Eldric Chronicles: The Bonded

Book One

Chapter One: Slave?!

The cell door opened with a sound like a complaint — the low, rusty groan of hinges that had never been properly maintained, followed by the sharp, metallic percussion of keys against iron.

Odyn was already awake.

He had been awake for some time, actually, lying still on the narrow cot with his eyes closed and his breathing even, cataloguing the sounds of the building around him with the patient attention of someone who understands, instinctively, that information is the only currency available to a person in chains. He had heard two guards change shifts in the early hours. He had heard a cart moving on cobblestones somewhere overhead. He had heard, distantly, the sound of a child crying and then going quiet in the way children go quiet when they have decided that crying is no longer useful.

He recognized that particular silence. He had arrived at it himself, somewhere over the dark sea between worlds.

"Oi." The voice was rough, belonging to a man who had long ago stopped pretending to be civil about anything. "Did you hear me? I said get up, brat."

Odyn opened his eyes.

The guard who stood in the doorway was broad and thick-necked, with the kind of face that had settled permanently into a scowl somewhere around middle age and apparently never found its way back out. He smelled of pipe-leaf and something sour that Odyn's nose quietly objected to. The man's gaze landed on the young elf's face — took in the pointed ears, the too-dark skin, the orange eyes blinking up at him from the cot — and his expression shifted from impatient to something uglier. A small, contemptuous sound escaped him.

"Tch." He clicked his tongue against his teeth. "So you're one of the long-eared ones." He reached in and grabbed Odyn by the front of his rags without ceremony. "Get moving, forsaken."

The kick that followed caught Odyn squarely in the back as he was pushed through the doorway.

He grunted. His bones — already a catalogue of aches from the previous days — seemed to register the impact in sequence, one protest following another down his spine. He stumbled and caught himself against the corridor wall, pressing his palm flat against the damp stone until the worst of it passed. Then, with the slow and deliberate care of someone who will not give the man behind him the satisfaction of watching him crumple, he straightened up.

He walked.

The corridor beyond his cell was dim and low-ceilinged, lit by the kind of lamps that gave light primarily to the shadows around them. Other doors lined the walls. Through the barred windows of a few, he caught glimpses of faces — mostly children, watching him with the large, careful eyes of people who have learned to observe everything and react to nothing. He did not recognize any of them. They did not look like elves. They did not look like they were from his world at all.

But they looked exactly like he felt.

He filed that away.

Outside, the day was white and overcast, the sky a flat, bright gray that pressed down over the town square like a lid. The square itself was already busy — vendors and pedestrians and people who had gathered for reasons Odyn did not yet understand — and as the guard walked him through it, he became aware, in the slow and unmistakable way of someone whose abilities extend well past ordinary perception, that he was being looked at.

Not glanced at. Looked at.

He could feel the weight of it the way he could feel a change in weather — that particular pressure on the back of the neck, that awareness of being assessed and found wanting before a single word had been exchanged. The people he passed did not speak to him. They did not need to. Their thoughts were close enough to the surface that his Elven sensitivity caught the edges of them without effort: strange, wrong, other, forsaken, the last word snagging on something specific, a label he had heard once before and was beginning to understand was what humans called people like him.

He kept his face still.

He kept walking.

At the far end of the square, he saw it: a raised wooden platform in the center of the open space, broad and solid, the kind of structure built to hold weight and attention both. It was unoccupied now, in the thin morning light. But the arrangement of the square around it — the way the ground before it was worn flat, the way the lampposts flanked it at precise intervals — told him everything he needed to know about what it was used for.

His stomach turned once, quietly, and then he told it to be still.

Think, he said to himself. Think, don't feel. Not right now.

He was shoved into the back of a vehicle — large, mechanical, rumbling with an engine sound that vibrated up through the floor and into his shins — and the door was shut behind him. He blinked, adjusting to the dimmer light of the enclosed space.

He was not alone.

There were perhaps a dozen people in the back of the vehicle with him. A handful of adults, sitting close together with the inward-turning stillness of people who have stopped expecting things to improve. The rest were children — younger than him, most of them, their clothing threadbare and their faces wearing that particular expression that is not quite hope and not quite the absence of it but somewhere in the difficult territory between. They looked at him the way children look at something they cannot immediately classify: with a combination of wariness and undisguised curiosity.

Odyn looked back at them.

Then he found a corner, brought his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around himself, and closed his eyes.

