Chapter Five – Esme
Chapter Five
Esme
The heat hits me two steps out of the portal, and it’s not the heat of a Concord summer. The air burns going in, dry all the way down, and I stop abruptly, which makes Darina bump into my back.
“This way,” Osric says. “The chamber has to stay clear.”
The portal chamber is a cave of black stone, and the two Scorpii guards flanking its doors turn their heads to watch us pass. Their tails curve up over their shoulders, stingers raised. Darina grabs my hand and grips hard enough to hurt. I understand her distress, because I feel it too.
We step outside, and I see Haara for the first time.
I expected a camp, tents scattered across sand, something crude.
Instead, a hidden valley opens between black cliffs, and a whole city climbs up in layers – terraces, stone bridges, stairways cut into the rock, shade cloths stretched over narrow paths.
Water must run somewhere under all that stone.
Scorpii move along terraces and stairways, and the ones nearest to us stop what they’re doing when they see us.
They stare as we walk. Armored warriors, traders with baskets, children whose small tails already carry stingers… All of them look at me as if I were an oddity carried in to be examined. I keep my chin up and my face smooth. Concord trained me to be looked at and judged, so this is nothing to me.
Osric walks ahead of us. In Concord, he was one of the biggest creatures at the market, save for the orcs and giants.
Here, among his own kind, he’s still one of the biggest, and his tail moves behind him as he walks, thick at the base of his spine, narrowing section by section to the sharp, dark point at its tip.
I did this, I remind myself as I follow him. I sold myself to him. I traded a gilded cage for the Waste, and I have no one to blame for it.
His car waits at the end of the walkway, long, wide and open, with no roof at all. He lifts our two bags into the back, then comes around the side and offers me his hand, palm up, to help me climb in.
“Don’t touch me.” It comes out harsher than I intend, and I can hear the panic in my own voice. “Don’t come near me, and don’t expect anything from me.”
He freezes.
“I would never...” He doesn’t finish the sentence. “It’s not my intention to make you feel uncomfortable. I’m sorry.”
He steps back and tucks both hands behind his back. He stands there, waiting, while Darina and I climb up on our own.
Shame warms my face. He’s carried our bags since Concord, said nothing cruel to either of us, and I shouted at him for trying to help me. I don’t apologize, though. I settle onto the seat, fold my hands in my lap, and look straight ahead.
He drives along the valley floor, through the lowest level of the city, past terraces and staring Scorpii. Then the cliffs open, and the road runs out into the desert.
I’ve never seen this much empty land. Black stone, thornbrush, cacti taller than the car, and dust that rises behind us and hangs in the air.
There are no walls out here, no gates, no roads leading anywhere I could name.
Our maps at home mark all of this as blank space with danger written along the edges, and now I understand why.
Darina reaches over and takes my hand. I hold on.
I’m shaking, and I can’t make it stop, so I stare at the horizon and ask myself what I’ve done.
Whether I traded an old man’s bed for something worse.
Whether I’ve dragged the only person who loves me into a desert that kills humans.
Neither of us says a word with him so near, but her thumb moves back and forth across my knuckles the entire way, and I focus on that small motion instead of on the desert.
The house stands where the city ends and the open desert begins, built into a dark cliff. It has heavy doors, high ceilings I can see through the entryway, and a wide terrace facing the sand. It’s severe and plain.
Osric carries our bags inside, and we follow him into a cool stone hall.
Some sort of animal darts around the corner ahead of us and hisses. I jump back into Darina, one hand pressed to my chest, my heart beating hard.
“That’s Nim,” Osric says. “A duskcat. She lives here. She’s harmless, I promise.”
“Okay,” I say. Though I’m not certain it is, in fact, okay.
However, it must be nice, I think, to have a wild thing choose you and your house as its permanent home. I was never allowed to have a pet.
He leads us up the stairs, to the second floor, and down a corridor. He stops at two doors, side by side.
“These are yours,” he says. “One each, so you have your own space. My room is at the very end of the hall.” He nods toward a door far down the corridor. “I won’t bother you. You have my word.”
Then he clears his throat, turns his head aside, and coughs into the back of his hand. He’s been doing that since we stepped through the portal – clearing his throat, coughing low, swallowing it down. I wonder what’s wrong with him. I don’t ask.
“Rest as long as you need,” he says, and he leaves us there.
I watch him walk all the way to the end of the hall, then down the stairs, and he doesn’t look back once. There are no locks turning, no instructions, no rules. I came ready to fight, and he has given me nothing to fight about.
I catch Darina’s sleeve before she reaches her own door.
“Come in with me. Please.”
