Lock and Ezra

Lock and Ezra’s relationship is shaped by an uneasy overlap between obligation and affection: both serve the Coterie as tithes, but their treatment of one another and their commitment to the people around them exceed the terms of that service. Their bond emerges not through a single declaration of friendship, but through physical care, candid disagreement, and a shared readiness to stand with their chosen family when danger closes in.

Shared work and practical care

During a fight, Lock grows trees from pieces of wood, splitting the ground and sending trunks upward before widening them across the space. Ezra, meanwhile, drops his bow, tears off his suit, shifts onto four paws, retrieves the small bow in his mouth, and races through the debris around the trees. The scene places their different abilities side by side: Lock alters the battlefield on a striking scale, while Ezra moves through its dangers with speed and agility. It does not describe a plan they have agreed on, but it shows both of them acting within the same dangerous struggle rather than standing apart from it.

Their care for one another becomes more intimate when Ezra returns to the room and winces under Lock’s hand. Lock notices, rolls up Ezra’s shirt, and discovers that his back is lumpy and misshapen. Glass has become embedded in Ezra’s body as it healed around the shards. The injury is not treated as an abstract cost of the fighting: Lock immediately looks for a way to deal with it, while Ava recognizes his protective anger as the response of a “punk-rock mama bear.” That description makes Lock’s concern feel familiar to those around him, even though the scene’s focus is his attentiveness to Ezra.

The house has almost nothing suitable for treatment: Lock finds a razor blade in a toolbox, no bandages, and only an expired bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He and Ava take Ezra into the kitchen, where the linoleum will be easier to clean. Lock removes Ezra’s shirt, tucks a towel into his pants to catch the blood, and positions the blade beneath the largest lump. After warning Ezra, he cuts into the skin and presses beside the glass until it slides free; Ava cleans the wound with peroxide. Ezra hisses and then shouts, while Lock continues the careful work. Eight other distorted shapes remain on Ezra’s back, so the moment records both the immediate relief of one shard’s removal and the unresolved prospect of more pain.

Tithes and the cost of protection

Lock’s understanding of their bond is tied to the bargain that brought them into Coterie service. During an argument with Ava, he insists that she has leverage and is not as disposable as some supernaturals. He then points to himself and Ezra as examples of people whose service protects others. Lock says that his time in the Coterie allows an entire forest of Dryads to be left alone, while Ezra’s service means his younger sisters can attend school, live normally, and be protected. In Lock’s account, the Coterie is not simply a source of coercion: it also provides protection and training to people who may have few alternatives.

Ezra adds an important qualification to Lock’s description of what the Coterie has given him. He credits his lock-picking and general sneaking skills to his fox nature rather than to the organization. His aside is light in tone, but it preserves a distinction between abilities he already possesses and skills or security acquired through service. Their shared status as tithes therefore does not make their experiences identical, nor does it erase their own sources of strength.

Lock’s defense of the Coterie is not an uncomplicated endorsement. He acknowledges that it is not wholly good, while arguing that it is not wholly evil either. When Ava reacts angrily, he answers through the concrete examples of people who rely on the organization, including a troll whose wards allow him to work. The exchange exposes a real conflict between their positions: Lock is asking Ava to recognize the lives protected by the institution, while Ava is focused on her own coercion and on the fact that Cade has been taken. Their disagreement does not mean Lock is indifferent to Cade. He explicitly makes clear that Cade is family to both of them, and that the situation worries them both.

Family under pressure

Ezra’s brief attempt to interrupt the argument by saying he does not like it when Mom and Dad fight, followed by a joke about two Christmases, gives the trio’s closeness a domestic register. The joke does not resolve Lock and Ava’s dispute, but it shows Ezra responding to their conflict as someone emotionally inside the family circle, not as a detached observer. His place in that circle is reinforced by Lock’s insistence that Cade, too, is family. Lock spends more time with Cade than with his own mother, he explains, and so regards the danger to Cade as personal.

Lock also resists Ava’s effort to treat the coming struggle as hers alone. He recalls shared movie nights and describes his involvement as a matter of belonging, not permission: “We’re a team. We’re family.” He extends that claim beyond himself and Ezra. The Were-hare drove has reason to defend Duncan because Venus has put a hit out on him, and because losing him could cost the drove its home. Ezra, Lock argues, might claim he is helping for amusement if anyone else asked, but the people close to him know that is only a performance. Lock’s account links their individual choices to a larger network of loyalty and mutual risk.

That network does not make the danger disappear. It changes who bears it. Lock tells Ava that if the situation were reversed, she would do the same for them; therefore, her attempt to call the conflict hers alone cannot keep them safe or uninvolved. His argument turns care into action and obligation into choice: they may have entered Coterie service under a system of tithes, but their decision to protect one another is represented as a commitment they make for themselves.

The meaning of their bond

Lock and Ezra’s relationship is presented through complementary forms of care. Lock’s care is visible in the precise, uncomfortable work of treating Ezra’s wounds and in the protection he believes their service provides for Ezra’s sisters. Ezra’s place in the relationship is less often expressed through a comparable speech; instead, he moves through danger, contributes his skills, and remains present when the group’s family tensions surface. The evidence supports a relationship of mutual reliance, though it gives Lock the clearest explicit account of what that reliance means.

Their bond also complicates a simple opposition between freedom and protection. Lock does not deny that the Coterie has serious faults, and Ezra’s separate account of his fox-derived skills keeps their identities from being reduced to what the organization trained them to do. At the same time, Lock knows that his service helps shield the Dryads and that Ezra’s helps secure a safer life for his sisters. Against that institutional bargain, their care for one another and for Cade reads as chosen family: not an escape from danger, but a reason to face it together.