It happened so fast, Tes didn’t feel the pain until it welled, thin lines of blood where the bands of steel cut into her skin. Panic rolled through her, her free hand already reaching out, intending to undo the threads inside the steel.
“I wouldn’t,” said the woman, who clearly assumed that Tes intended to pry herself free the usual way. “There is a lot of metal in this shop.”
Tes’s free hand stopped, hovered, withdrew. It was true—she could get herself loose, and expose her power in the process, but in a test of speed, she would still lose.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“We’ll get to that,” said the woman, leaning an elbow on the counter. “But first…”
Suddenly she had a knife in one hand and a lock of Tes’s hair in the other. With a flick of her wrist, the curls came free, dropping like a dark ribbon into the woman’s palm. As Tes watched, the knife vanished, and the woman tied the lock of hair into a knot, and slid it in her pocket. Panic wormed through her; not at the loss of the curls—she had a mountain of them—but at how they could be used. Just as names had value, so did anything that came from a person’s body. That was meant to belong only to them.
The woman rapped her fingers on the counter, drawing Tes’s attention back to the metal pinning her hand.
“Now,” said the woman, “before I begin, you should know, for every lie you tell, you’ll lose a finger.” She looked around. “I imagine those are important, in this line of work.”
Tes fought to steady her heart. She had never been a good liar, which was why she’d always opted for omission. Better to say nothing and avoid the traps, the tells. But she had a feeling silence wouldn’t buy her much.
“Where is Haskin?” asked the woman.
“There is no Haskin,” she said. “It’s just me.”
“Could have told you that,” said the man, hefting a sword from a shelf. He held it up to check his teeth. The woman let out a low sigh, halfway to a hiss, but kept her attention on Tes.
“What’s a girl your age doing with a shop all her own?”
Tes swallowed. “I’m good at what I do.”
“So am I,” said the woman, and Tes sucked in a breath as the metal pinning her hand tightened a fraction, cutting into her skin. “Our friend brought in something to be fixed. Where is it?”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” said Tes. “After all, this is a repair shop.”
The man chuckled, the sound like a blade on a whetstone. The woman didn’t smile. She nudged the ticket forward. Tes made a show of staring at the number.
“I remember him,” she said after a moment. “He was sick.”
“Not anymore,” said the man, in a way that made it clear he hadn’t gotten better.
The woman clenched her teeth. She didn’t like this man, thought Tes. That was good. That was something.
The woman’s cold eyes swiveled back to her. “What’s your name?”
A name was often a valuable thing, but only if you were alive to use it. “Tes.”
“Well, Tes. Our friend made a mistake. He should have brought that piece to us, not you. We’re here to take it off your hands.” As she said that last word, she tapped the metal pinning Tes’s fingers to the table. “Did he tell you what it was?”
“No,” said Tes, glad it was the truth. “He practically shoved it at me, never even said what it was meant to do. Do you know how hard it is to fix a spelled object without knowing its purpose?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Did you? Fix it?”
“No,” she said, the word coming out too fast. The metal tightened suddenly, white-hot pain as the steel sliced into the base of her thumb. “I mean, not yet,” she gasped out. “I’m still working on it.”
“But it can be fixed?”
Tes nodded, frantic, and after a moment, the metal loosened. Blood dotted the counter between her fingers.
“Where is it now?” asked the woman, gaze drifting over the shelves, and Tes gritted her teeth to hide her surprise. Something in the bland way she scanned the shop made Tes suspect she’d never seen the doormaker before, at least, not when it was whole. If they didn’t know what they were looking for—
Tes twisted, gesturing with her free hand to the wall of shelves behind her. The stash, as Nero called it.
“Third shelf,” she lied, the words coming out too fast as she wracked her brain for the contents of each basket, something that was roughly the right shape. “Second bin from the left.”