Chapter Seven – Esme
Chapter Seven
Esme
The car is gone, and so is Osric.
I stand on the terrace and look down at the stretch of gravel where he parked when we arrived. I can see the tire tracks. I woke to a house that was too quiet, got up to check, and here I am, staring at the place where his car should be.
“He left?” Darina steps out beside me, working her hair into its usual braid.
“It looks that way.”
“Did he say anything to you? About where he was going?”
“No. Why would he? He doesn’t answer to me.” I turn my back on the empty gravel. “And I don’t care where he goes.”
Darina ties off her braid and says nothing, which is her way of calling me a liar.
Fine, I noticed that he’s gone, and I keep noticing it, and that annoys me. It isn’t about him. It’s the strangeness of waking up in a house at the edge of a desert, owned by a monster, and finding him vanished without a word.
And there’s the other thing too, the thing I’ve been trying not to think about since I opened my eyes.
Yesterday, he offered me his hand to help me into the car, and I snapped at him.
“Don’t touch me,” I said, with panic in my voice.
And he apologized to me. Gave us rooms, cooked for us, refused my money, and told me I could leave whenever I wanted. I never thanked him for any of it.
I was distressed. I’d been auctioned off, marched through a portal, and dropped into a new life among a species the people of Concord tell horror stories about.
I had my reasons. But reasons aren’t the same as being right, and I know the difference.
I should try to be decent to him. Decent costs me nothing.
“Well,” Darina says, “if the master of the house is out, we should explore.”
We start at our end of the hall and work outward.
The house turns out to be far larger than I realized.
Rooms are carved straight back into the cliff, with high ceilings and heavy doors, and they keep going, one behind another.
Some have been restored, with swept floors, mended shutters, and clean, empty shelves.
Others are sealed and dusty, with sand gathered in the corners and crates stacked under cloth.
We find empty chambers whose purpose I can’t guess, a storage room full of tools, and narrow terraces cut into the rock face, each with its own square of shade.
“How many people lived here?” Darina asks, turning in the middle of an empty room.
“I don’t know. It was abandoned, I’d say. You can see where he’s repaired things and where he hasn’t managed yet.”
“He did all of this by himself?”
“Who else? Have you seen any servants?”
At the far end of the hall, we come to his door. It’s closed. We both stop in front of it, because it’s the last room on this side of the house.
“I’m sure he won’t mind, if you’re curious…” Darina starts.
“No. I would never.” I turn and head toward the stairs. “I’m not interested in him, so I’m not interested in where he sleeps.”
“Of course,” she says after me, in the voice she uses when she’s trying not to laugh.
At the bottom of the stairs, she pushes open a door and calls my name.
I forget to be annoyed with her. It’s a library.
Shelves are carved into the stone from floor to ceiling, and they’re filled with books.
A tall window looks out over the open desert, all red and black cliffs, thornbrush and light. It’s the prettiest room in the house.
Darina pulls a book down and frowns at it.
“Can you read this?”
I take it from her. The script runs in sharp, angled marks, row after row. I pull down a second book, then a third.
“It’s their language. They’re all the same, probably.”
“The one beautiful room in this house,” she says, “and we can’t use it.”
We put the books back and leave. I’m more disappointed than I want to admit. I stop at the window on the way out. From up here, the desert doesn’t look dead, only endless.
The lowest terrace opens onto the garden, if I can call it that. Stone beds line the walls, some cleared, some half-choked with thorny desert plants that catch on my skirt when I pass. A dry fountain stands in the middle, and cut brush is stacked against the far wall where Osric must have piled it.
It isn’t beautiful. In Concord, gardens are trimmed, watered, and never left to their own devices. This garden is bare, dusty, and severe. But it isn’t dead, either. It’s abandoned, and an abandoned thing can be brought back.
Darina toes the stacked brush.
“He seems like a good man. Osric.”
“You keep saying that.”
“He hasn’t touched you or threatened you. He didn’t separate us, and he doesn’t treat me like his property.”
“Do you hear yourself? You’re praising a man for the things he hasn’t done to us.”
“I’ve been an orphan and a servant my whole life. Plenty of men do those things without thinking twice.”
“It isn’t about him.” I sit down on the rim of the dry fountain.
“I never wanted a husband. I wanted to travel, I wanted to see the world and choose to live on my own terms. And the first time I set foot outside Concord, I land in another prison… in the Waste. With one of the most feared species on Alia Terra. It’s not his fault, I’m not saying that.
I did all this to myself. To us. He did us a favor by buying us, and now we’re here, and…
Don’t try to tell me it’s a good thing. It doesn’t feel like it is. ”
Darina sits beside me.
“He told you that you’re free to leave.”
“And if he meant it, I intend to leave. As soon as I have a plan, we’re gone.”
