![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaTitle: climb the wall to make the sun rise in time
Character: Taran
Location: Dein Efyd
Date: Day Three
When we were ten, me and Neirin got brought in to the One Eyed priests because a street vendor caught me with one of her tomatoes in my hand, and Neirin refused to let me get caught alone. It was just a little puny tomato, too, and I was really hungry. And maybe the One Eyed Deity really was in the priest that day, because even though the street vendor was Enwythau, the priest still scolded her for bringing us to her over such a trivial matter, because it meant that she had to deal justice. I didn’t even have to spend the night in a holding cell then: she’d sent for the artisan of the temple, made a note of the day and time and what I’d done (she refused to get Neirin involved, praise) and told us to go home.
Anyway, that was just after Mama and Father didn’t pay their taxes for the third year in a row, and they didn’t have nothing to give besides people. It was us or them, and they chose themselves. They told me and Neirin decided it was smarter to disappear after that, instead of being stuck with their taxes next year, so we went further in towards the city and ended up in the same housing compound where we’d spent the last two and a half years. When we first got there, Neirin was like that; he’d stick his neck out to go down together, rather than save his own skin. It turned out that it was lucky he’d not gotten marked that day: he got his own charges soon enough. I thought it might have been that that changed him, or started him down that road.
Point being, I knew him better than anyone else in the world, and after we got thrown underground for a few nights for a fight on the steps of the Spider’s temple, I saw how he dealt with it. He got more cautious, more afraid of going to market, more afraid for us both. So one night, when we were at home lying on our beds, I got up and sat next to him. Then of course I couldn’t figure out what to say, or how to say it. Eventually, he poked me in the side. ‘Go away or talk, but don’t just sit there like a lump of clay.’
‘I’m too bony to be clay,’ I’d said. ‘I was gonna say, you don’t got to stick your neck out for me if it means you getting sent to the market. You can just let me go.’
‘That’s stupid. Of course I’ll come and bust your sorry ass out of there,’ he said, kicking me for good measure.
I felt a lump in my throat. ‘I’m serious. I know you don’t want to, so I’m telling you: when I get caught next, if that’s it for me, don’t think I’ll be pining away the rest of my days waiting for you.’
There was a long silence. Neirin reached up and punched my shoulder lightly. ‘Yeah, okay. Thanks. You’ll do the same, right?’
‘Nah, there’s no way you’re getting arrested where I don’t.’ I shoved him closer to the wall and lay down on the cot next to him, feeling sick to my stomach.
‘No, you’ve got to swear. You never know,’ he said.
‘Fine. I swear on the Shapeshifter.’
Neirin laughed and shoved me. ‘You can’t swear to keep a promise on a chaos deity; that’s cheating. I’m not stupid. Swear on something else.’
‘Only if you do, too,’ I argued.
I could see his teeth flash in a smile in the dark. ‘Sure. I swear on the dead soul of my mother who gave me life. Now you.’
I shut my eyes and swore on the same.
Neirin rolled back over, trying to shove me off his bed. ‘Go away now. It’s too hot,’ he said, but I didn’t let him move me, and after a moment, he’d given up, poked me in the ribs a couple of times, and fallen asleep.
&
‘What’re you thinking about?’ asked Siarlin, pulling me back to the present: sitting in the keeping place in what looked to be the early times just before dawn, with no one but a bunch of strangers for company. Someone walking past the window outside had dropped a basket of rocks or something a little while ago, waking up half the room much too early.
I realized I’d been smiling, and stopped. ‘My brother,’ I said.
‘Right. The unblemished soul,’ said Siarlin, rolling her eyes.
My face grew hot. ‘No, he’s not,’ I protested. ‘He’s frustrating a lot of the time, it’s just that I’m never going to see him again, okay? I don’t want to remember the really bad things. I’ll stop talking about it.’
‘That’s decent of you, Taran,’ she said. ‘Go back to sleep; there’s still a ways to go yet before they bring down breakfast.’
I bristled at that: she may have been older than me, but it was only by a year or so, and that didn’t give her the right to tell me what to do. (It was the fact that she’d killed a man and I hadn’t that gave her that right.)
I didn’t end up getting a chance to do as I was told regardless of whether or not I should have, because just as I was about to try for a comfortable position on the floor, the door at the top of the stairs opened. This time, there were four men in the doorway, and they had rope between them, not a bucket. On my left, Siaras scrambled into a sitting position and gawked at them like they were ghouls instead of people.
‘Do you think it’s time?’ Siaras whispered to me. The words came out loud in the dead quiet that fell.
I dragged myself into alertness, and squinted at the Enwythau men. I’d gotten accustomed years ago to Neirin feeding me the things he noticed, so much that I’d gotten out of the habit of noticing things myself. We were never apart long enough for it to be a problem. Now I stared blankly into the gloomy stairwell and tried to remember the sorts of things that Neirin would have told me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t see the hair wrap, that’d tell us for sure if they’re guards or marketers. And … well, but they’ve got rope …’
‘Of course that’s what’s going on,’ Siarlin said.
The four men with ropes came down the stairs. The dull grey light from the window reflected off of one man’s hip as he took a step, and I noticed the stone blade hanging on a loop that went over one shoulder and down to his waist. They all had it. I scowled and wished for the crummy wooden blade that I’d owned at home. It wasn’t too good for anything besides show, but sometimes, show was all that was needed. And even if it wouldn’t have worked on these people, I’d still have felt better having something to defend myself with.
They came down and took us in groups. The big ones went first, all grouped together: hands tied in pairs, then took a hold of the middle and led them up the stairs. I watched them do all that without really thinking about it — it was happening to them, not me. IF Neirin was here, he’d tell me to focus, pay attention, and think about what was going on, but even he wasn’t to good at telling me what to do when it was easier to pat Siarlin on the shoulder and tell her that she was going to be okay. She was watching Big Owen get prodded up the stairs, and her face had turned funny and blank. When I touched her shoulder, she jumped.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s fine for you — you’re ordinary-looking, you’ll probably get bought by someone who needs field hands or a servant. I’m probably going to end up as someone’s whore.’ I thought it was strange that she’d spent three weeks here without caring, right up to the very end.
‘That ain’t true,’ I insisted. ‘You could be a servant too, or a field hand. There’s plenty of things — what about the merchants, they’re always looking for pack carriers for the season.’
The door at the top of the stairs opened again, and the Enwythau men came to claim another eight of us. Even in the gloom, I couldn’t miss the disparaging look that Siarlin sent me. ‘Look at me. Do I look like a carrier?’
‘Being a whore isn’t terrible,’ said Siaras. Siarlin and I turned. ‘It depends on who you end up with, bit it’s not a death sentence.’
‘You were a gaethsion? Before this?’ asked Siarlin, showing more interesting the newest addition to the keeping place than she had all last night and yesterday.
‘Indentured.’ Siaras smiled. ‘But it was like being a gaethsion, without the ink to prove it.’
Siarlin’s jaw worked. I frowned at Siaras and tried to concentrate on figuring out why someone would be an indentured worach, instead of looking at the next eight men and women that they brought up the stairs.
They came for us next. I sort of floated out of my body for that bit: I saw myself get grabbed by the wrists while one man thrust loops of rope over my hands and tightened the knots. The ends of the rope led to Siarlin on my left. Her face was once again a mask. I turned to my right slowly, in time to watch the ropes close over the wrists that Siaras thrust out willingly. What was the point in that? I thought. It wouldn’t make them like you any more than if you struggled; they’d slap you around just the same.
