Bought By the Wild Roc (Monsters’ Bride Market #8)

Wren

The platform was splintered wood, rough enough to catch on the hem of my dress if I didn’t step carefully. Three steps up. A turn to face the crowd. The auctioneer’s hand on my elbow, positioning me like furniture.

“Scribe,” he announced. “Literate in five scripts. Good health. Twenty-four years. Starting bid.”

Not my name. Not that I expected it.

I kept my chin up. My hands steady at my sides.

This is fine, I told myself. This is just standing. I’ve been standing my whole life. I can stand for ten more minutes.

Sorley bid first.

I knew he would. He was my uncle’s creditor, a thick-necked trader who’d been circling our household for months, watching me carry documents back and forth, watching me work. He smiled when our eyes met. The smile said: I already own you. This is just paperwork.

“Ten thousand gold.”

A murmur ran through the crowd. High bid. Very high for a scribe with no particular beauty, no virginity to sell, nothing special about her except ink-stained fingers and a talent for being useful.

But Sorley wasn’t paying for me. He was paying to own my uncle’s debt and everything attached to it. Including me.

Other bids came in. Lower. Testing. Sorley swatted them away without looking, his eyes still on mine, still smiling that smile.

“Eleven thousand.”

I did the math without meaning to. Eleven thousand cleared my uncle’s debt with fifteen hundred to spare. Enough for Sorley to feel he’d gotten a bargain. Enough for my uncle to gamble away in a month.

Eight years. Eight years of copying documents until my hand cramped, of managing accounts he was too drunk to read, of being the silent machine that kept his household running. Eight years of standing between my uncle and my sister, making myself so useful he never looked twice at Elspeth.

She was fifteen now. Three more years until she’d be old enough for this platform. Three more years I’d bought her by being valuable.

And this was where it ended. On a splintered platform, being bought by a man who’d looked at my hips before my face.

I was not going to cry.

The bidding slowed. Sorley leaned back, satisfied. The auctioneer opened his mouth to call it.

And then I felt it.

Someone watching me. Not my body. Not the useful parts of me that could cook and clean and calculate. Something else.

I found him at the back of the crowd.

He stood perfectly still. That was the first thing I noticed, because no one stands that still. People shift their weight. They scratch their noses, adjust their collars, fidget in a hundred tiny ways they don’t even notice. This man was motionless. A statue. A held breath.

Tall. Taller than anyone around him, and broader too, his shoulders blocking the torchlight behind him. A cloak of iridescent feathers caught the light, bronze and black and gold. It moved without wind, rippling like something alive.

His face was shadowed, but I could see his eyes.

Amber. Fixed on me with absolute focus.

No. Not on me.

On my hands.

I felt it like a touch. Like he’d reached across the crowd and pressed his thumb to the inside of my wrist. My hands, ink-stained, callused from years of gripping pens, nails cut short and practical. My hands that no one ever looked at except to put more work in them.

He was looking at them like they meant something.

Something cracked in my chest. Small, barely there, like ice at the edge of a pond. I didn’t want it. I tried to freeze it solid again.

He walked to the auctioneer’s table, and the auctioneer went pale.

I couldn’t see what he placed on the table. Something that caught the light, prismatic, like a trapped piece of sky. The auctioneer made a sound I’d never heard a grown man make.

“The bid is... the bid is a Sky Jewel. Value assessed at eleven thousand, five hundred gold.”

Sorley’s face went purple. He half-rose from his seat, then stopped. Looked at me, then at the creature who’d outbid him, then back at me. I watched him calculate. Watched him decide I wasn’t worth dying for.

He sat down.

“The bid stands,” the auctioneer said again, like he was trying to convince himself. “The choice falls to the bride.”

I was supposed to walk to the winning bidder. That was the rule. The bride crosses the platform and places her hand in his, and the contract is sealed.

I knew the law for this auction house. The 30-day grace period. I could void the contract within a month…if I had the funds to repay the bid. I didn’t have two coppers to rub together, let alone hundreds of gold. The law was a shield for the wealthy, not for me.

The monster waited at the base of the stairs. Still as stone. Those amber eyes watched me, and I couldn’t read anything in them. Not hunger. Not cruelty. Not the smug satisfaction on Sorley’s face when he’d thought he’d won.

Nothing. Just focus. Just absolute, unbroken attention.

I looked back at Sorley. At the life waiting for me there. The calculations I’d already made: how long until he tired of me, how bad the years would be before he did, whether I could find a way to be useful enough that he’d keep me fed.

I looked at the monster.

He’d looked at my hands.

It meant nothing. It probably meant nothing. He probably collected scribes the way some men collected horses, appraising them by their working parts. The ink stains were just a sign of training, of value, of usefulness.

But no one had ever looked at my hands before.

I walked down the stairs. My legs were shaking. I kept walking.

Up close, he was even larger. I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes.

The amber had strange depths to it, like looking into a fire that burned in colors I didn’t have names for.

His skin was bronze, and when I looked closely, I could see the faint suggestion of something beneath it. Like patterns waiting to emerge.

I held out my hand.

He took it.

His palm was hot. Not warm the way living things are warm. Hot. Fever-hot. I could feel his pulse through his skin, slower than mine, stronger, a drumbeat I felt in my own bones.

Something in his jaw tightened. A muscle, jumping. Like he was holding something back.

“I accept,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected.

“Yes.” One word. Low, deep, carefully controlled. “We leave now.”

I should have asked where. I should have asked what he wanted from me, what he expected, what kind of life I was walking into. A smart woman would negotiate. A brave woman would demand answers.

I just nodded.

He turned, keeping my hand in his, and led me through the crowd. People scattered from our path. No one looked directly at him. A few looked at me with something like pity.

I looked back once. My uncle stood at the edge of the market, his face a mask of fury and relief. Fury that his plan had failed. Relief that he wouldn’t have to deal with Sorley’s disappointment.

He didn’t look sorry.

I turned forward and didn’t look back again. If I thought about Elspeth alone in that house now, no one standing between her and our uncle’s attention, I wouldn’t be able to keep walking. With the income from my sale, he’d have no reason to bother her.

I almost believed it.

The monster led me through the market, past the pens of other women waiting their turn, past merchants and monsters and humans all pretending not to stare. His hand stayed hot around mine. That pulse never changed, never quickened, steady as something ancient.

At the perimeter, the road ended in a cliff.

I stopped walking.

He stopped too, turning to look at me. For the first time, something flickered across his face. Not amusement, exactly. Something quieter.

“You have questions,” he said.

“Several.”

“There is no road.” He said it like he was confirming something obvious. “My home is not accessible by ground.”

I looked at the cloak. At the way it rippled and shifted on his shoulders, bronze and black feathers catching the last of the light.

“You can fly.”

“Not me. The cloak.” He touched it, and the feathers shivered under his hand. “It is an artifact. Very old. It carries me when I need to travel.”

“And you expect me to fly with you.”

“Yes.”