“How?” She asks it gently, without any argument in it. “Where would we go? Esme, everything I’ve ever seen is the orphanage and your parents’ house. What have you seen?”
“Concord,” I admit.
“So, two girls who’ve only known one city since they were born are going to walk out into the world and build a life. With what?”
“I have money. I took it from my parents before we left, and my jewelry is in my bag. I can sell it.”
“Is it enough?”
“Enough to travel on, maybe. Not enough to live on.” I lift my chin. “But we can work.”
She laughs so hard she has to grip the fountain rim to stay upright.
“What?” I snap at her.
“You,” she says, wiping her eyes. “Work. Esme, you have never worked a day in your life.”
“I can learn.”
“You’ve never carried your own bathwater. You’ve never lit a stove. You can’t even dress yourself without help.”
“That’s not a skill, that’s flexibility.”
“I’m on your side,” she says, and bumps her shoulder against mine. “I’m going wherever you’re going, you know that. I’d just like us to survive once we get there.”
“We will. I’ll figure it out.”
She looks up at the house, at the terraces stacked against the black cliff.
“It’s a good house, you know. It needs a woman’s hand.”
“If you mean curtains and flowers, you can stop right there.”
“I mostly mean edible food.”
I think about dinner last night, the tough meat, the strange roots, whatever that gray sauce was, and I stand up.
“That, I’ll allow. I can’t survive another meal made by that man.”
The kitchen is deep and cool, with a long stone counter and shelves I have to stretch to reach.
We go through Osric’s supplies jar by jar: dried meat, roots, grain, oil, and a row of spices with no labels that Darina sniffs with great interest. She names half of them and makes faces at the rest. Some leftovers from his dinner wait under a cloth, and neither of us is brave enough to eat them cold.
Nim appears while Darina is elbow-deep in the grain sack. She doesn’t come to us. She jumps onto the far end of the counter and settles there with her tail wrapped around her feet, watching.
“Hello, you,” Darina says.
She peels back the cloth, picks out a piece of meat, and holds it out. Nim looks at the meat, then at Darina’s face, and doesn’t move. Darina sets the piece down halfway between them and steps back. Nothing happens.
“She’s not hungry,” I say.
“Or she doesn’t take bribes.”
“Then why is she staring at us?”
Darina straightens up slowly, the grain sack forgotten.
“Because she’s not here to eat. She’s on duty.”
“On duty.”
“Think about it. He leaves without a word, and his creature posts herself in the kitchen to watch us. He left her instructions. Watch the humans. Report everything.”
“She does look like she’s taking notes.”
Darina lifts the wooden spoon and holds it up in front of Nim.
“Write this down. The blonde one has touched the pots.”
“The blonde one?” I laugh.
“Yes. And the redheaded one is plotting against the master’s sauce.”
“Somebody has to,” I huff. “If she reports anything, it should be how bad I think the sauce is.”
We’re both laughing, bent over the counter, so hard that Darina presses the spoon to her belly. I can’t remember the last time I laughed like this.
That’s how Osric finds us. I turn to reach for the water jug, and he’s there, standing in the kitchen doorway. I go quiet mid-laugh, and behind me, Darina goes quiet too.
He’s dusty from the road, and he looks tired. He holds himself carefully, tail low behind him. He doesn’t come in.
I did this. I forced him to be careful in his own house, and now he stands outside his own kitchen while two strangers handle his supplies. I look for something to count, and there’s nothing but jars.
“Be decent,” I told myself. This was a good place to start.
“Darina and I are taking over the meals,” I say. “If you have no objection.”
“None,” he says.
“Good.” I fold my hands in front of me, the way I was taught to stand when announcing something that will surely be refused. “And there’s another thing you should know. I’ve decided to leave. But I need a plan first – where to go, how to make a living – so I’ll stay a few days. Maybe a week.”
He doesn’t argue, and he doesn’t ask a single question.
“As you wish,” he says.
Then he turns on his heel and is gone before I can read his face.
I feel relieved. I was braced for an argument, for conditions, for the hurt look I saw at dinner. He gave me none of that. I got everything I asked for without saying one word more than I had to.
Then I feel sad, and I have no reason for it. What did I want? For him to argue? For him to fight to keep me? That makes no sense. He’s a stranger who bought me at an auction, and I’m leaving. His agreement is the best thing he could have given me.
I brush the thought away.
Nim jumps down from the counter and pads after him. The piece of meat stays where Darina placed it, untouched.
“Well,” Darina says, and hands me a bowl. “If we’re leaving as soon as you have a plan, then I have a few days to teach you how to do actual work. We’d better start with cooking.”
“Start me on something simple,” I say, as I eye the ingredients she’s arranging on the counter.