I snapped back into myself when the Enwythau man tugged on the ropes that held me and Siarlin. My heart started to pound with fear, and my stomach twisted itself into knots as I took my first step forwards.
‘Come on, up you get,’ said the man who held our rope, wrapped around thick-muscled hands. I hissed and swore and shuffled after him. The stone steps felt cold under my feet, and I thought I could feel every crack and imperfection that they had. The fibers of the rope scratched and poked into my skin as I followed Siarlin up the steps and out the door. Past the door was the long corridor I came through two days ago, with the crooked stones that probably should have been fixed ages ago. No one spoke as we walked; no one who mattered, anyway. Two of the Enwythau men talked to each other in the awkward, upper-class dialect of their type. Apparently the daughter of one had some sort of disease that made her blind. Siaras leaned forwards to talk to him about her, mimicking their accents. I counted the number of out-of-place stones in the wall by my shoulders as we passed them, and stayed well out of it.
The hallway ended in another stone wall with a mural painted into it, torches worked into it so that it looked like there were people with flaming hair. The men took us on a sharp left just before we hit the wall, and [then we went into a tunnel under the ground. It went on for a long time, and it was dark except for a torch held by one of the guards. We were brought into the smaller marketplace, where the only other people were merchants and vendors, setting up their areas. This was the private market, the one that only Enwythau were allowed to enter as free buyers: it was located in the part of the city that their type had claimed for themselves, and it dealt exclusively in the things that everyone else was forbidden from owning. I tried to take advantage of being there, for the first and probably last time in my life, but by that time I was too busy worrying about the possibility of throwing up to do much looking around.]
The gaethsion section of the market was marked off by colored cobblestones, and dominated by three large, thick wooden pillars. Someone had carved them into detailed patterns that would probably have had Rhys crying with joy at their beauty, or something. I’d heard that they were magic, carved into spells to encourage people to be generous with their purchases. Other Neirin knew someone who’d gotten the talent for magic, and they said it was a load of shit, but I could see pretty clearly some of the groundwork designs that held the shape of any magical artwork, so maybe Other Neirin was lying. He did that sometimes; then we’d laugh at the things we could get each other to believe.
And now I could see what the pillars were for, magic or no: the sixteen people who had already been taken up were grouped around two of the three poles. The ropes that had brought them up were wrapped around the pillars, and locked in place by painted spars of wood. Siaras, Siarlin and I were pulled along too, and everyone in the group was tied to the third, empty pole. I watched closely as they tied the rope with me and Siarlin, but then I saw the type of paint on the locking piece of wood, and understood why no one had tried to escape from something that looked so flimsy. It didn’t mean that I didn’t try as soon as they were done, of course, but no one made any move to stop me. The guard with the blind daughter just stood by and watched me with his arms folded. I scowled and put my head down, and kept working at it until one of the men tied at our stake as well called out, ‘Give it a rest, son.’
After that, there was just a whole lot of waiting. The markets set up early, but they didn’t open up to everyone until after morning prayers, and those weren’t said until the entire sun had cleared the horizon. That was plenty of time to remember that I hadn’t had a proper meal since the day before I got caught, hadn’t had any breakfast, and I was hungry. I looked around for something to distract myself, but the closest thing was a Cysgoth merchant setting out loads of gold and jade jewelry. There was lots of both to be found all over, but the Cysgoth people were known for having the best metalworkers. I fingered the chunk of plain stone in my own ear as he set out jade ear plugs onto a black cloth with most of the road dust brushed off of it. He caught me watching after a few minutes and helf up his hand: index and middle fingers out with the thumb stuck between them, a fairly universal ‘fuck off’ gesture. The rope scraped at my wrists as I returned it with both of my hands.
‘Fool,’ said the woman sitting on my left. I ignored her; the merchant ignored me; nothing else happened. The lump in my stomach that hurt worse than hunger returned. I fought the urge to just curl up unto a ball and press my forehead against my knees until the sick feeling went away, until the clinking of the merchants’ wares and the smells of sweat and dirty human faded, and I woke up on the raised cot next to Neirin. That wasn’t an option; it wasn’t going to happen; I still hoped, and I needed to stop thinking like that.
I needed to. It didn’t mean I was able to.
‘Hey, are you all right?’ I felt a hand on my shoulder, and looked up into Siaras’ dark eyes. ‘You look like you’re going to be sick, and to be honest, you’re too close for that to be comfortable for either of us.’
The explanation startled a laugh out of me — not a full one, but more than I’d have expected. I shook my head to hide it. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Better look more like it, then.’ Siaras patted me on the top of my head and scooted away, back to Siarlin. I nodded at the long braid that swung down Siaras’ back in retreat. I needed to relax my face, relax my body. Body language was everything, could be the difference between walking away unharmed and getting a broken nose again; it couldn’t matter that I was just a prisoner on the market and I’d never see my brother again. The rest of the world wouldn’t stop waiting for an opportunity to crack me just because I felt sorry for myself. After that comment from Siaras, I straightened my back, squared my shoulders, and sat upright, cross-legged, with my hands folded together in my lap. Not particularly defensible, but if I sat in a crouch for too long, then my legs would fall asleep.
Morning prayers were meant to be said with family, in the center of the housing compound and facing the rising sun. They were to the Unseen Deity, the Creator of the Sixth World, and doing it in a plaza full of strangers, led by Enwythau who thought it was fine to pray by themselves … it made me slump for a moment before I saw Siaras and forced myself to sit up straight again. I’d do it, I told myself. I’d do it knowing that Neirin would be saying the same things at the other end of the city. I thought of that, and I pictured our family — all thieves and fools and family just as surely as Ma and Father were for all that none of us were born to it — standing in a circle in our compound, hands raised, when the Enwythau slavers hauled us to our feet and we lifted our own close-tied hands to the sun. The Enwythau spoke their slurred version of the words, while Siarlin and the other tiroethyr gaethsion and I spoke in our own dialect. Reciting the words with my face tilted upwards calmed me down a little; underneath the current of the spoken words, I said my own prayer in my head. ‘Unseen One, the one who watches always, the Sun and the Light, please may I see my brother again. You saw fit to take my parents the same way, and I never complained; well, now I’m asking. Please. Just once. And if not, then don’t send me to be somebody’s whore.’ The priests said it was bad luck to ask the Life Giver for more than one thing, in case they thought we were being greedy, and took away something to teach us a lesson. But right now, I didn’t have all that much they could take away, so I didn’t see the harm. When the spoken part was done, one of the men came around with a knife smaller than my thumb, and we held out our hands. He held my hand steady with one of his, while with the other he opened a tiny cut on the heel of my palm. I watched the blood well up there, waited until there was enough that when I flipped my hand over, it dripped into the bowl that the man held out before he moved on to the next person. ‘Blood for blood,’ I said.
I felt a little better after that. I looked out at the sun until my eyes burned, then sat down. Then the market started, and everything went to hell in two seconds flat. It may have been an exaggeration, two second; people took about five minutes to really swamp the place. They took a particular interest in the gaethsion area because there were few of us, so maybe it felt more crowded than it was. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. It was early morning, crowded and noisy, and I was surrounded by strangers gawking at me. Siarlin had it worse, though, with the prodding. After I watched the fourth person reach out to stroke her hair or face or body, I shuffled over and planted myself in front of her, scowling at anyone who looked in her direction.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked. She sounded amused.
‘Protecting you,’ I said, tucking in my chin to glare at a slimy-looking Enwythau man. He reached out and tugged on my hair instead. I spit at him.
‘You don’t need to do that.’ Siarlin shrugged. ‘It won’t help in the end.’
