My brother had two days left, and the woman who could give them back let me lie to her for a full minute before she told me the price was me.

I didn't know that yet. Walking in, I still thought I was the most dangerous thing in the room.

"Your Radiance." I led with the smile, the one that opens doors. "I'll be brief. I can see you're a busy woman."

She wasn't a woman, exactly. She sat above a floor lit from somewhere under the stone, and her shadow ran up the wall behind her three times her height. I clocked it, filed it under things not to think about, and kept moving. You always keep moving.

"I represent a consortium," I said. "Interests on both sides of the border. A proposal that favors the crown more than it favors me — which is the only kind worth a queen's evening."

The floor went cold under my left boot.

Just a patch of it, the exact shape of where I stood, the light pinched out of the stone there like a snuffed candle. I have stood on a lot of floors that turned on me. The trick is you keep talking.

I kept talking.

"My principals will forgive the debt entire," I said. "In exchange for nothing but a standing arrangement with the court."

The cold spread another foot.

There were no principals. There was a forged token in my coat stamped with my brother's mark, and four months of knowing that the job that broke him was a job I'd talked him into. Every clean sentence I laid down put the light out under it. By the time I reached mutual benefit I was standing on a shrinking island of gold in a widening dark, and she hadn't blinked once.

"There is no consortium," she said.

She didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to. The room was listening to her, not to me.

"Of course there is. I have papers."

"You have a forged token and a brother." The dark stopped, a hand's width of gold left under each boot. "Edrin. Nineteen. You talked him into a job, it went bad, the debt landed on him, and you came up my mountain to gamble it loose with a story." She tilted her head. "That's the one true thing in you. And you've spent the whole night burying it."

My mouth kept going while the rest of me went still. That has saved my life more times than luck has. It had stopped working the second I crossed her door — I just hadn't noticed. She'd been reading me like a page the whole time.

"Then you know the rest." I let the smile go. It had stopped earning. "I'll pay it. Name the price."

"The price is you."

She came down off the dais slow, and the gold returned to the stone under her feet as she walked, lighting her way to me like the room was glad to have her closer. She stopped near enough that I had to tip my head back to hold her eyes.

"The debt comes off the boy and onto you. You serve until it's paid. There's a door — any night you want it. The cost of the door is the debt going home to him." She let that sit. "And there's a word. Sael-doreth. Say it and I stop, whatever I'm doing. Not because I choose to. Because I won't be able to do otherwise. Say it back."

"Sael-doreth." It cracked down the middle.

She heard the crack. I watched her hear it.

"Swear."

I swore.

Heat closed around my throat. A band drew itself up out of the skin — no clasp, nowhere it went on, just there now, tightening until it found where it wanted to sit. It didn't choke me. It sat the way a hand sits on the back of a dog's neck. Easy. Certain. Owned.

"That's the vow," she said. "It doesn't come off."

"Cute." My voice came rough under it. I reached for the joke anyway, fast, because the joke is the one thing no room has ever taken off me. "Does it come in other colors, or is searing wire the only—"

"Kneel."

My knees hit the stone before the joke cleared my teeth.

I didn't decide it. The word went past my mouth, past the part of me that runs the show, and folded me down. Off to the side the grifter in my head was still standing, still talking, drawing up escapes he'd never get to use.

And under him, low and warm and shameful, was relief.

Nothing left to angle. No next line to find. The deciding had been lifted out of my hands like a weight I'd carried so long I'd stopped feeling it — and some animal floor of me went quiet for the first time in years.

"Good," she said.

The word went down through the collar, into my chest, and stayed.

I knelt on her floor with my brother's debt sewn into my throat, one hour into knowing her, and the only thought I could hold all the way through was that I wanted her to say it again.