Chapter 22: A Knight’s Debt
Chapter 22: A Knight’s Debt
I had called her to get me over a wall. One charge, spent on that.
The plan lasted another four seconds, which was how long it took me to actually look at her.
She was leaking from the hip. There was a puncture through the mail at her side that hadn’t closed. Her free hand shook, and she’d been pressing it against her own body without noticing. There was more of her blood on her than on the blade.
She looks three minutes from dying, and she is still trying to give orders.
"Sit down," I said.
"I do not—"
"You’re bleeding out. If you go back like this, you may not last long enough to help those four hundred people." I was already at the door. "Stay in this room. Don’t open it, don’t make noise. I’m getting supplies."
"Boy—"
"Adrian Vale," I said. "That’s my name."
A pause.
"Aria."
[Summon Identified: Aria.]
The night medical station is a canvas annex behind the intake hall, staffed after midnight by one bored orderly and a lamp.
I didn’t have to lie about much. My shoulder blade had been open for a day and a half and had gone hot at the edges, the dressing over my ribs was three days old, and I’d been sweating through work shifts on top of both. I walked in looking like a man who had finally admitted he needed help — which was true, only about somebody else.
"You should’ve come sooner," the orderly said, not unkindly. "Band."
I held out my wrist. He scanned 1447 and handed over gauze, disinfectant, tape, a sealed pack of clotting powder, and a paper twist of painkillers, and told me to come back if the shoulder started to smell.
[Charge applied: 18 credits.]
Balance: 604.
Three days of work, and I’ve just undone a quarter of it for a woman I’ve known ten minutes.
Fine.
I got the door shut behind me, knelt down, and worked.
She let me, which surprised me more than anything else that night. A woman who had arrived mid-swing through a dimensional bridge sat still on the concrete while a stranger with shaking hands cut the straps on her armour, because she’d run some fast internal calculation and decided this was the better use of the time.
The hip was the bad one. I packed it with clotting powder and wrapped it, and the bleeding slowed and then mostly stopped. The puncture at her side I cleaned and closed as well as I could. The jaw was shallow. There was a burn across her forearm I could only cover. My hands weren’t steady and I wasn’t good at it and I told her so twice, and both times she said, "Continue." Once, when the disinfectant went in, she made a short sound through her teeth and then apologised for it, which was so absurd I nearly laughed.
She watched me the whole time. Not warily — studying. And at some point I realised she was waiting for the price. For me to say now here’s what you’ll do for me. It never came, because I’d already given up on it, and I watched her work that out and then not know what to do with it.
[Manifestation Remaining: 19:14]
"Ten minutes," I said, taping the last of it down. "You’ve got about nineteen left."
Aria flexed the leg carefully, rolled the shoulder, then took a breath that went all the way down—probably for the first time since the battle began.
"I could not have stopped this bleeding at the gate," she said. Not gratitude—assessment, spoken aloud, the way she seemed to speak everything. "There was no one behind the line. I would have gone until I fell. Now I return with this"—she touched the wrapping—"and with breath in me, and ten minutes of rest that will cost my people no time at all." Something moved behind her face. "You have not asked me for anything."
"No."
[Relationship parameters updated.]
Desire: 68 → 70
Trust: 1 → 11
Resonance: 1% → 2%
Trust had climbed by ten points because I helped her and asked for nothing. Eleven was still low, but low was reasonable when I had pulled her away from four hundred civilians at the worst moment of her life.
"You summoned me."
"That doesn’t make you mine."
She looked at me a moment. Then she stood, testing the hip, one hand on the boiler — and upright she stood the way I imagine she’d stood on that wall. Spine straight, chin level, sword resting point-down against the concrete like a walking stick that had killed people.
"Then I will see this place," she said. "Show me where you have summoned me to."
"No."
The word was out before I’d finished deciding on it.
Aria’s eyebrows went up perhaps two millimetres.
"No," I said again, and put my back against the door, which was objectively one of the least effective things I have ever done. "You can’t go out there. Nobody can see you. Not one person."
"Move."
"Please listen first." My voice cracked in the middle and I hated it. "Everyone in this place knows me as a D-grade summoner with a junk talent and a debt. That is exactly what I need them to think. If anyone sees a B-grade knight walk out of a laundry pump room because I called her — if they find out I can pull living people across dimensions—" My throat closed. "They won’t ever let me leave. They’ll put me somewhere with a lock on it and take the trick apart to see how it works."
"I am not your servant," Aria said. Perfectly calm. "Nor your prisoner, nor your hostage. Your ability brought me here. It does not give you command over me. And you are—" her eyes went over me once, briefly, honestly "—in no condition to prevent me from walking through that door, or through you."
"I know."
"Then move."
I didn’t.
She looked at me for a long moment, and something in her face shifted, because she was a soldier who had spent years reading men in bad situations.
"You chose a hiding place with one door," she said slowly. "You have flinched at every sound from outside since I arrived. You would not let me follow you for medicine." A pause. "You are frightened. Not of me."
"No."
Aria set the sword point-down and folded her hands over the pommel.
"Explain."