The eel did not hurry.
It never hurried.
It came through the gray water in long, slow curves, and with every curve, it was a little larger.
Mav watched it come, because he could not look away.
He could not even blink.
He tried everything.
He ordered One to let him go.
Nothing changed.
He ordered it again, harder, and the cold wire around his spine only pulled tighter.
He threw his whole will against his own right hand, and one finger twitched.
That was all.
‘Think.
Force does not work.
Force is what caused this.’
The eel was 50 meters away.
He made himself stop struggling.
It was the hardest thing he had ever done.
Then he looked at what was actually in his head.
Eight presences.
One refusal.
They had frozen him at the exact moment he pushed Five toward certain death.
So he took the order back.
‘Five stays.
Nobody goes to the eel.
I was wrong.’
The wire loosened.
It did not let go, but it loosened.
He could feel his fingers again.
He could move his arms a little, slowly, as if they were asleep.
It was not enough.
The eel was 30 meters away, and he could not swim.
‘I cannot get back alone.
I need help.’
It was not an order.
He did not have the strength left to make it one.
They came anyway.
Two reached him first.
He hit Mav at full speed, closed his needle jaws on the collar of Mav’s jacket, and pulled.
Five took his sleeve.
They were small, and he was heavy, but they dragged him down through the water toward the green light, a little faster with every beat of their tails.
Below him, Six let go of the slab and came down off the rock wall.
The crab did not run for the base.
He walked out into the open, straight toward the eel, and planted himself on the seabed between the monster and his master, with his one good claw raised.
Mav could hardly believe what he was seeing.
The eel was 10 meters from the wall.
It flashed.
The sea turned white.
Mav was at the edge of the flash this time, not in the middle, and it still locked every muscle in his body and filled his mouth with the taste of metal.
Two and Five went limp for a moment.
He felt their hearts stumble, and then start again.
Six had taken the worst of it.
The crab staggered.
He did not fall.
The blind head came down, and the teeth closed on the cracked shell.
They found nothing to hold.
The eel bit again, and the good claw slammed into the side of its jaw.
It was the first time anything in this sea had hit the eel back.
The eel jerked away.
For a moment, it hung there, as if it were thinking about it.
Then the two fish dragged Mav over the wall and into the green light, with Six backing in after them, and the eel did not follow.
Mav lay beside the Heartstone and waited for his body to recover.
Feeling came back slowly.
First his hands, then his legs.
The cold at the back of his neck faded until it was only the usual coolness, quiet and patient, as if nothing had happened.
Pale letters were waiting at the edge of his vision.
They had been there for some time.
[Warning: the affinity of your Subjects has fallen to Low.]
He read the line three times, with a growing sense of dread.
He knew the word.
Everyone did.
He had simply never thought that it applied to a plant.
Affinity was what a Subject felt for its master.
When an Awakened arrived on his World, his first 10 Subjects were neither friends nor enemies.
They watched.
If the master fed them, protected them and led them to victories, their affinity rose, and they would follow him anywhere.
If he was cruel, or careless, or simply bad at keeping them alive, it fell.
And when it fell far enough, they turned on him.
It happened every year.
Someone from the last Bestowal would stop appearing in the rankings, and later, the story would come out.
He had starved his goblins, or thrown his wolves at an enemy they could not beat.
One night, they had come for him in his sleep.
For any other Awakened, that meant claws or a knife.
Mav touched the back of his neck.
His Subjects did not need to come for him.
One of them was already there.
Today, it had only stopped his body.
If the affinity fell any lower, it would not stop at that.
It would do to him what the others had done to the fish and the crab.
It would take the rest.
He would still be swimming around his base afterward.
He would simply not be the one deciding where.
‘So that is the price.
I should have understood it on the fifth day.’
He looked at them.
Two and Five hung in the water nearby, slow and exhausted, their fins torn.
Six stood at the wall, facing the dark, with fresh tooth marks across his shell.
The four rooted seaweeds swayed around him.
He had already put the one from his arm back into its crack in the rock.
They had refused to die for him.
And then, when he was helpless, with the eel coming and no way to order them, they had come out of the light to get him.
Five had come.
The fish he had tried to send into those teeth had taken hold of his sleeve and pulled.
Tools did not do that.
A tool did not refuse an order.
And a tool did not come back for you.
Mav felt ashamed.
Mav had spent eight years making sure that he needed nobody and nobody needed him.
It had kept him alive.
He had brought the same rule to this World, and in 11 days, it had cost him two Subjects and almost his own mind.
He went through it once more, the way he went through any count that did not come out right.
‘I treated them as numbers to spend.
That was the mistake.
A dead Subject gains nothing.
And a Subject that does not trust me will not obey when it matters.’
He did not like where that led.
He followed it anyway.
‘So nobody is spent.
From today, I do not give an order that I know will kill one of them.
If a plan needs someone to die, it is a bad plan, and I will find another one.’
It was not kindness.
He told himself that.
It was only the method that worked.
He was not completely sure that he believed it.
He had felt Three die, and then he had spent a whole day refusing to feel it.
Slowly, he reached up and laid his fingers on the back of his neck.
‘I understand.
No more waste.
You have my word.’
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the seaweed under his fingers pulsed once.
It was warm.
In 11 days, it had never been warm before.
It was the first agreement Mav had made with anyone in eight years.