He felt the vehicle begin to move. He felt the road beneath them shift from cobblestones to something rougher, the vibrations changing pitch, the sound of the engine deepening as the vehicle gathered speed. He felt, without looking, the other children glancing at him and then quickly away, glancing again when they thought he wasn't watching.

He could not fault them for it. He knew what he looked like to them — dark-skinned in a way that set him apart even among those who were already set apart, with ears that came to deliberate points and eyes the color of a fire's hottest heart. He was strange to them. He understood being strange. It was a thing he had always been, in various ways, to various people, and he had learned early that the most useful response to being studied was simply to let it happen.

They're children like me, he thought. That's all that matters right now.

A tear escaped before he could stop it.

He let it go. There was no one here who mattered enough to hide it from, and the pretense of composure costs energy, and he was very tired. He pressed his forehead against his knees and let the road's vibrations carry him, and he thought about his sister's face, and the clearing in the forest, and the way his father's hand had felt on his shoulder, and his mother's voice reading the old passages aloud on quiet evenings, and all the small and ordinary things about home that he had not understood were precious until they were no longer there.

I'll come back, he thought. Whatever this is, it won't be forever.

The thought did not entirely convince him. But it was a thing to hold onto, and so he held it, and eventually, despite everything, sleep found him.

Far across the darkness between worlds, on a planet where the twin suns were just beginning their descent toward the horizon, Khanna Andross was adjusting the straps of her bracers.

The jade-green armor fit her well — better than it had six months ago, when she'd had to pad the shoulder guards to keep them from sliding. She was eleven years old and already taller than most of the women in her mother's household, with the broad shoulders and straight-backed bearing of someone who had spent more time in a training yard than in a sitting room and considered this an entirely satisfactory arrangement.

She checked the bracers. Checked the belt. Checked the blade at her hip and the pack on her back.

"Looks like I have everything," she told herself, and walked out the door.

Her father was waiting in the courtyard.

Raptaryn Andross was a large man, large in the specific way of people who are very good at very physical things and have been for a very long time — not imposing so much as simply present, with an unhurried solidity to his movements that made the space around him feel more organized by proximity. He was in his dark green armor, as he almost always was, and Khanna's youngest brother Borhdak was perched on his shoulders with the easy confidence of someone who has occupied that position since before he could properly walk.

Borhdak was six years old, with silver-and-lavender hair inherited from different branches of the family tree, and the flame-orange eyes and pointed ears that every dark elf carried. He was currently looking at his sister with the complicated expression of a small child who understands that something significant is happening but is not entirely sure whether to be proud or worried about it.

"You'll be careful?" Raptaryn said. It was the same tone he used to ask if she'd eaten, or checked the edge on her blade before training — practical, no performance in it, the kind of love that expresses itself as attention to detail.

"Always," Khanna said. She stepped in and hugged him once, brief and solid, her arms reaching only partway around the breadth of him. She felt him return it, and the warmth of that stayed with her even after she stepped back.

"I'm going to find him," she said. It was not bravado — she said it the way she said most things of importance, quietly and with the evenness of someone who has already settled the question internally and is simply reporting the conclusion. "His family needs him. I won't come back until I have."

Raptaryn studied her face for a moment. Then he turned her gently by the shoulders and gave her a small push forward, and she heard the smile in his voice even without seeing it. "Then go. Your mother and Lynnia won't wait all day."

She bowed once, the short dip of the head that passed between soldiers, and broke into a run down the road.

"Papa." Borhdak's voice drifted after her, small and uncertain. "Will sissy be okay?"

She didn't hear her father's answer. She was already too far.

At the docking bay, the small company was assembled and waiting.

Lynnia stood at the head of the group — composed, silver-haired, her emerald armor catching the flat morning light — and regarded Khanna with the appraising expression of a commanding officer confirming a subordinate is ready to be deployed. "I take it you're prepared to depart, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, Commander."

Beside Lynnia, Khanna's mother Lailah — the Duchess of Xenia, sister to the High Queen herself — waited with the unhurried patience of a woman who is very rarely surprised by anything. Her middle child Alek stood near her, quiet and watchful in the way of those rare people who notice everything and volunteer nothing, the kind of stillness that belongs to exceptional trackers.

The ship was already humming at the dock, its engines warming.

Khanna looked at it for a moment, thinking of her cousin — the stubborn, earnest, infuriatingly selfless boy who had walked into a group of armed men's custody to spare his five-year-old sister a single night of fear.