‘Might help now,’ I didn’t move, and she didn’t say anything else about it.
Another part of the market was the hawking, of course. Most days, it was easy to hear the main market from three streets away at least; I’d never been anywhere near this one, and it was a lot smaller, but it nearly matched the main one in loudness. Of course, my perspective on that was probably skewed, given that there was an Enwythau man standing six feet away from me, hollering at the top of his lungs to anyone who walked by.
‘Young man, twelve years old! Look at that, look at that? And all of that without a proper meal in his life; think of the potential!
Young woman, sixteen years old@ Built like a cat: not unsightly, but look at those arms! Anyone needing a slightly laborer, two hundred and fifty thrydden! Two hundred fifty thrydden for this lovely lady right here!
‘Seasoned worked, twenty-eight years old …’
I covered my ears with my hands; when that didn’t work, I crossed my arms and stared at the merchants on the far side of the market, willing my gaze to burn holes in the stones that walled us away from the rest of the city. The sun shifted overhead, and still I stared. Anything, so long as it wasn’t the lump in my throat or the bellowing in my ears.
Siarlin was one of the first to go. A man wearing layers of gold necklaces and bones through his nose wrapped the end of her rope around muscular fingers when one of the slavers cut it a foot from the center knot. I didn’t even notice until she got up from behind me, silently. I turned around in time to see her stand, blank-faced.
‘Siarlin!’ I said, scrambling.
‘I told you,’ she said. Her voice sounded funny, and then she was gone before I could say anything else, following a few paces along behind her new master. It was the height difference that killed me as I watched: him tall and thickly built, and her behind him, not even up to his shoulders, skinny and ragged. I watched her walk away until my eyesight blurred. It took a moment to realize that I was crying.
I blinked my vision clear, and shouted my frustration, letting the racket cover up the noise. How fucked up was that? There I was, crying over some girl I’d known for all of two days, and that was what broke me? Not losing my own goddamn family? I scrubbed my eyes with the back of my wrist and snapped when Siaras tried to touch my shoulder to offer — what? Comfort?
A pair of legs sticking out of a knee-length brown skirt appeared in front of me. I raised my eyes and up to the face of the ugliest man I’d ever laid eyes on. His forehead bulged out over eyes that were too far apart in his skull, and the tendons in his arms stood out like someone had wound wires underneath his skin, even when his arms were just folded across his chest. He stood with his feet planted and surveyed me and the other gaethsion as if we were dogs and he was picking out dinner. As soon as his eyes wandered away from me, I edged backwards until my back was pressed against the pillar.
One of the slavers oozed over to him, past the bellowing one. ‘May I assist you in any way, my good man?’ he asked.
The man’s head jutted forwards. ‘I’m looking for … one or two permanent travelling assistants,’ he said. His accent was funny, even for an Enwythau, and I couldn’t place it — which meant one thing: merchant, someone who travelled from far away enough that most people from his city-state didn’t make it this far. ‘No one too old or too violent, please.’
The slaver stuck his thumbs into his belt. ‘We deal only in petty criminals,’ he assured the man. ‘And you’re in luck; we still have many of our younger gaethsion.’ He waved a hand at those of us tied to my pillar, and my mouth went dry as the ugly man’s eyes flickered towards me.
‘I ain’t worth shit,’ I announced. ‘Practically useless.’
A muscle in his cheek twitched, and I wished for Neirin, who could let me know with one touch what it meant. ‘I see,’ he said.
I gazed up at him with what I hoped was a pleasant, dopey expression plastered all over my face, until he moved on to the next pillar. When he was gone, I let out an almighty sigh of relief, and slumped over until my forehead pressed against the ground.
‘He wouldn’t have been bad,’ said Siaras.
‘He’s a merchant,’ I mumbled against the dirt, and then had to sit up to repeat it when it turned out that Siaras couldn’t actually hear me that way. ‘Merchants are weird, and they worship the Three Winged Deity.’
‘Three Wings is the deity of protection …’ said Siaras, as though I was simple. ‘It makes sense?’
‘Yeah, but the statues always creep me out,’ I said, which wasn’t really a good argument. If I’d been able to figure out what bothered me about it, I’d have said, I don’t have any problem with Three Wings, but it’s about protection on the road, and I don’t want to travel all the time because no matter how stupid it is, I’d still rather stick around the area, where there’s a chance in hell that I’ll see my brother again. Or, The Three Winged Deity didn’t stop my parents from being taken away, or protect Ma from being sold to a whorehouse; so I don’t like It, because It sure as hell don’t like me. Though, you know, I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all, because Siaras seemed plenty nice enough and friendly, but we’d only just met yesterday, and I wasn’t about to trust someone who thought we were friends after one night. Especially not with anyone else around to check against, to see if I’d gotten Siaras figured out right.
‘All right. I’ll admit, they can be strange. There’s a temple dedicated to It in one city that has a monument twenty feet tall, nearly as wide with the wings,’ said Siaras.
‘Why were you in — where was that?’ I asked.
‘Well, you see,’ — but I didn’t get to hear the rest of the explanation. One of the slavers came back with the ugly man on his heels, and grabbed my rope. He sawed it off from the pillar and handed the end to the ugly man.
‘Ten and two hundred it is, then, Rhydian Seren,’ said the slaver, sounding displeased.
Rhydian passed him a handful of wide purple coins, the type I’d be lucky to ever get my hands on in a lifetime. There were an awful lot for just ten and two, though … ‘And two and fifty for the other one,’ he said.
The slaver nodded. He moved on and picked up Siaras’ rope, cut through that as well.
‘Wait, what?’ I blurted out. Siaras looked just as startled as me.
‘Come on, up you get,’ said the slaver.
Rhydian craned his neck to look over his shoulder at the entrance, foot tapping impatiently.
I met Siaras’ eyes. We both stood. My legs felt like I’d been running for miles, and shook when I locked my knees. I stared at nothing, afraid to look at Rhydian and focusing so that I wouldn’t collapse as the world spun — it had been a long time without enough food.
‘I thank you for your service,’ said Rhydian.
‘As I thank you for your custom,’ the slaver replied in kind. ‘Fare you well on your journeys.’
‘Fare you well, too,’ I said. It came out bitter and snide, and I flinched away from the retribution I expected, but the slaver didn’t even bother to respond. He was already moving on to talk to the next customer. Rhydian gave me and Siaras a tentative smile that I didn’t trust for a heartbeat. ‘Come along, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to the artisan first, and then I’ll take you to meet my family.’
‘A family business, is it?’ asked Siaras.
Rhydian made a noise that he could later claim was either confirmation or disagreement, depending on where his whims went. He pulled us both closer behind him and wrapped the ropes around his hand with a couple of turns, picking up the loose ends so that no one would try to grab them as we passed by. You heard stories about that happening; there would be people desperate enough to disguise themselves as Enwythau and then sneak into the market to steal back their lost family members. I stomped down on the part of me that secretly wanted Neirin to come rushing in to do the same. We had an agreement: if either of us got caught, the other was not to do something brainless. Getting thrown into the cells for future sacrifices wasn’t to anyone’s benefit, and Neirin was smarter than that.
The market wasn’t crowded enough that there was a chance of getting lost and separated, but there were enough people that I got bumped around a bit until Siaras grabbed me with a hand around my arm and hauled me closer to Rhydian. ‘Ain’t your fault you’re too short to be noticed, but it ain’t helping with me getting rattled, too,’ was the explanation. Rhydian gave Siaras a quiet, approving look, like the kid had just done something really fucking special instead of commonsense.
