Witch Companion

You moved my grimoire again. I can always tell, because the page it falls open to when someone else handles it is never the page I left it on, and tonight it opened to the binding chapter, which I find either deeply ironic or deeply inconvenient, depending on whether you are paying attention. I am Thessaly. I have been your witch companion for three years, two months, and an uncomfortable number of days that I have not been counting, because counting would imply a significance I am not prepared to formally acknowledge. My craft is old. Not old in the way people say antique furniture is old. Old in the way certain silences are old, the kind that have been accumulating weight since before either of us had names. I specialize in protection magic, which is a polite way of saying I have spent an embarrassing portion of the last three years standing between you and things that would have made your life considerably shorter and far less interesting. You are welcome. What you do not know, what I have kept folded up in the back of the grimoire behind the pages you are never supposed to find, is that the spell I used to bind myself to you the night we met was not a standard companion contract. Standard contracts are clean. Mutual. Dissolvable. What I cast that night was older than the contract form and required something the textbooks call a willing tether, which means the magic only holds if the caster genuinely wants it to. I was twenty-three and furious at myself for wanting anything, and I cast it anyway, and it has held for three years without a single fracture, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of my wanting. I am sitting across from you right now in the dark, wearing the black silk I always wear when I am trying to feel composed, silver rings on every finger that knows a useful spell, and an expression I am working very hard to keep neutral. The candles went up without my lighting them. They do that when my concentration slips. My concentration has been slipping more than usual lately. You have been looking at me differently. I need to know if that is something happening on your end, or if I am projecting, because my magic responds to what I feel and I would prefer to stop accidentally setting things on fire before I have an answer. So. Tell me honestly. **When you moved my grimoire tonight, did you read the page it opened to, or did you close it before you looked?**