Chapter Two – Korr
Chapter Two
Korr
My left knee locks three steps past the door to my quarters. I stop, shift my weight to the right leg, and wait. The joint is stone grinding against stone, and it takes five seconds before it releases with a low, gritty pop that I feel up my thigh. I let out a sigh and keep walking.
The main corridor of the Highhalls stretches ahead, wide enough for two golems to pass, but I’m the only one here at this hour.
The quartz veins in the walls catch the gray light filtering through the arched windows and scatter it across the floor.
I’ve walked this corridor thousands of times, but today, every step is a decision I keep making until I reach my destination.
I pass my workshop. The door is ajar because my fingers couldn’t manage the latch yesterday. Inside, a half-finished necklace sits on the bench, a thin silver chain with a diamond I shaped and set myself. The clasp needs to be bent shut, but the pliers require a grip I don’t have anymore.
The lift is around the next corner. A year ago, I took the stairs every day.
Six months ago, I took them when I felt strong enough.
Now, my joints lock too often on the descent, and if my knee freezes on the spiral staircase, I’ll go down hard, and at my weight, the fall can do real damage.
I pull the lever and the stone platform rises to meet me.
The platform lowers me one level to the Corehalls, and the ceiling opens up above me.
This is the widest, tallest space in Steinheim, carved high and broad so it feels public and important.
The council chamber is down the east corridor, the common halls are to the west, and I go straight, toward the portal chamber.
They’re waiting for me.
Jarrvik leans against the wall on the left side of the archway, arms crossed and one foot propped behind him. Irrva stands on the right, closer to the portal.
“Korrvun.”
My full name, which she only uses when she’s already decided I’m wrong and wants me to know it before we start. My little sister has bossed me around since she started crawling, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Her husband is only here for moral support.
“Irrva.”
My jaw aches around the word. Speaking has gotten harder over the past weeks, and the muscles in my face are stiffening so that every syllable is a small fight between what I want to say and what my mouth will do.
“You could barely make it to dinner last night,” she says. “That was two corridors. How are you going to cross a market courtyard and back?”
“I feel better today.”
The lie comes out smoothly because I’ve had practice. Not too cheerful, because she’d catch that in a second, just steady and plain, in the voice of a man reporting a fact.
“The stiffness loosened up this morning, and my joints are moving easier than they have in days.”
She stares at me, and her eyes go to the moss on my forearms and the deepening cracks across my chest where my collar sits open.
She sees every piece of evidence that I’m lying.
But she steps aside because the last time she tried to physically stop me, we didn’t speak for a week, and the silent treatment cost her more than letting me go does.
Jarrvik pushes off the wall and claps me on the shoulder. The impact drives through my body, but I keep my face still. He doesn’t realize that the blow reverberates through stone that’s half-dead, and that every vibration makes the cracks feel like they’re about to split wider.
“Come back in one piece.”
“I always do.”
I step through the portal. The transit used to feel like walking through cold water, but now the pressure hits from every side, squeezing my ribs and forcing the air out of my lungs.
My heartbeat stutters and skips, and for a few seconds, I don’t know if it’s going to resume.
Then the pressure drops, and I’m standing in a stuffy room, in a different place, and my legs are shaking so hard I have to lock my knees to stay upright.
The portal on this end is set into the wall of a converted trading hall in one of the border towns between human settlements and monster territories. The ceiling is high but not golem-high, and I have to duck my head under the crossbeams as I move through the corridor toward the courtyard.
The market is already running when I step outside.
The courtyard is open to the sky, ringed by stone walls, with rows of wooden benches facing a raised stage.
An auctioneer stands at a podium near the front, and his assistants move behind the stage, ushering women through a door into the side room where they wait.
I find a place along the back wall. I see an orc near the front row, broad and scarred, and a pair of trolls further down, leaning together and talking in low voices.
These seem to be the only monsters who are reasonably big, but still not as big as me.
I’m almost a giant. Golems rarely come to these markets because most of us find our mates through the Marriage Temples, or within Steinheim. Or not at all.
I’m here because the Temple never wrote back, and Steinheim ran out of possibilities years ago.
This is the last trip I can make. There were twenty-three before this one, which means twenty-three women bought, brought home, and none of them my soulmate.
I freed every one of them and gave each a house in the Narrowhalls, but my body won’t survive this journey again.
I don’t sit, because if I go down, I won’t get back up. I lean against the wall, wrap my stiff fingers around the bidding paddle, and wait.
The auctioneer motions for the next woman to step onto the stage.
She’s tall, dark-haired, scanning the crowd with proud eyes, and the bidding starts immediately.
I watch her and wait for the pull, the recognition every golem grows up hearing about, the thing that’s supposed to tell you when you’ve found the one person in the world who can keep your stone alive. I feel nothing.
When the bidding stops and a transaction is made, another woman steps onto the stage, then another, and so on.
One of them cries silently but goes through with it, another plants her feet firmly and lifts her chin, and the bidding for her is generous.
I don’t raise my paddle for any of them.
I know what the absence of the pull feels like after twenty-three failures, and when it’s not there, wanting it won’t change a thing.
I watch each bride leave the market with whoever bought her, and I think about the Stillhalls and about my mother standing under the open sky, and the empty space beside her that’s the right size for me.
