjusting them with one unsteady hand. “I want you to help me shut the Door—no more sacrifices and no more death—for good.”