Chapter Three – Esme
Chapter Three
Esme
Darina’s hand is cold in mine, and I can’t tell anymore which of us is shaking.
We move through the servants’ corridor without a lamp, past the laundry room and the racks of pressed linen.
I’ve lived in this house for twenty-two years, and I’ve walked this corridor maybe five times.
Darina walks it every day. She leads and I follow, which alone would put my mother in an early grave.
I’m carrying a bag, and she carries her own. We only packed what was absolutely necessary.
One of the kitchen girls stands in a doorway with a bread basket against her hip.
She looks at Darina, at me, then at the traveling cloak I’ve buttoned over my plainest dress.
She steps back to let us pass and says nothing.
The servants have always known Darina and I are friends. They’ve kept our secret for years.
“This is madness,” Darina whispers as we step out through a back door. “I want it noted that I said so.”
“Noted,” I whisper back. “Keep walking.”
The gardens are gray in the early morning light.
We stay off the raked paths and cross the wet grass to the far wall, behind the old pear trees.
There’s a hidden gate here, half-covered in ivy, rusted shut and forgotten.
The hinges grate, but they give. We slip through the gap, then we’re practically running, leaving my parents’ estate behind us.
I should be sick with fear. I am sick with fear.
My hands are damp, and my legs don’t feel entirely mine.
But under the fear runs a hot, spiteful joy that carries me down the lane faster than Darina can keep up.
My parents want to sell me to an old man and call it an alliance.
If I’m livestock, then I can walk myself to market and cut out the middlemen. At least I’ll pick the buyer.
The market district lies near the outer rings, in the shadow of the southern gatehouse, and it looks nothing like the Concord I know. There’s no white stone here, and no fountains.
The gatehouse rises out of the city wall with its watch platforms crowded with guards, twice the usual number, and below it, the holding yards are full.
Monster delegations stand in penned lines while clerks work down the rows with ledgers and inspection wands.
Guards open crates, unroll hide bundles, and confiscate weapons into numbered bins.
Beyond the yards, the doors of the portal chamber stand open, and officials check names before anyone steps through. Every visitor gets logged, searched, and escorted along roped-off roads toward the auction hall.
Concord calls this diplomacy. Up close, it looks like what it is, which is a city so frightened of its guests that it counts their teeth. I suppose this is why most bride markets are held outside the cities – to avoid the chaos and bureaucracy.
Darina presses against my side.
“They’re searching them,” she says.
“They check everyone.”
“They’re not checking us like that.”
“Because no one is afraid of humans. Why would they be?” I almost laugh at my own words, and I hate myself a little for it.
The brides’ registration desks stand inside the hall doors.
A line of women waits ahead of us. Some are poor, some are desperate, some hold themselves stiff and won’t look at anyone.
In the galleries above, the buyers are already taking their seats.
I see two dragons holding half of their human shape – horns, scaled forearms, and folded wings.
I see orcs, weremen, a giant hunched under the ceiling.
I see shadow beings that hurt to look at, and one tall creature whose body has a transparent quality to it, so that I can see the seats behind him through his chest. The women in line keep their eyes down. The monsters don’t.
When it’s my turn, the clerk doesn’t look up.
“Name?”
I think about lying. The thought lasts about two seconds, because there are at least four members of staff within earshot who’ve served canapés in my mother’s garden.
“Esme Elmsley,” I say.
His pen stops. He looks up, eyebrows raised, then his gaze moves past me. Another clerk is already sliding off her stool and walking fast toward the doors. There it goes, then. Someone will be at my father’s gate before I’m even on the stage.
I grab a pen and sign the registry in my best drawing-room hand.
A man comes toward us from the stage side, middle-aged, dressed in good clothes, dabbing at his neck with a folded cloth. The auctioneer himself has come down for me. I’m flattered.
“Miss Elmsley.” He says my name carefully, and very quietly. He looks at Darina, standing close behind my shoulder. “Oh, I see. You’re entering your servant for auction?”
“No.” It comes out sharp enough that heads turn. “Never. She’s my companion, and she’s not for sale. Don’t even think about auctioning her off.”