The artisan, a different one from the woman who’d done up my face a few days ago, sat inside a chalk circle with his materials spread out around him. No one stepped inside the circle no matter how crowded it got around the edges; when we got closer, I could see that the circle was actually a whole bunch of more complicated lines, woven together in different colors, and probably a set of signs to keep people at a distance. Selective-functioning signs, I thought. Fancy stuff. Neirin would be fascinated, if he ever got in here. Not that I wanted him to! That’d mean something bad happened to him. But if he did.
‘Ah! What services may I offer you today?’ the artisan asked Rhydian.
Tattoos didn’t hurt while they were being done. It was just paint that had been specially prepared (no one knew how except for the artisans who did it; it was said even before the Enwythau set down their restrictions, artisans had ties that bound them together strong than what people they belonged to) and painted on with particular sets of brushes in particular combinations of letters and symbols and extra lines that did stuff. The ones I had already were strictly informational: three lines going from my wrist to my elbow, with loops and dots coming off them and curling around each other. The lines that told about my being gaethsion, those would be painted across my collarbone. Given how much the one on my face stung when the paint settled in, I was in for a hell of a time later. For now, though, I had to concentrate on not squirming with ticklishness while the artisan stopped every few strikes to ask Rhydian how to spell his name.
Once me and Siaras were accounted for, the ink started to settle into my skin. It itched like anything, but the artisan slapped my hands away when I went to scratch.
‘It will only spread to your fingers, and then where will you be, gierthan?’ he asked. ‘No, stay still, and don’t touch it until tomorrow morning at the earliest.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rhydian. He gave a tug on my rope, stepping outside of the circle again. Me and Siaras followed him. I dug my nails into my palms and clenched my teeth to keep from touching my collar while we got dragged towards the exit like pet animals on leashes. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Siaras looking everywhere: not with a craning neck and lots of head-twisting, just a series of head-tilts and jumping eyes. It’d not be something I’d notice ordinarily, but when Neirin was worried he’d do the same, and so it was on my list of things to pick up on.
‘What do you see?’ I asked, in an undertone.
Siaras blinked at me a couple of times, face shifting in a way I’d be lost trying to pin down. ‘People. A whole lot of rich, Enwythau people with too much money to spend on things that aren’t worth what they cost.
‘Except for us,’ I said. ‘Us, all of a sudden, they get stingy, you notice that?’
Siaras gives me a small smile. ‘I had.’
Two tall, twisted-looking statues with wings and scales stood guard on either side of the exit to the marketplace. Their eyes followed me as I walked past them. Gwynn, one of Madoc’s men with his arm rotted off in a battle with the Cysgoth, he’d learned about art. He could probably tell me whose spirit the statues were supposed to represent. All I could tell was that they were Enwythau, by the clothing painted onto them, and they’d died in battle, by the wings. I spit on the feet of the nearest one as I passed, just in case.
Outside, Rhydian guided us into the middle of the road. Directly ahead was the monument that commemorated the birth of the current draethyr. Her mother’s huge beaked head loomed over a trio of people standing at the base of the monument. There were three of them: an old woman with grey hair, a younger woman maybe a little older than Siaras, and an Enwythau man taller than them both. The old woman waved to Rhydian, and he raised his hand back. I looked around to see if anyone I knew had been attracted by the movement. Me and Neirin tried to stay away from the Enwythau outsiders, and there wasn’t likely to be any of our type in this district, but Neirin was always telling me to be more careful, so I checked. Didn’t see anyone. No one gave Rhydian any notice at all, and if they didn’t pay attention to him, then their eyes passed straight through me and Siaras like we wasn’t even there.
‘Uncle!’ shouted the younger woman, when we were close enough to hear. Without so many people between us, I could identify her clothes as Enwythau, someone important, and her eyes as teithwyr. Except she’d called Rhydian ‘uncle’, and he was as Enwythau as they came, so maybe she was mixed. The old woman behind her wasn’t, though: she was olive-skinned teithwyr through and through.
Rhydian tugged on the ropes, pulling me and Siaras along more quickly until we were face to face with the strange group of people under the monument. ‘I found you,’ he said to the younger woman, smiling like they were sharing a private joke. ‘I told you I would.’
‘Myfanwy told me to be certain,’ she said, in Enwythau.
‘I can support her in that regard,’ said the older woman. Her accent was thick with the mushy sounds of the teithwyr’s language. ‘Bring them here so I can see. How much?’
‘Sixty and four hundred,’ said Rhydian.
The two women shared a knowing glance.
‘We’ll manage,’ said the old woman. ‘We will. The extra help should compensate, over time, for the losses.’
‘Grandmother, I’m sorry.’ The young woman had the sound of someone who had already apologized for whatever it was many times, and just wanted the discussion to be over with. ‘I’d stay if I could, you know that I would.’
‘And if you stayed, then there would be no reason for what happened, and we would all still be in danger. No. Go.’
‘If you don’t, you might restart a war between Cyfalaf and Amranai, and I don’t think that would benefit your family’s business, either.’ The other man spoke up for the first time. It was all I could do not to stare at the burns on his face, or at the number of military decorations he wore. They were everywhere: collars around his neck colored with bird feathers, carved disks in his ears with gold running through them, black and white triangles painted over his mouth in a permanent grin. He glanced at me; one eye was pale and bloodshot, the other nearly black.
‘Thanks, rheolwyr,’ said the young woman. She said it carelessly, which even I would know better than to do with a man like that. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of that. Now I have reason to go.’
‘What are you staring at, gaethsion?’ barked the warrior. I flinched, but he was glaring at Siaras, not at me. With good reason, too: Siaras was gawking at him and the younger woman as though they were the Old Gods returned from the void.
‘Andras Rheolwyr of Eldarath?’ asked Siaras breathlessly. I frowned.
The warrior ran his tongue across his lips. ‘That is what I am called.’
‘Then …’ Siaras bowed to the younger woman. ‘Are you Tanwen Draethyr of Cyfalaf?’
The younger woman turned around to the older woman for support; the old woman just lifted her chin. I guess that that meant something between the two of them, though, because she turned back to Siaras and shrugged.
‘Right now, no. Give me two weeks,’ she said.
‘The seren means yes,’ said the scar-faced warrior.
The look of slavish delight on Siaras’ face had to be seen to be believed. I turned away in disgust as Siaras rolled up a worn linen shirt to show off the lines of red writing that stretched from one shoulder blade to the other. ‘Seren, look. I believe in you. I speak on your behalf. See?’
Tanwen squinted at the red tattoos. She took care to mouth the words as she read, so that everyone would know that she could read it, and then smiled at Siaras. ‘I can see that,’ she says. ‘Thank you. I’ll — thank you. What do they call you?’
‘Siaras the Cysgoth.’ Quick fingers smoothed down the shirt again; I frowned at them. They gave off the impression of being clean, even if they weren’t any more so than mine, and soft, even though I could see calluses on the fingertips. There was something weird about that.
‘It’s good to meet you before I leave, Siaras the Cysgoth.’
Siaras bowed low to her, even though no one willingly bowed before the draethyr unless they were begging for their lives or hiding their treason. ‘Thank you.’
‘Who the hell is that?’ I asked Siaras in tiroetheod, so that the others wouldn’t understand.
‘I’ll explain when we’re alone,’ said Siaras, responding in the same language. I caught Rhydian’s faint scowl of disapproval, but ignored it.