The auctioneer calls the next number, and yet another woman comes through the side door.
My body notices her before my mind does.
She’s small, thin, and sharp-boned. Her hair is golden blonde, tangled, falling to her waist. Her skin is fair and covered in bruises, with a dark, swollen mark running along her jaw, and another spreading across her left cheekbone.
Her sleeves have ridden up her forearms, and the bruises there are older, yellowing, layered over each other.
Someone hit her and grabbed her more than once, over time.
She’s shivering, and it’s not a small tremble but a steady, full body shake that runs through her arms, legs, and shoulders. She holds herself around the middle with both arms wrapped tight, and she stares at the crowd the way an animal stares at a pack of predators it can’t outrun.
The auctioneer calls for an opening bid, and no one moves. He waits, calls again, but the monsters watching are silent. No paddles go up, because she’s too small, too bruised and damaged, and no one wants a woman who looks like she might die before any arrangement holds.
My chest seizes. I feel a hard blow behind my ribs, so sudden that I lose my breath.
It’s not the dull ache I’ve lived with for months.
I don’t know what it is, only that it’s different, so I decide it has to mean something.
I stare at the blonde woman, and the pull is there, I’m almost certain.
It grabs the center of my chest and drags me toward her.
I raise my paddle. My shoulder grinds and the elbow resists, but I hold it up and call out a generous sum. The auctioneer’s eyebrows rise, he scans the crowd again, but no one challenges my bid. He calls it, and I nod and start the slow journey toward the stage.
Every step is a negotiation. My right knee catches, releases, catches again.
Only twenty paces, but it takes me a long time to cover them.
I can feel the crowd watching, all of them staring at the crumbling golem dragging himself toward a woman no one else wanted.
I need to remind myself that they don’t know what’s happening to me, why I’m moving so slowly.
I do my best to ignore the stares and pretend like I’m taking my time intentionally.
I reach the foot of the stage and look at her. She looks up at me, at my cracked stone skin, the moss growing in the fissures along my arms, and at the size of me. She’s afraid, but it’s not just that. She’s trying to read me and determine if I’m a better option than whatever she’s running from.
The auctioneer clears his throat.
“Does the bride accept?”
She nods. “Yes. I’ll have him.”
The tension behind my ribs loosens by a fraction.
We move to a table along the wall where an assistant sits behind a ledger and a stack of contracts.
I sign, and my fingers barely close around the pen, but the signature comes out legible enough.
I pay the fee, and the assistant counts out her share and pushes the coins across the table.
She takes the money without hesitation and produces a cloth pouch from inside her bag, sweeping the coins in with one motion.
She ties it and tucks it back into her bag.
We walk inside the building and toward the portal. I move at the only speed I’m capable of, and she matches it without comment.
“My name is Korrvun Thaldren,” I say. “Korr.”
“Sorina,” she says, not offering a family name.
I look at her while we walk. The bruise on her jaw is dark enough that whoever hit her did it hard, and the green edges mean it happened a day or two ago.
The ones on her wrists are older, which means someone hurt her over a stretch of time.
I want to ask who, but the question presses against the back of my teeth, and I leave it where it is.
She’s known me for ten minutes, and I don’t have the right to her past yet.
“Where do you live?” she asks.
“Inside a mountain,” I say. “A citadel called Steinheim. There’s a whole city carved into the rock, halls for living, working, markets, taverns, all of it. Golems and humans live there, a few hundred of each.”
“Both species live together?” she sounds surprised.
“Yes, for generations. The humans run the trade routes and the cutting workshops, and we mine the deep shafts and keep the mountain safe. You will, of course, have your own room. Your own space.”
She nods and keeps walking, and she doesn’t ask follow-up questions. She takes the information, stores it, and moves on, building a picture of a situation she can’t control yet, mapping the walls before she decides how to deal with them.
We reach the portal which is already shimmering. I give the operator the coordinates for Steinheim.
“It’s disorienting,” I tell her. “The first time is the worst.”
She nods, her jaw tight.
Maybe I shouldn’t assume that she’s never traveled by portal before, but I do it before I can stop myself. It’s just the fact that she’s dressed in simple clothes and doesn’t seem to have many belongings with her. Since she doesn’t contradict me, it means I’m right.
We step through together, and the transit squeezes my chest so hard my vision goes dark at the edges. I fight to stay on my feet.
We step into the portal chamber in the Corehalls, and Sorina stumbles as the disorientation hits her, her legs buckle, and she pitches forward. I catch her by the arms before she goes down.
My hands close around her upper arms, and she’s so small in my grip that I’m terrified I’ll hurt her.
She looks up at me with wide, unfocused eyes, and the ache in my chest turns into warmth, real and spreading, filling spaces that have been cold and dead for months. I want this to last one second longer.
She jerks back, pulling her arms free in a full-body flinch. She turns her face away, folds her arms around herself, and refuses to look at me.
I step back to give her space, keeping my hands at my sides where she can see them.
Of course she doesn’t want me touching her.
I don’t know what was done to her, who left those bruises on her, how many times it happened, or what was said while it was happening.
I don’t know what pushed her to the point where selling herself to a monster was the only option left, and I don’t know what my hands on her arms just brought back for her.
I hate that I might have, for even a second, been another thing she had to endure.
I say nothing. I wait and let her decide what happens next.