Useless. Incorrect. Decayed beyond use. Valueless. Beginner stuff. Ink rubbed off.

The barrel of second-hand spell scrolls was just another trick to keep him busy, the boy thought. It was his father's policy: Keep Kovacs doing pointless chores so he doesn't try to kill himself again.

Worthless old cantrips with a distinct farming theme. How to drive botfly away from sheep. Wouldn't work even if you tried it. How to poison a rat with about eighteen unnecessary ingredients - and a gaping moth-eaten hole in the middle. How to summon an animal. This scroll, though dusty and faded, was more complete than its brothers. It looked to have been written by a still older hand. The parchment was soft and thick, surviving the decay of the others. There at the end was the twist that showed the spell could be cast once and only once, then would be destroyed for all time. Clearly no one had wanted to use this up. Kovacs couldn't immediately understand what it did. There was a bonding element staring at him in the middle of the parchment - it unpleasantly reminded him of his father.

No one gave a damn what happened to him. His mother was dead. He'd thought he could make a human friend, but that would never work for a monster like him. He wasn't really his father's son, only a tool. His father cut him and waited to see what happened and cut again.

Only Tirzah - maybe Tirzah, his father's half-ogre bodyguard, tall and broad, orange-skinned and black-eyed. She wasn't cruel to him. She kept him busy with harsh training, but at least she was trying to teach him something. He longed for just a portion of Tirzah's strength, her easy, shattering punches and her occasional tusked grin.

He wanted to disappear from the world. But it would have to be in a way that his body wouldn't betray him. If he tried again and failed, his father would make things worse for him. His power to heal what was done to him was a curse, not a gift.

This was a spell to summon an animal. No, it wasn't a spell to summon a fresh barnyard animal for the pot. This was a spell to summon a familiar, an animal companion that reflected the wizard's nature. Their souls were bonded for life. They felt each other's triumphs and pains. Neither could be harmed without harming their companion.

Kovacs had adopted a stray cat once. His father drowned it in the water barrel.

A familiar, though, was different. His father wouldn't be able to kill a familiar without harming Kovacs more than he intended.

A familiar would be his.

Kovacs felt his heart beat in his ribcage like thunder. He didn't give himself time to hesitate. He felt the spell fizz on the tip of his tongue, like the taste of charged brass. His father couldn't take this from him.

It might be a horse or a dog, he thought. He spent a lot of time on chores in the stable lately. He'd never tell his father that he got along with the horses; he didn't let himself get attached because they were treated like tools, bought and sold again nearly every stop. He'd like a dog, a big one to walk by his side. Or a giant deadly bird like a hawk with claws and beak. It would rip open anyone who wanted to harm him.

He uttered the syllables of the spell firmly enough, though his hands shook. The parchment blackened below his fingers. It dissolved to black dust even as he tried to keep hold of it, tried to fix the last of the spell in his mind.

He swayed, dizzy on his feet. He fell, cracking his head against the table. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember what he'd just done. He got to his knees, cursing his headache.

Then he doubled over, pain like he'd never felt before shooting from his stomach. He needed something. Needed it now. Needed it with a more desperate need than anything he'd felt before.

He stumbled into the market tent as if he'd been pulled there. He'd not realised this place was here, so close to their lodgings. Birds in a hundred different plumages chattered from the rooftop, marmots whistled, ostriches paced, a leopard howled. An exotic animals stall.

He must have looked drunk or drugged. Shirt untucked, dried blood on his face, staring about himself with disbelieving eyes. The pain in his chest guided him past the fierce leopard without a glance, away from the prize wolfhounds and purebred parrots. He stood, panting, over a small cage filled with smaller creatures, each twisting in a tiny partition.

He slid his hand in and picked one up. It was a small fluffy creature with black eyes and light orange fur.

I must've messed up the spell, he thought.

But he could feel her. This was his. This tiny incongruous mess of hair and vulnerability. She was his.

"Sir?" the proprietor said icily, a moment away from throwing the boy out on his ear.

He thrust his purse out. Paid the man far too much.

"It's called a hamster. They're native to Tethyr and Calimshan," the man said. "Know what they eat? Well, I have a food deal for you today."

Kovacs got out the basic questions - eating, drinking, cleaning, caging - and all the while felt his mind expand. He could feel his familiar's soft warmth inside and outside himself. She reached out to him in turn, not caring at all what kind of monster he was. To her, he wasn't a bastard son of the god of murder. He was only a human she'd decided to adopt, rooting something of him inside herself, as she had become a part of him.