[And then Tanwen and Andras said goodbye to Rhydian and Mabyn, and they left, and Rhydian took me and Siaras back along the hot stone pavement.]
chapter five
Character: Taran
Location: Dein Efyd
Date: Day Three
When we were ten, me and Neirin got brought in to the One Eyed priests because a street vendor caught me with one of her tomatoes in my hand, and Neirin refused to let me get caught alone. It was just a little puny tomato, too, and I was really hungry. And maybe the One Eyed Deity really was in the priest that day, because even though the street vendor was Enwythau, the priest still scolded her for bringing us to her over such a trivial matter, because it meant that she had to deal justice. I didn’t even have to spend the night in a holding cell then: she’d sent for the artisan of the temple, made a note of the day and time and what I’d done (she refused to get Neirin involved, praise) and told us to go home.
Anyway, that was just after Mama and Father didn’t pay their taxes for the third year in a row, and they didn’t have nothing to give besides people. It was us or them, and they chose themselves. They told me and Neirin decided it was smarter to disappear after that, instead of being stuck with their taxes next year, so we went further in towards the city and ended up in the same housing compound where we’d spent the last two and a half years. When we first got there, Neirin was like that; he’d stick his neck out to go down together, rather than save his own skin. It turned out that it was lucky he’d not gotten marked that day: he got his own charges soon enough. I thought it might have been that that changed him, or started him down that road.
Point being, I knew him better than anyone else in the world, and after we got thrown underground for a few nights for a fight on the steps of the Spider’s temple, I saw how he dealt with it. He got more cautious, more afraid of going to market, more afraid for us both. So one night, when we were at home lying on our beds, I got up and sat next to him. Then of course I couldn’t figure out what to say, or how to say it. Eventually, he poked me in the side. ‘Go away or talk, but don’t just sit there like a lump of clay.’
‘I’m too bony to be clay,’ I’d said. ‘I was gonna say, you don’t got to stick your neck out for me if it means you getting sent to the market. You can just let me go.’
‘That’s stupid. Of course I’ll come and bust your sorry ass out of there,’ he said, kicking me for good measure.
I felt a lump in my throat. ‘I’m serious. I know you don’t want to, so I’m telling you: when I get caught next, if that’s it for me, don’t think I’ll be pining away the rest of my days waiting for you.’
There was a long silence. Neirin reached up and punched my shoulder lightly. ‘Yeah, okay. Thanks. You’ll do the same, right?’
‘Nah, there’s no way you’re getting arrested where I don’t.’ I shoved him closer to the wall and lay down on the cot next to him, feeling sick to my stomach.
‘No, you’ve got to swear. You never know,’ he said.
‘Fine. I swear on the Shapeshifter.’
Neirin laughed and shoved me. ‘You can’t swear to keep a promise on a chaos deity; that’s cheating. I’m not stupid. Swear on something else.’
‘Only if you do, too,’ I argued.
I could see his teeth flash in a smile in the dark. ‘Sure. I swear on the dead soul of my mother who gave me life. Now you.’
I shut my eyes and swore on the same.
Neirin rolled back over, trying to shove me off his bed. ‘Go away now. It’s too hot,’ he said, but I didn’t let him move me, and after a moment, he’d given up, poked me in the ribs a couple of times, and fallen asleep.
&
‘What’re you thinking about?’ asked Siarlin, pulling me back to the present: sitting in the keeping place in what looked to be the early times just before dawn, with no one but a bunch of strangers for company. Someone walking past the window outside had dropped a basket of rocks or something a little while ago, waking up half the room much too early.
I realized I’d been smiling, and stopped. ‘My brother,’ I said.
‘Right. The unblemished soul,’ said Siarlin, rolling her eyes.
My face grew hot. ‘No, he’s not,’ I protested. ‘He’s frustrating a lot of the time, it’s just that I’m never going to see him again, okay? I don’t want to remember the really bad things. I’ll stop talking about it.’
‘That’s decent of you, Taran,’ she said. ‘Go back to sleep; there’s still a ways to go yet before they bring down breakfast.’
I bristled at that: she may have been older than me, but it was only by a year or so, and that didn’t give her the right to tell me what to do. (It was the fact that she’d killed a man and I hadn’t that gave her that right.)
I didn’t end up getting a chance to do as I was told regardless of whether or not I should have, because just as I was about to try for a comfortable position on the floor, the door at the top of the stairs opened. This time, there were four men in the doorway, and they had rope between them, not a bucket. On my left, Siaras scrambled into a sitting position and gawked at them like they were ghouls instead of people.
‘Do you think it’s time?’ Siaras whispered to me. The words came out loud in the dead quiet that fell.
I dragged myself into alertness, and squinted at the Enwythau men. I’d gotten accustomed years ago to Neirin feeding me the things he noticed, so much that I’d gotten out of the habit of noticing things myself. We were never apart long enough for it to be a problem. Now I stared blankly into the gloomy stairwell and tried to remember the sorts of things that Neirin would have told me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t see the hair wrap, that’d tell us for sure if they’re guards or marketers. And … well, but they’ve got rope …’
‘Of course that’s what’s going on,’ Siarlin said.
The four men with ropes came down the stairs. The dull grey light from the window reflected off of one man’s hip as he took a step, and I noticed the stone blade hanging on a loop that went over one shoulder and down to his waist. They all had it. I scowled and wished for the crummy wooden blade that I’d owned at home. It wasn’t too good for anything besides show, but sometimes, show was all that was needed. And even if it wouldn’t have worked on these people, I’d still have felt better having something to defend myself with.
They came down and took us in groups. The big ones went first, all grouped together: hands tied in pairs, then took a hold of the middle and led them up the stairs. I watched them do all that without really thinking about it — it was happening to them, not me. IF Neirin was here, he’d tell me to focus, pay attention, and think about what was going on, but even he wasn’t to good at telling me what to do when it was easier to pat Siarlin on the shoulder and tell her that she was going to be okay. She was watching Big Owen get prodded up the stairs, and her face had turned funny and blank. When I touched her shoulder, she jumped.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s fine for you — you’re ordinary-looking, you’ll probably get bought by someone who needs field hands or a servant. I’m probably going to end up as someone’s whore.’ I thought it was strange that she’d spent three weeks here without caring, right up to the very end.
‘That ain’t true,’ I insisted. ‘You could be a servant too, or a field hand. There’s plenty of things — what about the merchants, they’re always looking for pack carriers for the season.’
The door at the top of the stairs opened again, and the Enwythau men came to claim another eight of us. Even in the gloom, I couldn’t miss the disparaging look that Siarlin sent me. ‘Look at me. Do I look like a carrier?’
‘Being a whore isn’t terrible,’ said Siaras. Siarlin and I turned. ‘It depends on who you end up with, bit it’s not a death sentence.’
‘You were a gaethsion? Before this?’ asked Siarlin, showing more interesting the newest addition to the keeping place than she had all last night and yesterday.
‘Indentured.’ Siaras smiled. ‘But it was like being a gaethsion, without the ink to prove it.’
Siarlin’s jaw worked. I frowned at Siaras and tried to concentrate on figuring out why someone would be an indentured worach, instead of looking at the next eight men and women that they brought up the stairs.
They came for us next. I sort of floated out of my body for that bit: I saw myself get grabbed by the wrists while one man thrust loops of rope over my hands and tightened the knots. The ends of the rope led to Siarlin on my left. Her face was once again a mask. I turned to my right slowly, in time to watch the ropes close over the wrists that Siaras thrust out willingly. What was the point in that? I thought. It wouldn’t make them like you any more than if you struggled; they’d slap you around just the same.
