Al-Sāmiyah's ring pair

Two plain iron rings, one large and one the size of a man’s, worked into the wall above the forge at Wraithblade Keep. They looked like the bands holding the timber together, and nobody had ever found them. Nothing marks them out except that this one set does not follow the pattern the rest of the ironwork keeps, and that it is loose enough to lift off by hand.

Al-Sāmiyah knew where they were. She had been going about the keep like someone re-learning a house they had not visited in some years, and then she fetched Aldo with her beak, brought him to the forge room, and pecked at one spot above the fire until he went and looked at it. He took down two bands. She lifted a leg for the big one, and it did not merely fit her: it seated into a worn groove at the base of her talon. She had worn it before. He put the small one on himself.

Neither ring gives anything up to a look. Mikhail turned Aldo’s over and found it plain to the point of dull, with no ornament on it at all, and could not tell whether it was magical.

It woke a day later. Aldo felt slightly off through the morning, and at the close of the full twenty-four hours two things arrived at the back of his mind. One was a pull, a gentle gravity wanting a portion of his essence, the same kind of pull the table in that keep had on him, which he had fed once already and needed several days to feel whole after. The other was a tether: it slackened as he walked toward her and drew tight as he walked away, with no boundary to it that he could find.

He gave it what it wanted. He went deathly pale for as long as it took, and then his mind filled with her, her heartbeat, that she was hungry and a little agitated, the proud motherly thing she carries, and her distance and her direction. Fed, the ring puts status on her at will, so long as the two of them are on the same plane.

She looked down at her own ringed talon afterward, and then up at him, as if to say the tether was not one way. Whether hers reads him back has never been established.