"They don't live long, I'm afraid," the man finished with. "Maybe you'll be back for another one or three." Kovacs was already headed out the tent-flap.

That's fitting, then, he thought. My kind doesn't live long either.

She was beautiful, in a way, he thought, looking more closely at the bright orange fur and black apple-seed eyes. Delicate, darker stripes patterned the underside of her fur. Orange and black. And big teeth. It's perfect. I'll ask her what I want from her.

"Your name is Tirzah the Second," he told the hamster. She didn't object to - or really understand - the name. "Come on. Let's find your original incarnation."

—

It had been an eventful time with Tirzah. He and his familiar stumbled into a silver dragon's lair. His father had defeated the dragon - thereby, Kovacs assumed, putting him in as good a mood as any mortal mage might be - and ordered a rapid departure.

Do not stay in the territory of a dragon angry with you. Excellent advice for any situation. Kovacs leant against the side of Tirzah's caravan. He'd run to fetch the bone-setter to do his work inside there. He drew out the hamster and held her cupped in his hands. She nestled against him.

"I don't know anything about having a familiar," he explained. "And you don't know anything about being a familiar. You don't even understand - no, you understand the sense, just not the words I'm saying. That's all right." He'd stood alone and abandoned on the edge of a black glass cliff for so long. It was now as if a window to sunlight had been opened inside his head. It was only a tiny window high on the wall, made of ridiculously delicate and weak crystal, but - she was something. Someone. The first Tirzah was, perhaps, the same to him.

"This is Tirzah's caravan. You'll like Tirzah. She got between us and an angry dragon today," Kovacs said. "She broke her arm. And you're going to have to meet my father. I found the artefact he wanted, the Claw of Kazgaroth, so he'll be pleased. He'll hurt you, but not too much."

He left Tirzah the Second on his shoulder. She could hold on nicely, moving in anticipation of him.

"I retrieved the artefact you were looking for and destroyed the dragon's lair," Kovacs boasted. His father took up the claw and laid it aside as soon as he knew it to be genuine.

"That was useful to me. What is this?"

Then cold hands touched Tirzah, explored joints and prodded flesh. Kovacs felt it himself and willed her to stay calm.

"She's a kind of rodent," Kovacs said helpfully. "My familiar. She'll be no trouble. In fact, she's an asset. I'd never have found the Claw without her."

His father pinched Tirzah by the scruff of her neck, holding her between finger and thumb. "I see only a vulnerability."

"I have plenty of those," Kovacs reminded him. "Does it make a difference?"

"Let your foolishness be your own punishment." Kovacs felt the fingers release. He scooped Tirzah from the air, holding her close. His father dismissed him with a nod, a reprieve. He scuttled away to sit with Tirzah the first while the caravan moved out.

—

"That will be all." His father dropped the scalpel into a flask of boiling water. Steam and bloody dust rose from it.

He was forced to feel two things at once. His own pain and his father's pleasure, his father's power pressing on his skin like iron weights. The alien presence was thrust inside him and he couldn't hold it back. The markings on his body burnt like fire. They were how his father bound him in blood and bones, made him no more than a slave. And now the bond let up. Kovacs felt some sort of control shift back into his limbs, releasing him to move if he could. His father paid him no attention as he cleaned up.

He knew he could choose to stay here, in too much agony and exhaustion to move. He could stay with his father.

Or he could get up, despite everything. He slowly drew on his clothes and boots. The pain was still in him like white-hot shards of glass. Tirzah was away on a mission. No one he could trust was here.

He stumbled into his tent. The hamster was writhing in her cage. She could feel what he felt - he knew now that he'd forced her into this hell. He dropped down beside her. Tirzah the Second tried to nuzzle his fingertips, even though she felt worse than he did. He was used to it and she wasn't.

Kovacs reached inside his mind, though he'd have preferred to pass out then and there. There had to be a door somewhere. He wrenched at it. Let there be a barrier. He and his familiar could share some things, but it didn't have to be this. His father chose when to open and when to close the bond he'd forced on Kovacs. Let him learn how to do this for her. He forced himself to stay present, stay in pain.

He felt it hurt worse. He'd locked himself away with his suffering. Tirzah was free. He'd spared her, even if he couldn't spare anyone else. She relaxed at last.

He thought the hamster might leave him and take her rest. Instead, she crept toward him. He heard her voice, chirping and whickering almost like human speech. For moments the pattern seemed to make a real word or phrase, then it changed again. It took some of the pain away to have his mind guess and turn on what sounded like a word. It soothed him.

A boy and his hamster, familiar and human, fell asleep in a lonely tent.