“As you say, as you say.” He bows his head slightly, and his eyes catch my name in the registry. He purses his lips. “You understand what the registration means,” he says. “Once your name is called…”
“I understand,” I say, and move past him to where the other women are waiting.
Darina catches my sleeve.
“Esme, that clerk who left…”
“I know.”
“How long do we have?”
“However long it takes them to cross the city,” I say. “So, pray for traffic.”
We don’t get traffic. The galleries are still filling when, through the wide open doors, my parents walk into the auction hall with four peacekeepers behind them.
My mother has dressed in a hurry and still looks perfect, which is the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen her do. My father doesn’t run. He never runs. He walks the way he votes, slow and certain, while the peacekeepers spread out along the wall. Their heads turn, searching the lines of women.
I find the auctioneer at the foot of the stage steps and hurry toward him.
“Put me up first.”
“Miss Elmsley…”
“First. Now.”
He wipes his neck again.
“Do you know what your name means here? Every buyer in this hall does business in this city, and who decides access and contracts? Your father. You’re not a bride to them, you’re a diplomatic incident.” He lowers his voice. “Go home, child. This isn’t the place for you.”
“Don’t call me child.”
“You don’t want to do this.”
“Don’t tell me what I want.” It comes out louder than I mean it to.
People are beginning to stare. “Everyone thinks they can tell me what I can and can’t do.
What to wear, when to smile, whom to marry.
I’m of age. I registered. I decide what happens with my life now, and if you won’t call my name, I’ll climb up there and start the bidding myself. Would you rather have that?”
He looks at the peacekeepers fanning along the wall, at my father’s measured walk, at the galleries full of watching monsters, and I can see him weighing which scandal will cost him less. My parents haven’t yet spotted me and Darina. We have seconds left.
“All right,” he says, and gestures me up the steps. “I’m only doing my job.” The last words are mostly for himself.
The stage is higher than it looked from the floor. Below me, the hall spreads out in rings of faces, humans at the desks, monsters in the galleries, and when they see me, recognition moves through them fast.
A dragon leans toward his neighbor. An orc says my father’s name, and I hear it clearly from where I’m standing.
The ones who don’t know me are told by the ones who do.
I watch the gossip travel row by row, and I focus on keeping my back straight and my chin up.
I bite the inside of my lip to stop it from trembling.
“Lot one,” the auctioneer calls, and his voice turns smooth and practiced. “The lady is twenty-two years of age, in good health, of…” he hesitates, “…distinguished family. The opening bid stands at one thousand credits.”
He’s priced me at one thousand credits for my name alone, and I understand it isn’t a compliment. It’s an apology aimed at my father. Whatever happens on this stage, that poor man will be running his auctions in another city soon enough.
No paddle moves anywhere in the galleries.
The dragons study their own claws. The transparent creature looks straight at me, and I watch the empty seats through his chest while no one bids. The weremen at the rail talk quietly among themselves.
Nobody in this hall wants to carry Aldric Elmsley’s daughter home over one shoulder and Concord’s fury over the other. My stomach drops.
“One thousand credits,” the auctioneer says again. “Do I hear one thousand?”
There’s a commotion at the edge of the stage. My parents have found me, finally, and I smile knowing it’s too late. There’s a scuffle as guards try to decide whether they’re allowed to touch my parents and kick them out. Wisely enough, they conclude that they aren’t.
I see my mother’s gloved hands appear on the boards near my feet as she leans in, almost clawing her way up to me.
“Esme.” She keeps her voice low, probably thinking she can still avoid a scene. “Sweetheart, come down. Come down now, and we go home, and nobody speaks of this again, I promise you. Nobody has to know.”
“The whole city knows, Mother.”
My father doesn’t reach for the stage. He stands with his hands folded and speaks the way he always does. Controlled, definitive, with only a hint of anger underneath.
“Get down from there, or you are finished. Do you understand me? You’ll ruin yourself. You’ll ruin this family. No man will want to marry you after this spectacle.”
“Good,” I say. “Then stop offering me to men. You wanted me sold? Watch.”
“Esme…” my mother starts.