I snapped back into myself when the Enwythau man tugged on the ropes that held me and Siarlin. My heart started to pound with fear, and my stomach twisted itself into knots as I took my first step forwards.
‘Come on, up you get,’ said the man who held our rope, wrapped around thick-muscled hands. I hissed and swore and shuffled after him. The stone steps felt cold under my feet, and I thought I could feel every crack and imperfection that they had. The fibers of the rope scratched and poked into my skin as I followed Siarlin up the steps and out the door. Past the door was the long corridor I came through two days ago, with the crooked stones that probably should have been fixed ages ago. No one spoke as we walked; no one who mattered, anyway. Two of the Enwythau men talked to each other in the awkward, upper-class dialect of their type. Apparently the daughter of one had some sort of disease that made her blind. Siaras leaned forwards to talk to him about her, mimicking their accents. I counted the number of out-of-place stones in the wall by my shoulders as we passed them, and stayed well out of it.
The hallway ended in another stone wall with a mural painted into it, torches worked into it so that it looked like there were people with flaming hair. The men took us on a sharp left just before we hit the wall, and [then we went into a tunnel under the ground. It went on for a long time, and it was dark except for a torch held by one of the guards. We were brought into the smaller marketplace, where the only other people were merchants and vendors, setting up their areas. This was the private market, the one that only Enwythau were allowed to enter as free buyers: it was located in the part of the city that their type had claimed for themselves, and it dealt exclusively in the things that everyone else was forbidden from owning. I tried to take advantage of being there, for the first and probably last time in my life, but by that time I was too busy worrying about the possibility of throwing up to do much looking around.]
The gaethsion section of the market was marked off by colored cobblestones, and dominated by three large, thick wooden pillars. Someone had carved them into detailed patterns that would probably have had Rhys crying with joy at their beauty, or something. I’d heard that they were magic, carved into spells to encourage people to be generous with their purchases. Other Neirin knew someone who’d gotten the talent for magic, and they said it was a load of shit, but I could see pretty clearly some of the groundwork designs that held the shape of any magical artwork, so maybe Other Neirin was lying. He did that sometimes; then we’d laugh at the things we could get each other to believe.
And now I could see what the pillars were for, magic or no: the sixteen people who had already been taken up were grouped around two of the three poles. The ropes that had brought them up were wrapped around the pillars, and locked in place by painted spars of wood. Siaras, Siarlin and I were pulled along too, and everyone in the group was tied to the third, empty pole. I watched closely as they tied the rope with me and Siarlin, but then I saw the type of paint on the locking piece of wood, and understood why no one had tried to escape from something that looked so flimsy. It didn’t mean that I didn’t try as soon as they were done, of course, but no one made any move to stop me. The guard with the blind daughter just stood by and watched me with his arms folded. I scowled and put my head down, and kept working at it until one of the men tied at our stake as well called out, ‘Give it a rest, son.’
After that, there was just a whole lot of waiting. The markets set up early, but they didn’t open up to everyone until after morning prayers, and those weren’t said until the entire sun had cleared the horizon. That was plenty of time to remember that I hadn’t had a proper meal since the day before I got caught, hadn’t had any breakfast, and I was hungry. I looked around for something to distract myself, but the closest thing was a Cysgoth merchant setting out loads of gold and jade jewelry. There was lots of both to be found all over, but the Cysgoth people were known for having the best metalworkers. I fingered the chunk of plain stone in my own ear as he set out jade ear plugs onto a black cloth with most of the road dust brushed off of it. He caught me watching after a few minutes and helf up his hand: index and middle fingers out with the thumb stuck between them, a fairly universal ‘fuck off’ gesture. The rope scraped at my wrists as I returned it with both of my hands.
‘Fool,’ said the woman sitting on my left. I ignored her; the merchant ignored me; nothing else happened. The lump in my stomach that hurt worse than hunger returned. I fought the urge to just curl up unto a ball and press my forehead against my knees until the sick feeling went away, until the clinking of the merchants’ wares and the smells of sweat and dirty human faded, and I woke up on the raised cot next to Neirin. That wasn’t an option; it wasn’t going to happen; I still hoped, and I needed to stop thinking like that.
I needed to. It didn’t mean I was able to.
‘Hey, are you all right?’ I felt a hand on my shoulder, and looked up into Siaras’ dark eyes. ‘You look like you’re going to be sick, and to be honest, you’re too close for that to be comfortable for either of us.’
The explanation startled a laugh out of me — not a full one, but more than I’d have expected. I shook my head to hide it. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Better look more like it, then.’ Siaras patted me on the top of my head and scooted away, back to Siarlin. I nodded at the long braid that swung down Siaras’ back in retreat. I needed to relax my face, relax my body. Body language was everything, could be the difference between walking away unharmed and getting a broken nose again; it couldn’t matter that I was just a prisoner on the market and I’d never see my brother again. The rest of the world wouldn’t stop waiting for an opportunity to crack me just because I felt sorry for myself. After that comment from Siaras, I straightened my back, squared my shoulders, and sat upright, cross-legged, with my hands folded together in my lap. Not particularly defensible, but if I sat in a crouch for too long, then my legs would fall asleep.
Morning prayers were meant to be said with family, in the center of the housing compound and facing the rising sun. They were to the Unseen Deity, the Creator of the Sixth World, and doing it in a plaza full of strangers, led by Enwythau who thought it was fine to pray by themselves … it made me slump for a moment before I saw Siaras and forced myself to sit up straight again. I’d do it, I told myself. I’d do it knowing that Neirin would be saying the same things at the other end of the city. I thought of that, and I pictured our family — all thieves and fools and family just as surely as Ma and Father were for all that none of us were born to it — standing in a circle in our compound, hands raised, when the Enwythau slavers hauled us to our feet and we lifted our own close-tied hands to the sun. The Enwythau spoke their slurred version of the words, while Siarlin and the other tiroethyr gaethsion and I spoke in our own dialect. Reciting the words with my face tilted upwards calmed me down a little; underneath the current of the spoken words, I said my own prayer in my head. ‘Unseen One, the one who watches always, the Sun and the Light, please may I see my brother again. You saw fit to take my parents the same way, and I never complained; well, now I’m asking. Please. Just once. And if not, then don’t send me to be somebody’s whore.’ The priests said it was bad luck to ask the Life Giver for more than one thing, in case they thought we were being greedy, and took away something to teach us a lesson. But right now, I didn’t have all that much they could take away, so I didn’t see the harm. When the spoken part was done, one of the men came around with a knife smaller than my thumb, and we held out our hands. He held my hand steady with one of his, while with the other he opened a tiny cut on the heel of my palm. I watched the blood well up there, waited until there was enough that when I flipped my hand over, it dripped into the bowl that the man held out before he moved on to the next person. ‘Blood for blood,’ I said.
I felt a little better after that. I looked out at the sun until my eyes burned, then sat down. Then the market started, and everything went to hell in two seconds flat. It may have been an exaggeration, two second; people took about five minutes to really swamp the place. They took a particular interest in the gaethsion area because there were few of us, so maybe it felt more crowded than it was. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. It was early morning, crowded and noisy, and I was surrounded by strangers gawking at me. Siarlin had it worse, though, with the prodding. After I watched the fourth person reach out to stroke her hair or face or body, I shuffled over and planted myself in front of her, scowling at anyone who looked in her direction.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked. She sounded amused.
‘Protecting you,’ I said, tucking in my chin to glare at a slimy-looking Enwythau man. He reached out and tugged on my hair instead. I spit at him.
‘You don’t need to do that.’ Siarlin shrugged. ‘It won’t help in the end.’
