Vargos bent low in the fog and spoke softly in the ear of the gasping, writhing man. ‘A warning. Leave her be. Find another, Pharus.’
He straightened, carried on, not looking back. He never looked back. Not since he’d left home. He saw Martinian and the girl gazing at him, cloaked shadows on the almost invisible surface of the road. He shrugged, and spat. ‘Private quarrel,’ he said. He knew they would know it was a lie, but some things were best not spoken aloud, Vargos had always felt. He did not, for example, tell them he expected to die before midday.
Her mother used to call her erimitsu, ‘clever one’ in their own dialect. Her sister was calamitsu, which was ‘beautiful one.’ and her brother was, of course, sangari, which was ‘beloved.’ Her brother and father had died last summer, black sores bursting all over their bodies, blood running from their mouths when they tried to scream at the end. They buried them in the pit with all the others. In the autumn, faced with winter coming, imminent starvation, and two daughters, her mother had sold one to the slavers: the one who had the intelligence to perhaps survive in the harsh world far away.
Kasia had had a reputation already that made her almost unmarriage-able at home. Too clever by half, and too thin by more than that in a tribe where women were valued for full hips and soft figures-promise of comfort in the long cold and children easily birthed. Her mother had made a bitter, brutal choice but not a unique one that year as the first snows fell on the mountains above them. The Karchite slave traders knew what they were doing that season, travelling the northern villages of Trakesia and then Sauradia in a slow circuit of acquisition.
The world was a place of grief, Kasia had understood, beyond tears, after the first two nights journeying south with shackles on her wrists. Man was born to sorrow, and women knew more of it. She’d lain on the cold ground, head averted, watching the last sparks of the dying fire as she lost her maidenhead to two of the slavers in the dark.
A year in Morax’s inn had done nothing to change her thinking, though she had not starved and had learned what to do to avoid being beaten too often. She was alive. Her mother and sister might be dead by now. She didn’t know. Had no way of knowing. The men hurt her sometimes, upstairs, but not always and not most of them. You learned, if you were clever, to shield that cleverness and gather a blank, stolid endurance about you like a cloak. And you passed days and nights and days and nights that way. The first winter in this alien south, spring, summer, then the coming of autumn again with turning leaves and memories you wanted to avoid.
You tried never to think of home. Of being free to walk out of doors when work was done, following the stream uphill to places where you could sit entirely alone beneath circling hawks and among the small quick woodland creatures they hunted, listening to the heartbeat of the world, dreaming in daylight with open eyes. You didn’t dream, here. You endured, behind the cloak. Who had ever said existence offered more?
Until the day you understood they were going to kill you, and you realized-with genuine astonishment-that you wanted to survive. That somehow life still burned inside like the obdurate embers of a fire more fierce than desire or grief.
On the almost-invisible road, walking east with two men in grey, sound-swallowing fog on the Day of the Dead, Kasia watched them dealing with fear and the rawness of their danger and was unable to deny her joy. She struggled to hide it, as she had hidden every emotion for a year. She was afraid if she smiled they would think her simple, or mad, so she kept close to the mule, a hand on its rope, and tried not to meet the eyes of either man when the mist swirled and showed their faces.
They might be followed. They might die here on the road. This was a day of sacrifice and the risen dead. There might be daemons abroad, in search of mortal souls. Her mother had believed that. But Kasia had claimed her knife in the mist before dawn, darting through fog to the smithy and taking it from its hiding place. She could kill someone, or herself, before they took her for Ludan.