“Leave me alone.”
“One thousand credits,” the auctioneer calls over us all, sweating. “Dear gentlemen. Honored guests. One thousand.”
The silence gets worse. The clerks have stopped writing, and my parents standing in front of the stage have turned this into something else, because the galleries aren’t watching a bride being auctioned off anymore. They’re watching a full-on family quarrel.
My face burns. I came here to be publicly sold, and I’m being publicly refused instead, which is the one outcome I haven’t planned for. I’d laugh if my jaw would just unclench.
I must take this into my own hands. I lift myself on my toes and raise a hand to get everyone’s attention. When I speak, I try to project my voice as far as I can.
“Whoever buys me,” I call out to the galleries, “takes my companion as well. Two women. One price. She’s healthy, clever, and considerably better tempered than I am.”
No one laughs. I frown. It was a good joke.
Below the stage, Darina’s face turns up to me, white, her mouth open. She didn’t agree to this. She didn’t even hear it coming, and I’ll answer for that later. I’ll take her with me anyway, because I’m not walking out of here and leaving her to my parents’ mercy.
Still, not one paddle rises.
“Eight hundred,” I say.
The auctioneer turns to stare at me.
“Miss, you can’t lower the price. That’s not how it works.”
I ignore him.
“Five hundred.”
The galleries have gone very still. My mother is calling my name over and over. My father is red with fury, and I can see he’s starting to consider violence.
“Four hundred,” I say through gritted teeth, and hear my voice come out thin.
No one moves. They all stare at me like I’m putting on a weird show they’re not quite comprehending.
My knees are barely keeping me upright. I lock them, because I’m not going to collapse in front of everyone.
Nobody is going to bid, and there’s no floor under my price low enough to make my name cheap.
I’ll walk down these steps and join my parents.
I’ll ride home between them in a closed carriage, and I’ll never hear the end of it my whole life.
I’ll be married quietly to Garron Wycliffe, if he still wants me, and if not, my father will find another old, sleazy man.
At the back of the hall, a paddle goes up. I blink twice, because I can’t believe my eyes.
“I’ll buy you,” a voice says.
I see the tail first. It rises behind his shoulder as he stands, thick where it leaves his spine, narrowing section by section to a curved point that shines in the light spilling through the windows.
I understand that point is a stinger before I understand anything else about him.
Then I see his eyes, dark blue and gleaming, with no pupils at all. Insect eyes.
There’s no mistaking what he is, because everyone in Concord knows the Scorpii. He’s a male out of the Waste.
The other monsters make room for him as he walks toward the stage. The orcs find somewhere else to stand. One of the shadow beings drifts back into a dark corner. As he approaches, the hall gives him a wide lane to move.
He’s huge, taller than the weremen, and broad through the shoulders, plated in a hard shell of bluish gray that shades to purple where the light hits it.
He wears human clothes only from the waist down.
His face is pale and angular under the blue marks on his forehead, his ears are pointy, and his black hair falls long and straight past his shoulders.
I can’t read anything in his eyes. They give nothing away. I’m more afraid of him than of everything else that has happened this morning put together.
This isn’t the escape I planned. This is worse. Or maybe it’s the only door I have left.
“Sold, then.” The auctioneer’s voice cracks as he calls it. He turns to me, and there’s real concern on his face as he watches me. “Miss Elmsley, the bride holds final choice. Do you accept this man as your buyer?”
The hall waits for me to refuse. I can feel it from every direction.
My mother has both hands pressed to her mouth.
My father has gone from red to deathly pale.
Darina grips the edge of the stage with both hands, staring up at me pleadingly.
Humans and monsters are waiting for the Elmsley girl to laugh, apologize for her little fit, climb down, and go back to her silk dresses and her pretty jewelry.
I look at the Scorpius. He stands below me with the paddle loose at his side, near enough now that I can see my own outline reflected in his dark blue eyes. He waits like everyone else. Even he doesn’t believe I’ll go through with it.
“Sold,” I say, and I’m proud of myself when my voice doesn’t waver.
Let them stare. I’m going to prove every one of them wrong. Even myself, really.