Hold on, she thought, with the focused certainty that had always been her most reliable feature. I'm coming.

She walked up the boarding ramp.

Back in the palace at Xenia, the news had reached the other Albanar siblings in the days following Odyn's disappearance. It had been delivered carefully, with all the care that such news deserves and none of the softening that ultimately changes nothing, and the children had received it in the various ways of people who are shaped differently and therefore break differently under the same weight.

Roy — second-born, twelve years old and already carrying himself with the gravity of someone who is quietly aware of what his family expects of him — had gone very still upon hearing it. Then he had gone to the training yard, and he had not come out for three hours. The sounds from inside the yard told the rest of the story: the methodical, relentless rhythm of a boy with something to prove and nowhere useful to direct it. He knew he wasn't strong enough to help. He knew it with the specific and intolerable clarity of someone who is old enough to understand their own limitations and young enough to find the understanding almost unbearable.

He trained harder.

Banryu — sky-blue and lavender-haired, wearing his customary violet tunic and the silver armbands that had been a gift from Odyn three birthdays ago — did not entirely understand the full weight of what had happened. He was young enough that the situation lived at the edges of his comprehension, enormous in shape but blurry in detail. What he understood was that his eldest brother was gone and Roy was angry and Sarai was not okay. That was enough to know that things were serious. He did what he always did when things were serious: he stayed close, followed Roy's lead, and threw himself into whatever training was happening around him with the enthusiasm of someone who believes that effort is at least a form of control.

He was currently seated beside Randolph — the eldest of the Elven Council's trusted members, silver-haired and silver-bearded, in white and silver robes with a white staff resting across his knees that served as much as a symbol of his standing as an aid to walking — receiving instruction in the foundations of ancient Elven magic.

Banryu had no illusions about where he stood relative to his brothers in raw magical ability. Odyn's capacity for light magic was the kind of thing that senior soldiers spoke about in careful, impressed tones. Roy's instincts were their own kind of formidable. Banryu was neither of these things, and he had made peace with it by becoming something else: a fortifier, an enhancer, someone whose gift lay not in the direct and explosive applications of magic but in the steadying and strengthening of everything around him. It was a different kind of power, quieter, and he was learning to be proud of it.

Still, he watched his younger sister across the courtyard, and what he felt looking at her was not pride. It was worry, plain and simple, wearing no decoration.

"Will she be okay?" he asked.

Randolph did not answer immediately. His old eyes rested on the princess for a moment — taking in the stillness of her, the way she sat in the shade of the courtyard wall with her knees drawn up and her gaze fixed on some middle distance that had nothing to do with the stones in front of her — and the expression on his weathered face was the complex, layered thing of someone who has lived long enough to know that some questions do not have answers that comfort.

"That," he said at last, "is not a question I can answer for you, my prince. What lies before your sister now is a wall only she can climb. The best that we can do — all that we can do — is to stand at the base of it and make certain she knows we are there."

Banryu was quiet for a moment. The words settled.

Then he nodded, slowly, and stood. "She'll get through it," he said, more to himself than to his teacher. "I know she will. We just have to help her see that it's worth trying."

Randolph regarded the boy with something close to approval. He said nothing, which, from Randolph, was its own kind of affirmation.

Across the courtyard, Sybyrh Arkham — Lynnia's younger sister, with the distinctive blonde-and-black-streaked hair of her family and the patient, steady presence of someone who has always understood that care is a practice rather than a feeling — sat with her arm around the princess.

Sarai had not spoken in days.

It was not a matter of being unable to. The healers had confirmed she was physically uninjured. What had happened to her was something the healers' instruments could not fully measure — a wound of the kind that does not show on the body, the kind that comes from watching someone you love be taken away from you while you stand there helpless, your hand outstretched, the distance growing.

She ate when food was brought to her. She slept when exhaustion overtook her. She cried, sometimes, in the deep hours of the night — quietly, like someone who has decided that crying is a private matter. But she did not speak, and she did not respond to words, and the expressions that moved through her face were few and far between and gone before anyone could properly catch them.

The family had learned, from Hyatan, not to fill the silence with language. Language required a response, and Sarai was not ready to respond. What she needed was simpler and more difficult: to be held. To feel that something was still there. To understand, without being told, that the world had not ended simply because the person she loved most in it was gone.

So Sybyrh held her. She had been holding her for most of the morning, her arms loose and warm, making no demands.