‘Might help now,’ I didn’t move, and she didn’t say anything else about it.
Another part of the market was the hawking, of course. Most days, it was easy to hear the main market from three streets away at least; I’d never been anywhere near this one, and it was a lot smaller, but it nearly matched the main one in loudness. Of course, my perspective on that was probably skewed, given that there was an Enwythau man standing six feet away from me, hollering at the top of his lungs to anyone who walked by.
‘Young man, twelve years old! Look at that, look at that? And all of that without a proper meal in his life; think of the potential!
Young woman, sixteen years old@ Built like a cat: not unsightly, but look at those arms! Anyone needing a slightly laborer, two hundred and fifty thrydden! Two hundred fifty thrydden for this lovely lady right here!
‘Seasoned worked, twenty-eight years old …’
I covered my ears with my hands; when that didn’t work, I crossed my arms and stared at the merchants on the far side of the market, willing my gaze to burn holes in the stones that walled us away from the rest of the city. The sun shifted overhead, and still I stared. Anything, so long as it wasn’t the lump in my throat or the bellowing in my ears.
Siarlin was one of the first to go. A man wearing layers of gold necklaces and bones through his nose wrapped the end of her rope around muscular fingers when one of the slavers cut it a foot from the center knot. I didn’t even notice until she got up from behind me, silently. I turned around in time to see her stand, blank-faced.
‘Siarlin!’ I said, scrambling.
‘I told you,’ she said. Her voice sounded funny, and then she was gone before I could say anything else, following a few paces along behind her new master. It was the height difference that killed me as I watched: him tall and thickly built, and her behind him, not even up to his shoulders, skinny and ragged. I watched her walk away until my eyesight blurred. It took a moment to realize that I was crying.
I blinked my vision clear, and shouted my frustration, letting the racket cover up the noise. How fucked up was that? There I was, crying over some girl I’d known for all of two days, and that was what broke me? Not losing my own goddamn family? I scrubbed my eyes with the back of my wrist and snapped when Siaras tried to touch my shoulder to offer — what? Comfort?
A pair of legs sticking out of a knee-length brown skirt appeared in front of me. I raised my eyes and up to the face of the ugliest man I’d ever laid eyes on. His forehead bulged out over eyes that were too far apart in his skull, and the tendons in his arms stood out like someone had wound wires underneath his skin, even when his arms were just folded across his chest. He stood with his feet planted and surveyed me and the other gaethsion as if we were dogs and he was picking out dinner. As soon as his eyes wandered away from me, I edged backwards until my back was pressed against the pillar.
One of the slavers oozed over to him, past the bellowing one. ‘May I assist you in any way, my good man?’ he asked.
The man’s head jutted forwards. ‘I’m looking for … one or two permanent travelling assistants,’ he said. His accent was funny, even for an Enwythau, and I couldn’t place it — which meant one thing: merchant, someone who travelled from far away enough that most people from his city-state didn’t make it this far. ‘No one too old or too violent, please.’
The slaver stuck his thumbs into his belt. ‘We deal only in petty criminals,’ he assured the man. ‘And you’re in luck; we still have many of our younger gaethsion.’ He waved a hand at those of us tied to my pillar, and my mouth went dry as the ugly man’s eyes flickered towards me.
‘I ain’t worth shit,’ I announced. ‘Practically useless.’
A muscle in his cheek twitched, and I wished for Neirin, who could let me know with one touch what it meant. ‘I see,’ he said.
I gazed up at him with what I hoped was a pleasant, dopey expression plastered all over my face, until he moved on to the next pillar. When he was gone, I let out an almighty sigh of relief, and slumped over until my forehead pressed against the ground.
‘He wouldn’t have been bad,’ said Siaras.
‘He’s a merchant,’ I mumbled against the dirt, and then had to sit up to repeat it when it turned out that Siaras couldn’t actually hear me that way. ‘Merchants are weird, and they worship the Three Winged Deity.’
‘Three Wings is the deity of protection …’ said Siaras, as though I was simple. ‘It makes sense?’
‘Yeah, but the statues always creep me out,’ I said, which wasn’t really a good argument. If I’d been able to figure out what bothered me about it, I’d have said, I don’t have any problem with Three Wings, but it’s about protection on the road, and I don’t want to travel all the time because no matter how stupid it is, I’d still rather stick around the area, where there’s a chance in hell that I’ll see my brother again. Or, The Three Winged Deity didn’t stop my parents from being taken away, or protect Ma from being sold to a whorehouse; so I don’t like It, because It sure as hell don’t like me. Though, you know, I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all, because Siaras seemed plenty nice enough and friendly, but we’d only just met yesterday, and I wasn’t about to trust someone who thought we were friends after one night. Especially not with anyone else around to check against, to see if I’d gotten Siaras figured out right.
‘All right. I’ll admit, they can be strange. There’s a temple dedicated to It in one city that has a monument twenty feet tall, nearly as wide with the wings,’ said Siaras.
‘Why were you in — where was that?’ I asked.
‘Well, you see,’ — but I didn’t get to hear the rest of the explanation. One of the slavers came back with the ugly man on his heels, and grabbed my rope. He sawed it off from the pillar and handed the end to the ugly man.
‘Ten and two hundred it is, then, Rhydian Seren,’ said the slaver, sounding displeased.
Rhydian passed him a handful of wide purple coins, the type I’d be lucky to ever get my hands on in a lifetime. There were an awful lot for just ten and two, though … ‘And two and fifty for the other one,’ he said.
The slaver nodded. He moved on and picked up Siaras’ rope, cut through that as well.
‘Wait, what?’ I blurted out. Siaras looked just as startled as me.
‘Come on, up you get,’ said the slaver.
Rhydian craned his neck to look over his shoulder at the entrance, foot tapping impatiently.
I met Siaras’ eyes. We both stood. My legs felt like I’d been running for miles, and shook when I locked my knees. I stared at nothing, afraid to look at Rhydian and focusing so that I wouldn’t collapse as the world spun — it had been a long time without enough food.
‘I thank you for your service,’ said Rhydian.
‘As I thank you for your custom,’ the slaver replied in kind. ‘Fare you well on your journeys.’
‘Fare you well, too,’ I said. It came out bitter and snide, and I flinched away from the retribution I expected, but the slaver didn’t even bother to respond. He was already moving on to talk to the next customer. Rhydian gave me and Siaras a tentative smile that I didn’t trust for a heartbeat. ‘Come along, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to the artisan first, and then I’ll take you to meet my family.’
‘A family business, is it?’ asked Siaras.
Rhydian made a noise that he could later claim was either confirmation or disagreement, depending on where his whims went. He pulled us both closer behind him and wrapped the ropes around his hand with a couple of turns, picking up the loose ends so that no one would try to grab them as we passed by. You heard stories about that happening; there would be people desperate enough to disguise themselves as Enwythau and then sneak into the market to steal back their lost family members. I stomped down on the part of me that secretly wanted Neirin to come rushing in to do the same. We had an agreement: if either of us got caught, the other was not to do something brainless. Getting thrown into the cells for future sacrifices wasn’t to anyone’s benefit, and Neirin was smarter than that.
The market wasn’t crowded enough that there was a chance of getting lost and separated, but there were enough people that I got bumped around a bit until Siaras grabbed me with a hand around my arm and hauled me closer to Rhydian. ‘Ain’t your fault you’re too short to be noticed, but it ain’t helping with me getting rattled, too,’ was the explanation. Rhydian gave Siaras a quiet, approving look, like the kid had just done something really fucking special instead of commonsense.
