A Man Without a Mirror #3
It was certainly enough. Enough for a bit of paper to prove her humanity and a home and a nice horse with a good saddle. Enough to leave this job and take a rest before she found another. Enough to go spend a bit at a local market and flutter her lashes at a boy her age.
Enough, certainly. Not nearly what she was worth, but enough.
“It’s settled, then. Forty thousand talons, and I go with you. A talon less, and I shrivel your testicles from the inside,” the man told Belchin, cocking his head. “If they haven’t already shrunk back into your body and fizzled up into dust.”
Belchin’s eyes dropped to his crotch, seconds from ripping open his breeches to check if his grapes were raisins. Then he licked his lip and looked sideways to Karin.
“I don’t have that kind of money currently at my disposal,” he stuttered.
The man held up a finger and nodded down at Belchin’s burnable bollocks.
“B-but you have a vault, don’t you?” Belchin begged Karin. “You must!”
She sucked her teeth, not sparing a look at him. Her eyes were shining half with fury, half with pain as she ran her calculations. How much was Jinna worth? How much was her pride worth? If she lunged at the man with her nails, would he melt them clean off? The answer was yes, and Karin knew that.
So she stalked over to a gargantuan painting of a woman sitting atop a throne of men’s faces. It was just taller than Karin herself and hung close enough to the ground for one to stare deeply into the subject’s bored gaze. The man always felt like the paintings in this place were watching him.
Only when the woman in the painting blinked did he realize that his creeping suspicion was correct. She made no other movement, with one leg still thrown over the other, holding a long smoking pipe like a scepter, but those eyes stared at Karin’s face.
“Open, please,” Karin said with a sigh. The painting raised a brow.
“Your Highness,” she grumbled, and the woman—the painting—uncrossed her legs to reveal a keyhole where other openings might be.
Karin pulled a tiny blade from the strap of her bodice and tore a hole in the seam of her dress, reached inside, and from a secret pocket withdrew a bronze key.
She slid it into the hole, turned it, then eased back, before finding the right slot and pushing it in deeper.
The painting’s flat lips curled into a blissed-out grin. The piece, frame and all, swung open on invisible hinges.
Behind the painting were so many gold talons that a few spilled out on the ground.
The man had never seen even a single solid gold talon piece before, and he hardly knew anyone rich enough to have one.
A bronze talon was one talon. A silver, ten.
A gold piece? A thousand. The man’s rent was one silver.
Just one of the coins now rolling across the burned floor and collapsing by his feet would pay his rent for eight years.
A layer of dust dulled the image of a roaring eagle on the coin’s face.
The man’s heat flared. There was enough money in this hole to purchase citizenship for every night lady and lord in the city.
Instead, it sat here, fucking dusty. Karin was rich enough to tear her dresses for fun while Jinna was complaining about her single good pair of stays, hobbling on their last leg.
The longer he stayed in this place, the more he realized a bit of Magic had nothing to do with its decline. These people would have exploited each other to death anyway.
The man wondered if his wife were here, and where she fit.
Was she the night lady sewing her last dress together for the fifth time this year?
Or was she running around in frocks too good to touch the ground?
Part of him hoped it was the latter, despite the ire that bubbled in him at the idea.
He wanted her taken care of, but in this place every luxury one had was snatched from someone else.
“Forty thousand should be…” Karin counted her fingers. “Forty of these. Come.”
Jinna dragged herself to the fortune behind the wall and shakily counted out forty pieces into her pockets. Then, holding her sagging dress up with her hands, she turned on the man once named Mose. She ran to him, throwing herself up to his height despite the waves of acrid magic peeling off him.
“I can never repay you,” she told him, scratching across his back.
“Rest. Be happy,” the man told her, even as guards rushed him from behind.
“If I ever have children, I shall never name them,” Jinna sniffled into his ear.
Six guards yanked him from her arms. He let them wrangle him to his knees. Jinna clutched the gold in her dress like she might give it up, but the man shook his head at her, even as iron cuffs were latched onto his wrists.
The last peek of Jinna the man got was her face crumpling with tears as a bag was shoved over his head.
In that second, he finally understood this place.
Someone had to suffer. For every smile, for every laugh, for every quiet day in a safe home, someone else had to suffer.
Yesterday, Jinna. Today, him. Tomorrow, who knew?
He could only pray he suffered enough to earn her out of hers.