"You'll see him again," she said softly, into Sarai's hair. It was not a promise she had any right to make. She made it anyway, because some things need to be said regardless of whether they can be guaranteed — because hope sometimes requires someone to speak it aloud before it can take root. "When that day comes... he'll be so proud of who you've become. He chose this for you, because he believed you were worth it. Don't make him wrong about that."

For a long moment, nothing.

Then Sarai shivered.

It was a small thing — just a tremor, barely perceptible, the kind of movement that belongs to a person being reached by something they had not expected to feel. Sybyrh felt it through her arms and held a little tighter without changing anything else about the way she was sitting.

She did not push. She did not speak again.

But something had shifted, quietly, in the particular way of things that shift when no one is looking directly at them. The princess was not fixed — that was not a thing that happened in a single afternoon, in a single moment of warmth. But somewhere beneath the stillness and the grief and the carefully maintained blankness, a small thing had persisted that Sarai herself might not have been able to name.

She had not given up.

She was not sure she believed she would see her brother again. She was not sure she dared to. But the thought that she might — that it was at least still a possibility existing somewhere in the world — was enough, for now, to be slightly more than nothing.

She leaned a fraction closer into Sybyrh's warmth, and the afternoon light moved over the courtyard wall, and the training sounds continued in the distance, and the world did what the world always does in the face of grief: it kept going, patient and indifferent, waiting for the people inside it to decide whether they were coming along.

The vehicle stopped sometime after dark.

Odyn woke to the same rough hands that had put him in it.

He was dragged out by the arm, the night air cold against his face after the stale warmth of the transport's interior. He found his feet quickly — a thing he had become practiced at — and looked around with the careful, unhurried attention he had been applying to every new environment since this had all begun. Information first. Reaction second.

The town was smaller than Kyoto had been, its streets narrower and its buildings lower, lit by lanterns that threw amber circles against the dark in overlapping patterns. A few people moved on the streets, despite the hour, and they watched him pass with the flat, appraising expressions of people who have seen this kind of procession before and formed opinions about it.

And at the center of the town square — visible now even in the dark, because it had been built to be visible — the wooden platform stood.

He had guessed correctly.

The building they brought him to that night was stone-walled and underground, its stairs descending into a cellar that smelled of damp and mold and age. His cell here was smaller than the last one. The guard who put him in it, either through carelessness or casual cruelty, did not simply push him through the door — he kicked him, hard, between the shoulder blades, sending him stumbling forward to land on the stone floor with an impact that announced itself through every bruise and re-opened cut on his body simultaneously.

The floor was very cold.

He lay still for a moment. He heard the cell door shut. He heard the guard's footsteps recede.

Then he pushed himself up.

His hands were shaking slightly — not from fear, he told himself, and believed it mostly — and there was fresh blood on the heel of his left palm where it had caught the edge of a stone. He tore a strip from the hem of his shirt, which was more rags than shirt at this point, and wound it carefully around the cut. He did the same for two other wounds that had reopened in the fall.

The remainder — deeper cuts, things the cloth couldn't properly address — he attempted to treat with magic.

It was a limited effort. He was eight years old, and while his natural capacity was considerable, capacity and control were different things entirely, and control was something that required years of patient instruction to develop. What he managed was rudimentary at best: a dim, steady warmth that he coaxed out of his palms and pressed carefully against the worst of the wounds. It helped. Not enough. Better than nothing.

His circlet was still on his head.

They had tried to take it, early on, the same way they had taken everything else. The attempts had been brief and educational — the first guard had received a discharge of electricity precise enough to leave a distinct pattern of burn marks on his hand, and the second had simply found himself briefly on fire in a way that was controlled enough not to be fatal but thorough enough to be unforgettable. The circlet, they had concluded, could stay. It only removed itself for those of royal Elven blood. On any other hands, it had opinions.

The green bandanna he'd worn since he was very small was still there too, faded now and fraying at the edges. He was glad. It was a small thing. It was enough.

He found the cot in the corner of the cell and lay down on it.

Here he was, then. Dark elf. Eight years old. High prince of Albanar, the kingdom at the center of the world, heir to a throne and a people and a history he already felt pulling at him like a current. Beaten, chained, on a planet he had never intended to visit, in a cell that smelled of mold, in a country whose language he knew imperfectly and whose customs he understood barely at all, waiting to be sold to whoever decided he was worth the price.

He stared at the ceiling.

This is, he thought with a dryness that was either composure or the closest thing to it that was currently available, not ideal.

