Chapter 74: The Terms

Kai didn’t sleep very well that night. Every hour, right on the hour, he felt another point leave him like a pinprick somewhere behind his ribs, and every time it happened, it woke him up.

[It is midnight. 337 days. Current divinity points: 32.]

After the third time, he decided that he wasn’t going to try to sleep anymore. He went downstairs to the dining room, lit a candle, and took Draven’s letter out of its envelope, and after staring at it for a long while, he grabbed one of Princess Seris’s sticks of charcoal and scrawled two words across the bottom of the page in big, ugly letters.

DISPUTED. SEND TERMS.

[What are you doing?]

"What any normal person does when they get a bill they don’t agree with," Kai whispered. "I want to see the terms."

[Will he send them?]

"He’s a businessman," Kai whispered. "He’ll send them, because he thinks they’ll scare me. You only show someone your contract when you’re sure they can’t get out of it."

He put the letter back in its envelope, walked outside in his bare feet, and set it on the front step, right where the cook had found it. Then he went back inside and sat at the table until the sun came up, feeling the points leave him one at a time.

When Mira came downstairs in the morning, she found him still sitting there. She didn’t ask him why, and she simply made him a cup of tea, sat down in the chair beside him, and waited with him.

The answer arrived not long before noon. No one saw who left it, because one second the step was empty, and the next there was a stack of paper as thick as a book sitting there with a gold ribbon tied around it and a small note tucked underneath.

Mr. Mercer, as you asked. You will find them fairly airtight. C.D.

Justiciar Hale untied the ribbon himself and laid the pages out across the dining room table, and then he pulled out a pair of spectacles that Kai had never seen him wear before. Princess Seris sat down on one side of him with her notebook, Aldous sat down on the other side with his porridge, and the three of them spent the rest of the afternoon reading.

Kai tried to follow along, but after a few minutes, he lost track. The contract was eleven pages long and full of the kind of words that nobody ever used unless they were a lawyer or a scammer, and even Kai, who had written a few contracts like this himself back on Earth, had a headache by the time he got halfway through the second page.

He walked outside, sat down on the edge of the well, and stared at the mark on his hand instead.

"Can I ask you something?" Kai whispered.

[Of course]

"Does it hurt you when the points go?" Kai whispered. "Even a little bit? Be honest."

Syraphim didn’t respond for so long that Kai started to think she wasn’t going to answer him at all.

[No, it does not hurt. It feels like hunger, Kai. I was hungry for a very long time, in the dark under the Cathedral with my mother. I know what it feels like to be hungry]

"That’s not a no," Kai whispered.

[It is not a yes either. Go back inside. They will figure something out]

Through the open window, Kai could hear Hale’s dry voice reading out one of the terms, and Princess Seris questioning it, and Aldous quietly explaining what one of the stranger words meant. He sat there and listened for a while, and he thought that the bargain god had picked a very bad city to start a war in, because Veyrath was full of stubborn people who didn’t like being told what things cost.

[Current divinity points: 26.]

By the time the sun was setting, Kai was back at the table with the rest of them, and Justiciar Hale finally took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

"He is right," Hale said. "It is very well done. Whoever wrote this knew exactly what they were doing."

"Is there a way out of it?" Kai asked.

Hale didn’t answer him right away, and instead, he slid one of the pages across the table and pointed at a paragraph near the bottom.

"This is where it becomes interesting," Hale said. "Read it."

Kai pulled the page towards him and read the paragraph out loud.

"If any party should break, sever, or destroy the seal on this bond before its term has been fulfilled," Kai read, "that party shall assume the whole of its debt, and the remaining balance shall become theirs to fulfill."

"That is how it came to you," Hale said. "You broke the seal on the coin, and so you took on its debt."

Mira had been sitting quietly beside Kai all day, but now she leaned over and read the paragraph for herself, and Kai saw her eyes move across the lines twice, and then a third time.

"Then it can be passed to someone else," Mira said slowly.

Everyone at the table turned to look at her.

"If someone were to break the seal on your hand, the debt would pass on to them," Mira said. "Whoever breaks it gets the debt. So I’ll break it."

"No," Kai said.

"Kai..."

"No," Kai said again, louder this time, and he pulled his hand off the table and clenched it into a fist. "No way."

"You need those points," Mira said. "You need them to reach the hundred, and to save her, and to save all the people in this city who will lose their gods if you don’t. I don’t need anything. I’m not a god. I’m just a girl you bought with some rocks." She placed her hand on top of his fist. "At least let me do something for you that actually means something."

Kai just stared at her, and for a moment, he couldn’t find any words at all. Nobody else at the table moved a muscle. Garrick had stopped chewing, Princess Seris had stopped writing, and even Aldous had put down his spoon.

"You already did," Kai said, and his voice broke. "Remember when you walked into the market square and paid that man with your father’s money? You told me that you wanted your freedom to belong to you and no one else, not even me." He opened his hand and showed her the little golden circle on his palm. "This is forty years of your life, Mira. I’m not going to let you sell your freedom to buy mine back. Nothing is worth that."

Mira looked at him for a long while, and her eyes slowly filled with tears.

"You’re such a dumbass," Mira whispered.

"Yeah, I know," Kai said.

She leaned forward and rested her forehead against his, right there at Justiciar Hale’s dining table in front of everyone, and she began to cry and laugh at the same time.

[Kai]

"Not now," Kai whispered.

[Yes, now. Look]

A line of gold letters appeared in front of him, but they weren’t the hard, brassy gold of the debt. They were a soft, warm gold, the same color Syraphim’s words had always been.

[Faith gained. Mira Vallen: +4%. Faith: 100%. Status: True Believer.]

[True believers: 3/100.]

Kai read the message over and over again, until his eyes blurred so badly that he couldn’t see it anymore.

"What?" Mira asked, pulling back to look at him. "What’s wrong? What’s happening?"

"You," Kai said, and he couldn’t stop himself from smiling through his tears. "You’re the first one. The first actual person."

Mira stared at him for a second, and then her eyes went wide, and she covered her mouth with both of her hands.

Garrick let out a yell so loud that Hale’s cook dropped a pot in the kitchen, and then he grabbed Aldous by the shoulders and started shaking him, and Aldous began to laugh as if he had forgotten how. Celestine had been asleep in her chair by the fire, and she opened her eyes and asked what was going on. When Princess Seris told her, the old woman placed a thin hand on her chest and whispered something that sounded like a prayer, except that it was only Mira’s name. Princess Seris drew a small star in her notebook, and then she thought about it for a moment and drew two more.

[I have waited so long to see that number change because of someone who is alive]

"Me too," Kai whispered.

[Becoming a true believer is worth a great deal of divinity. Check your points]

Kai looked at his points, and his mouth dropped open.

[Current divinity points: 76.]

"That will come in handy," Kai said, laughing. "That will come in really handy."

It wasn’t until everyone had gone to bed and the house had gone quiet that Kai went back to the dining table by himself. He lit the candle again, pulled Draven’s eleven pages towards him, and read through them one more time, but this time, he looked for what wasn’t written there, the same way he used to read a mark’s papers back on Earth.

On the very last page, underneath the signatures, there was a single line that he had missed the first time. It was written in handwriting so small and ink so faded that he could barely make it out.

Witnessed on this night, in the cellar of the Gilded Exchange, by Castor Draven, clerk.

Kai looked at the date written beside it, and then he sat back in his chair very slowly, because it was dated forty years ago.

[Kai. Draven was there from the beginning]

"I know," Kai whispered. "He’s been there since the very start."

[337 days. Ninety-seven true believers to go]