Page 35 of Bound and Tide

Xander started at the voice that had been quiet for days, pausing only briefly to tug on his vial before shaking the dig away.

Keys were easy to slip off of the cradled guard, no arcane lock for Bendcrest’s prison as it had other means. The barred door opened without even a creak.

That was too easy, the fools.

Who are you to call someone else a fool?

When they stepped further inside, the smell knocked Xander out of his own head and the imposing voice away once again. Costa shuddered and wiped at his face as Xander called up an errant shadow to block his nose. Before the boy could take another step, Xander grabbed his elbow so he wouldn’t go careening into the pit of prisoners.

Standing still as their eyes adjusted to the darkness and the moonlight streaming in through the high windows, they listened. A chain jangled against another and water dripped steadily.

“I can feel the arcane blocks,” Costa whispered. “How am I supposed to—”

Xander held up another trinket inches from Costa’s nose.

“This feels holy,” he said as he took it.

“Disgusting, isn’t it?” Xander ensured he had the second of its kind on him still. “But I learned that wretched spell anyway, and it’s a good thing since it’s coming in handy. Just keep that idol on you, and you should be able to overcome the block.” Really, he’d employed the spell he’d learned and reversed from the Lux Codex on a handful of trinkets so he could overcome the charms on Red’s shop, but he never ended up bringing them there. It felt wrong, he supposed, to deceive her, and after seeing the el’erium, he didn’t want to.

Costa ran a finger over the carvings on the wooden trinket, and in the moonlight it seemed he was admiring them despite that they were the messy work of someone less skilled than he. Then he wrapped his hand around it tightly and closed his eyes.

Xander watched as the boy took a deep, grounding breath. He never did that himself with arcana, but there was a shift in the humidity around them. Then, a squawk, sudden and loud, and Costa gasped, eyes popping open.

Xander held out his hand to keep the boy from adding to the noise as the prison fell quiet. A jackdaw was perched on the narrow sill of one of the high windows, its pointed face turned down to them, beak open. The creature was not a threat, but Xander knew time was not on their side.

Chapter 17

BLOOD, WATER, THICKNESS, ALL THAT

“Which one?” Xander asked, stepping to the edge of the pit.

Costa kept close, craning his neck. He pointed out a prisoner who leaned with his back up against the pit’s wall, head down, arms crossed. Their target was thin and tall, skin pale in the dark.

Xander assessed the steep ramp they used to transport prisoners downward and presumably up again, though he wasn’t sure how often the latter happened.

Costa moved a bit more confidently then, peering over and then pointing, his voice still painstakingly low. “Can we let her out too?”

“Her? There’s a woman in here, and you know her?” Xander eyed the huddled mass, and indeed his keen eye had noticed her soft jaw and heavy lashes peeking out from under a hood. “What in the Abyss did she do to end up here?”

“Prostitution’s only legal on certain streets,” said Costa, strained. “But you don’t even have to be in the wrong place, you just have to say no to the wrong city guard, and…well.”

Xander’s guts turned over. “Shit, yes, fine, but you’re going to have to work twice as fast!” He tried to keep his voice low, but he garnered the attention of one of the prisoners who wasn’t very quiet himself.

“The fuck’s going on up there?”

Xander swiped a hand through the air, and cut off a bit of shadow so that it slapped over the prisoner’s mouth.

That’s more like it.

“Get to severing those chains.” He gave Costa a hard nudge, shaking away the voice.

The boy’s eyes widened, the whites bright in the darkness. “I…I’ve never done it so far away.”

“Well, then, closer we shall go.” Xander grabbed him by the back of his cloak and marched him to the crude stone ramp.

Costa tripped over himself and probably would have fought back if he’d had a single fighting bone in his body, but Xander could smell weakness from one thousand paces, and the kid was all rotten jelly. Their arrival roused other prisoners, but Xander remained focused, shaking Costa by the collar to urge him to get on with it.

With a trembling hand, the boy moved his fingers through the air, and again the humidity changed. Ice caught the light as the tiniest snowfall formed just at the tip of Costa’s finger and then darted outward in a dagger-sharp slice, cutting into the chains of the prisoner they intended to free. There was a ping and a snap, and though the chain did not break, it certainly cracked.

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