But he was alive. He had his circlet, his bandanna, the quiet hum of his magic beginning to reassert itself even through the drain of the chains. He had, somewhere inside him, the long and well-worn voice of his father explaining why a warrior who cannot rest is no warrior at all — and the counterpoint to that, his own stubborn refusal to lie down even when lying down was the obvious choice.

He had, most importantly, the face of his sister reaching for him through the trees, and the promise he had made her, and the absolute certainty that he intended to keep it.

He closed his eyes.

Tomorrow, then.

Morning arrived with the same guard and the same boot and the same complete absence of preamble.

"Time to wake up, freak."

Odyn was already awake.

He was hauled to his feet, his wrists bound again in the mana-blocking chains that pressed against his magic like a hand over a flame — not extinguishing it, but containing it, reducing him to ordinary human-child-levels of physical ability, which is to say none at all against a grown man in armor. He was aware of this. He noted it with the pragmatic calm he had been cultivating, filed it under present constraints, and walked.

The square was fuller than yesterday.

People had gathered — traders, officials, the merely curious, and a particular category of person whose interest in proceedings like this had the specific quality of someone evaluating an investment. They stood in rough semicircles around the platform, and the murmur of their voices carried a particular energy, anticipatory and slightly too bright, that Odyn recognized as the sound of people who have convinced themselves that what they are doing is ordinary.

He was walked up the steps.

The chains on his wrists were adjusted, connected to a post behind him. The auctioneer — a compact, self-satisfied man whose job had long ago persuaded him that efficiency was the same thing as decency — looked the young elf over with the practiced eye of someone cataloguing features for a sales description.

"Next on the docket," the man announced, turning to the crowd with the projecting voice of someone who has made this particular type of speech many times before, "prisoner X-901. Male. A dark elf, for those with a discerning eye — a rare commodity in these parts, and I'm told one worth the attention. Strong for his age. A natural fighter, with latent abilities that our specialists assess as extraordinary." A pause for effect. "The right buyer will find this one worth every coin."

The crowd responded with the sound of people who are interested and pretending not to be.

Odyn stood on the platform and looked out over them.

He had, in the years of his life before this week, encountered many things that angered him. His father's opponents in the council chambers. Unfair treatment of the smaller elven nations by their more powerful neighbors. The condescension of people who assumed he was less formidable than he was because he was young.

None of those things had produced the particular, specific quality of anger that was now sitting behind his ribs.

He was a person. He was standing on a platform while people assigned him a price. He was being discussed in terms of utility and value and rarity, the same way one might discuss a horse or a tool, and the people discussing him were doing it loudly and in front of him with the serene confidence of people who do not expect the subject of their discussion to have feelings about it.

He kept his face still.

He kept his eyes flat and unhurried, scanning the crowd the way his mother had taught him to scan a room — not looking at anything specifically, but taking in everything, waiting for the detail that matters to present itself.

Don't show them anger, said the voice in the back of his mind that sounded like his parents. Anger is information. Don't give it away.

The bidding started.

He watched it the way he watched everything now: systematically, filing details, noting faces. There were several council officials near the front whose raised voices and competing gestures suggested this was not merely a transaction to them but a contest of status. There were buyers whose expressions had the cool, transactional quality of people who purchase things professionally. There were a few who simply looked at him with uncomplicated contempt, the kind that required no logic and no evidence and no thought, the kind that belonged entirely to people who had decided ahead of time what they thought of people like him.

They're afraid of what they don't understand, said the voice.

He knew the voice. He had heard it in the Ancient Book of Light since he was very small — a presence that was less a sound than a certainty, calm and vast, that moved through the back of his mind in moments like this one. It had a name. He had read about the things that name belonged to — a being who had been misunderstood and persecuted in turn, and who had met that persecution with something that eight-year-old Odyn found far more difficult than fighting: patience. Consistency. The stubborn refusal to become what was being done to him.

Anger only leads to destruction, he reminded himself. It was not easy. But it was true, and it sat alongside the anger like a counterweight, keeping him level, and for now that was enough.

He was still scanning the crowd when he saw the man.

He almost missed him. The man was standing at the edge of the square, slightly separate from the gathered crowd, and he had the look of someone who had been passing through and stopped despite himself. Dark-skinned, with vibrant green eyes that were unusual enough to catch even in a crowd, black hair, and the bearing of someone who carries both authority and the habit of not making a show of it.

More importantly: the man was looking at him.