The artisan, a different one from the woman who’d done up my face a few days ago, sat inside a chalk circle with his materials spread out around him. No one stepped inside the circle no matter how crowded it got around the edges; when we got closer, I could see that the circle was actually a whole bunch of more complicated lines, woven together in different colors, and probably a set of signs to keep people at a distance. Selective-functioning signs, I thought. Fancy stuff. Neirin would be fascinated, if he ever got in here. Not that I wanted him to! That’d mean something bad happened to him. But if he did.
‘Ah! What services may I offer you today?’ the artisan asked Rhydian.
Tattoos didn’t hurt while they were being done. It was just paint that had been specially prepared (no one knew how except for the artisans who did it; it was said even before the Enwythau set down their restrictions, artisans had ties that bound them together strong than what people they belonged to) and painted on with particular sets of brushes in particular combinations of letters and symbols and extra lines that did stuff. The ones I had already were strictly informational: three lines going from my wrist to my elbow, with loops and dots coming off them and curling around each other. The lines that told about my being gaethsion, those would be painted across my collarbone. Given how much the one on my face stung when the paint settled in, I was in for a hell of a time later. For now, though, I had to concentrate on not squirming with ticklishness while the artisan stopped every few strikes to ask Rhydian how to spell his name.
Once me and Siaras were accounted for, the ink started to settle into my skin. It itched like anything, but the artisan slapped my hands away when I went to scratch.
‘It will only spread to your fingers, and then where will you be, gierthan?’ he asked. ‘No, stay still, and don’t touch it until tomorrow morning at the earliest.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rhydian. He gave a tug on my rope, stepping outside of the circle again. Me and Siaras followed him. I dug my nails into my palms and clenched my teeth to keep from touching my collar while we got dragged towards the exit like pet animals on leashes. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Siaras looking everywhere: not with a craning neck and lots of head-twisting, just a series of head-tilts and jumping eyes. It’d not be something I’d notice ordinarily, but when Neirin was worried he’d do the same, and so it was on my list of things to pick up on.
‘What do you see?’ I asked, in an undertone.
Siaras blinked at me a couple of times, face shifting in a way I’d be lost trying to pin down. ‘People. A whole lot of rich, Enwythau people with too much money to spend on things that aren’t worth what they cost.
‘Except for us,’ I said. ‘Us, all of a sudden, they get stingy, you notice that?’
Siaras gives me a small smile. ‘I had.’
Two tall, twisted-looking statues with wings and scales stood guard on either side of the exit to the marketplace. Their eyes followed me as I walked past them. Gwynn, one of Madoc’s men with his arm rotted off in a battle with the Cysgoth, he’d learned about art. He could probably tell me whose spirit the statues were supposed to represent. All I could tell was that they were Enwythau, by the clothing painted onto them, and they’d died in battle, by the wings. I spit on the feet of the nearest one as I passed, just in case.
Outside, Rhydian guided us into the middle of the road. Directly ahead was the monument that commemorated the birth of the current draethyr. Her mother’s huge beaked head loomed over a trio of people standing at the base of the monument. There were three of them: an old woman with grey hair, a younger woman maybe a little older than Siaras, and an Enwythau man taller than them both. The old woman waved to Rhydian, and he raised his hand back. I looked around to see if anyone I knew had been attracted by the movement. Me and Neirin tried to stay away from the Enwythau outsiders, and there wasn’t likely to be any of our type in this district, but Neirin was always telling me to be more careful, so I checked. Didn’t see anyone. No one gave Rhydian any notice at all, and if they didn’t pay attention to him, then their eyes passed straight through me and Siaras like we wasn’t even there.
‘Uncle!’ shouted the younger woman, when we were close enough to hear. Without so many people between us, I could identify her clothes as Enwythau, someone important, and her eyes as teithwyr. Except she’d called Rhydian ‘uncle’, and he was as Enwythau as they came, so maybe she was mixed. The old woman behind her wasn’t, though: she was olive-skinned teithwyr through and through.
Rhydian tugged on the ropes, pulling me and Siaras along more quickly until we were face to face with the strange group of people under the monument. ‘I found you,’ he said to the younger woman, smiling like they were sharing a private joke. ‘I told you I would.’
‘Myfanwy told me to be certain,’ she said, in Enwythau.
‘I can support her in that regard,’ said the older woman. Her accent was thick with the mushy sounds of the teithwyr’s language. ‘Bring them here so I can see. How much?’
‘Sixty and four hundred,’ said Rhydian.
The two women shared a knowing glance.
‘We’ll manage,’ said the old woman. ‘We will. The extra help should compensate, over time, for the losses.’
‘Grandmother, I’m sorry.’ The young woman had the sound of someone who had already apologized for whatever it was many times, and just wanted the discussion to be over with. ‘I’d stay if I could, you know that I would.’
‘And if you stayed, then there would be no reason for what happened, and we would all still be in danger. No. Go.’
‘If you don’t, you might restart a war between Cyfalaf and Amranai, and I don’t think that would benefit your family’s business, either.’ The other man spoke up for the first time. It was all I could do not to stare at the burns on his face, or at the number of military decorations he wore. They were everywhere: collars around his neck colored with bird feathers, carved disks in his ears with gold running through them, black and white triangles painted over his mouth in a permanent grin. He glanced at me; one eye was pale and bloodshot, the other nearly black.
‘Thanks, rheolwyr,’ said the young woman. She said it carelessly, which even I would know better than to do with a man like that. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of that. Now I have reason to go.’
‘What are you staring at, gaethsion?’ barked the warrior. I flinched, but he was glaring at Siaras, not at me. With good reason, too: Siaras was gawking at him and the younger woman as though they were the Old Gods returned from the void.
‘Andras Rheolwyr of Eldarath?’ asked Siaras breathlessly. I frowned.
The warrior ran his tongue across his lips. ‘That is what I am called.’
‘Then …’ Siaras bowed to the younger woman. ‘Are you Tanwen Draethyr of Cyfalaf?’
The younger woman turned around to the older woman for support; the old woman just lifted her chin. I guess that that meant something between the two of them, though, because she turned back to Siaras and shrugged.
‘Right now, no. Give me two weeks,’ she said.
‘The seren means yes,’ said the scar-faced warrior.
The look of slavish delight on Siaras’ face had to be seen to be believed. I turned away in disgust as Siaras rolled up a worn linen shirt to show off the lines of red writing that stretched from one shoulder blade to the other. ‘Seren, look. I believe in you. I speak on your behalf. See?’
Tanwen squinted at the red tattoos. She took care to mouth the words as she read, so that everyone would know that she could read it, and then smiled at Siaras. ‘I can see that,’ she says. ‘Thank you. I’ll — thank you. What do they call you?’
‘Siaras the Cysgoth.’ Quick fingers smoothed down the shirt again; I frowned at them. They gave off the impression of being clean, even if they weren’t any more so than mine, and soft, even though I could see calluses on the fingertips. There was something weird about that.
‘It’s good to meet you before I leave, Siaras the Cysgoth.’
Siaras bowed low to her, even though no one willingly bowed before the draethyr unless they were begging for their lives or hiding their treason. ‘Thank you.’
‘Who the hell is that?’ I asked Siaras in tiroetheod, so that the others wouldn’t understand.
‘I’ll explain when we’re alone,’ said Siaras, responding in the same language. I caught Rhydian’s faint scowl of disapproval, but ignored it.
[And then Tanwen and Andras said goodbye to Rhydian and Mabyn, and they left, and Rhydian took me and Siaras back along the hot stone pavement.]
chapter five