My room is large and plain, with a wide bed, a carved chest, and a window facing the open desert. I make it to the middle of the floor, and then I can’t stand still anymore. I pace from the window to the bed and back, arms wrapped around myself, fighting the tears with everything I have left.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I messed up. I sold us both to the desert because I couldn’t stand one more day of my father’s marriage plans. You didn’t agree to any of it. I dragged you here, and I’m sorry.”
Darina crosses the room, pulls me in, and holds me tight. She doesn’t let go until the shaking eases. She has held me through this before – after dinners, after fittings, after Father’s announcements. She knows to wait me out.
“It will be okay,” she says against my hair. “I chose to come. You know I chose it. And he seems like a good man.”
“I don’t want a man.” My voice breaks. “I never wanted one. Not Wycliffe, not an old one, or a young one… Not any kind of man.”
“I know.” She smooths my hair back from my wet face. “I know, and I understand. At least I’m a servant girl. All I have to do is work. I’ll never have to marry unless I choose to.”
“Then you’re richer than I ever was,” I say, and she huffs a small laugh.
We stay in my room while the light through the window turns gold, then red. Darina is the one who finally says it.
“We haven’t eaten since last night. Come down with me, please. You’ll think better with food in you.”
I don’t want to sit at his table. I go anyway, because she’s right, and because she’s hungry too, and won’t eat without me.
Osric has set the table himself. There are no servants in this house – no cook, no footmen, nobody at all.
There are three plates arranged with care, and food he clearly had no idea how to make for us: a platter of dark, roasted meat, dry at the edges, a bowl of pale mashed root, hard rounds of bread, and strips of some green, pickled plant sharp enough to make Darina’s eyes water.
Everything is edible, but nothing is good.
We eat little, all three of us, and Osric least of all, though the portions he set out could feed ten. Only Darina works through her plate steadily, out of politeness, and even she slows down at the pickled things.
“I apologize for the food,” Osric says. “I don’t have much experience cooking. Until now, I only ever made it for myself.”
“Thank you for cooking for us,” Darina says. “It was kind of you.”
He nods, and the three of us go quiet again.
He keeps his eyes on his plate, so I study him freely.
I have to admit that his face is handsome – angular and pale, with blue marks across his forehead.
His long black hair falls straight past his shoulders and looks silky.
He’s young, I think, for his kind, and strong; the shell that covers him instead of skin shifts over muscle in his arms and chest whenever he moves.
I wonder how that shell would feel under my fingers, smooth or rough, warm or cool, and I halt the thought right there.
I set down my fork.
“I want you to let me go.”
Darina stops eating. Osric raises his head and looks at me.
“I want my freedom,” I say. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”
“Why did you enter the bride market?” His voice holds no trace of accusation.
So, I tell him.
“My parents arranged my marriage to a political ally of my father’s, Garron Wycliffe.
He’s older than my father, you see. The engagement was decided in a matter of minutes, and nobody asked me a single question.
I was expected to smile and obey. The bride market was the one thing they couldn’t control.
If I was going to be sold either way, I wanted to choose the buyer myself, in public, where my family had to stand and watch. ”
Darina sighs softly.
When I finish, Osric nods.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he says.
“Then let me go.”
“Where would you go?”
I don’t have an answer, and he watches me while I fail to find one.
“I don’t know,” I say, at last. “I don’t know where I’d go. I only know I want to be free. I’ll repay you what you spent on me, all four hundred credits, every single one.”
He looks down at his plate. His tail slides low and disappears under his chair, out of sight.
His shoulders curve inward over the table, and he looks hurt.
I don’t understand why. He’s just met me.
I have no idea why he bought me, and I’m not ready to ask, either.
Maybe he did it because he felt sorry for me.
When he finally speaks, his voice is so low I have to lean in to hear it.
“You may leave whenever you want,” he says. “You’re not a prisoner in this house. You can also stay as long as you need. Both of you. Until you decide what you want to do next. I won’t ask anything from you. And you don’t have to pay me back.”
I wait for the rest of it, for the condition, for the price he’ll name once I’ve relaxed. In Concord, every kindness came with terms attached.
He offers nothing else. He rises, gathers the plates, and carries them away.
Darina and I are left alone.
There has to be a trick in it somewhere, but I can’t find one.
My father decided my marriage in his study and never asked for my opinion.
Garron pressed his thumb into my waist while we danced and told me he couldn’t wait to be alone with me.
My mother begged me to obey and called it love.
The auctioneer looked at me and told me to go home.
Not one of those people, from the first to the last, asked me what I wanted.
Osric paid for me and my best friend. He carries enough venom in his tail to kill us both, and hundreds of monsters shrank away from him when he walked toward the stage. He sat at his own bad dinner, wounded by my asking him to let me go, and put the decision in my hands anyway.
The monster who bought me is the first male to ever give me a choice.