Chapter 53. Devoted, Chosen, and Priced Accordingly

Chapter 53: 53. Devoted, Chosen, and Priced Accordingly

The woman opened her eyes.

They weren’t glowing. They were an ordinary warm brown, and they looked up at Sylvara with a gentle, polite warmth that was somehow worse than anything I’d seen in the canyon.

"Oh," she said. "Hello~! Thank you for looking after us~!"

"Is Master Maldric well?"

Nobody breathed.

"Master... Maldric?" Sylvara repeated softly.

"Yes." The woman smiled.

It was a sweet, easy smile, with nothing wrong in it at all. "He promised he would come back for us."

"He is so... very kind!" She bowed like a dog. "Please tell him that we have been good."

I felt something cold slide down my spine. And the way she said it like that... I can tell that her brain malfunctioned or something.

"Hjalla?" Bryn whispered.

She had come up behind us, and her face had gone the color of old paper. "Hjalla, it is Bryn! Do you not know me?"

"Of course I know you, dear Bryn." Hjalla looked up at her with warm, affectionate eyes. "You were always such a clever girl~!"

"Do not worry... Master Maldric will take care of everything!"

Bryn put her hand over her mouth. "N-no...!"

"She... she was the most stubborn woman in our clan," she said, in a voice that was barely there. "She argued with the Warmother herself..."

"She never bowed to anyone in her life!"

"And now she is..." She couldn’t finish.

Hjalla didn’t seem to notice. She kept smiling, patiently, as if we were guests she was happy to entertain.

Elsbeth stood very still a few feet away, with her fists clenched at her sides. She hadn’t made a sound, but I could see her jaw working and a vein standing out in her temple.

Velora, standing beside her, had gone pale for the first time since I’d met her, and her hand was resting on the hilt of her katana as if she didn’t know what else to do with it.

Nobody said a word.

There was nothing to say about this... fucked-up situation.

God... I hate brainwashed women who were forced to obey their brainwasher.

...

It took Sylvara, Bryn, and Bonette about an hour to piece together what the gold crystals were.

They didn’t sit around a table and give a lecture. They talked in low voices, in fragments, handing the pieces back and forth like people sorting through the ashes of a house.

"It’s a... blue one... it shatters your will by force," Sylvara said. "It is cruel, but it is honest..."

"The victim is aware, on some level, that something is wrong..."

"That is why some of them can reach back."

"But gold," Bonette said, "it’s worse because it takes your will and replaces it with happiness."

"They do not feel caged... They do not feel hurt... and they do not feel anything but a deep, warm contentment, and a love for whoever holds the stone."

"That is why they do not fight," Bryn said. "And why your hand did not reach them, Leon..."

"Nobody inside is trying to escape..."

I looked at Hjalla, who had gone back to humming a little tune to herself. She looked perfectly peaceful, like a woman waiting for a friend to come home.

I’d have given anything for her to scream.

Bryn explained what she knew, from the whispers of other captives and from the things Maldric had said when he thought nobody was listening.

The Chain called them Oathglass. The people who wore them were sold at auction as "Devoted," a term that fetched double the usual price, because buyers liked servants who were never angry, never tired, and always grateful.

"And the stronger ones," Bryn said, "the ones who can still fight, they call them the Chosen."

"They are elite soldiers who battle with joy for whoever holds their stone..."

"They do not need to be forced... just because they want to."

"How does it... even work?" I asked.

"There are layers." Sylvara drew a rough diagram in the dirt with a stick. "At the top, there is something they call the Throne Glass, held by the leader of the Chain."

"Below it are the root crystals, held by lieutenants like Maldric..."

"Each root controls a number of smaller crystals, the ones in the bodies of the captives..."

"Break a root, and everything beneath it is affected."

"Throne Glass," I repeated. "That didn’t sound good at all..."

"We do not know what it is... We only know that it exists."

Bonette had been very quiet. She sat with her knees drawn up, rolling a small gold fragment between her fingers, and when she spoke, her voice was thin and cold.

"The Lunhare never made gold moonglass," she said. "And we didn’t think about that either."

"Moonglass is blue, or silver, or clear... It does not come in gold."

"Someone has mixed it with something else."

"With what?" I asked.

"I... do not know."

Bryn hesitated.

"There is a rumor," she said slowly. "I heard it from a woman in the cells, before the Hollowing..."

"She said that the gold crystals cannot be set unless the victim says yes."

"Yes to what...?" Velora asked.

"To anything." Bryn’s voice shook. "They ask a question."

"Do you want your sister to live?"

"Do you want your child to eat tonight?"

"Do you want the pain to stop? And whatever they have to do to get you to say it, trick you, threaten you, starve you, and they’ll do it."

"And the moment the word leaves your mouth, the glass takes root."

A heavy silence fell. A cold wind pulled at the edges of the tents.

"One word..." Elsbeth said quietly. "That is all it takes."

I thought about the Lust System, and the rule that everything had to be freely chosen, and the horrible, twisted mirror image of it that I was looking at.

A world where consent had been turned into a weapon. Where the thing that should have protected you was the thing that destroyed you.

"They... twisted it," I said. "They took the one thing that’s supposed to be sacred and used it as a trap."

"Yes," Sylvara said.

She was looking at me with an odd, sharp expression, as if I’d said something that mattered more than I knew.

"This is wickedness," Velora said, so softly that I almost didn’t hear her.

She wasn’t looking at any of us. She was staring at Hjalla, and her face was very white.

"I have seen servants in human houses who were made this way...! Broken until they smiled!"

"No crystal at all...! Only habit, and fear, and years." Her hand tightened on her sword. "I did not know it could be done with glass...!!!"

She didn’t say anything more.

But for a moment, I saw a flash of something in her golden eyes, something old and buried and raw, and then it closed over like water.

The staff lay where Maldric had fallen, half buried in the snow beside the boulder where we’d tied him.

I’d barely noticed it.

Someone had kicked it aside after the fight, a long, slender thing of dark wood topped with a ball of pale blue crystal, and it had been lying there ever since, glinting in the thin light.

But now, as I walked past it on my way back to the tents, I realized that something was different...

It was humming.

It wasn’t loud. It was a low, faint vibration, like the purr of a very large cat, and when I crouched beside it I could see a tiny pulse of warm, golden light deep inside the blue glass.

It was hidden in the core, buried in the heart of the crystal... so deep that I wouldn’t have seen it unless I’d known where to look.

"Sylvara!" I called. "I think you should look at this."

She came over just to took one look, and went very still.

"That is... the root," she whispered. "The gold is hidden inside the blue."

"That is what binds the Oathglass!"

Before anyone could say anything else, there was a soft rustle of cloth behind us.

Hjalla was on her feet.

She moved slowly, almost dreamily, with her hands loose at her sides and that same gentle smile on her face.

She walked across the snow to the staff, bent down, and picked it up in both hands with great reverence, as if it were something holy.

Then she turned and, to my horror, walked straight toward me.

She stopped in front of me, knelt in the snow, and held out the staff in both hands.

"Master," she said, warmly. "You hold his voice now!"