Not the way the others were looking at him. Not with assessment or contempt or the hungry, shallow interest of a potential buyer. He was looking at him the way a person looks at something that has struck them somewhere they did not expect — with an expression that was equal parts sorrow and anger and a particular kind of resolution that Odyn, in his experience reading people, associated with people who have just decided to do something.

Who is that? he wondered.

The man's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly as his gaze traveled over the cuts and bruises on the young elf's face, the state of his clothing, the chains on his wrists. Something moved through his expression that Odyn could feel from the platform — a genuine and unguarded feeling, the kind that people usually work harder to conceal in public. Frustration. Sadness. A slow-burning anger on someone else's behalf that was, Odyn thought distantly, a very specific and particular emotion.

That poor boy, the man thought — and Odyn, whose Elven sensitivity had spent the last several days being the only thing standing between him and complete helplessness, caught the edges of it clearly. No child should have to go through this. No child, human or elf.

Kazuya Anuyachi. Head of one of the most respected samurai clans in the country, as Odyn would come to understand much later. A man whose reputation for standing in the way of corruption had made him, over the years, a very specific kind of enemy: the kind that patient, powerful men accumulate quietly and then address all at once when the opportunity presents itself.

He was here by accident, or something adjacent to it. He had been passing through. He had stopped because the sight of a child in chains on a public platform was the kind of thing Kazuya Anuyachi stopped for, constitutionally, because he had never once in his life managed to walk past an injustice without at least trying to correct it.

He was clearly calculating something, watching the proceedings with quiet attention, and Odyn watched him watching and felt, for the first time in days, something that cautiously resembled the early stages of hope.

The bidding climbed. The officials argued. The voices in the square grew louder.

And then a new voice cut through it — smooth, deliberate, carrying the particular authority of a man who is accustomed to people stopping what they are doing when he speaks.

The crowd fell quiet without being asked.

The man who had spoken stepped forward from the official's section, and Odyn's perception moved over him with the swift, comprehensive clarity of instinct: middle-aged, well-dressed, with the surface qualities of a man who has spent considerable time cultivating the appearance of authority and the deeper qualities of a man whose authority has long since curdled into something else entirely. His eyes were the color of old amber, and they had the particular flatness of eyes that stopped seeing other people as people some time ago.

He had offered a number. The number was high.

The auctioneers looked at it. They looked at each other.

At the edge of the square, Kazuya Anuyachi opened his mouth.

He was too late.

The gavel came down before the word left him, and the deal was done with the finality of a door slamming shut, and the man in the amber eyes looked across the square at Kazuya with an expression that was not quite a smile but contained everything a smile contains when it intends to wound rather than welcome.

Yaichi Sato. An officer in service to the Shogunate. A man with the kind of influence that moved quietly through the architecture of government, touching things, adjusting them, rerouting them toward his own uses without ever leaving a signature. A man who had, for some time now, found the Anuyachi Clan's habit of standing up for things to be an inconvenience that had grown past the point of tolerability.

Kazuya grit his teeth. His hands closed.

On the platform, Odyn watched the interaction between the two men with the attention of someone who is filed everything and understood more than he was supposed to.

The man who had just purchased him. The man who had tried and failed to prevent it. The look that passed between them — complicated, loaded, old with history that predated this morning by years.

This was planned, Odyn thought. Not a revelation so much as a confirmation of something he had already suspected. Nothing about his presence here was accidental. He had been brought here specifically, by people who served the interests of someone with specific reasons for wanting him here.

He did not yet know what those reasons were.

He added it to the list of things to understand later, when he had more information and more strength and fewer chains.

The guard came to collect him from the platform.

He went with the guard, because the chains made the alternative impractical, and because he had learned in the last several days that choosing when to submit and when to resist was itself a form of strategy. He had not yet found the right moment. He would.

As he was led from the platform, he allowed himself one more look at the green-eyed man standing at the edge of the square.

Kazuya Anuyachi watched him go with an expression that was equal parts apology and promise.

Odyn held the man's gaze for a moment. Then he turned away and kept walking, and the crowd closed behind him, and the square returned to its ordinary noise, and the morning continued as mornings do — indifferent to the things that happen inside of them.

But something had lodged itself in him, small and persistent. He could not yet name it. It was the particular feeling of knowing that in a world full of people who see you as a price tag, there is at least one person who looked at you and saw a person.

It was not much.

It was not nothing.

He walked forward.

End of Chapter One

Next: Chapter Two — Mistreatment and... A Daring Rescue?