CHAPTER FOUR #3
“What’s your name, darling?” he asked, but she shook her head, gesturing to her mouth.
With a surge of anger, he understood. Tongue-tied.
If it wasn’t enough to hurt her, to change her, to take every choice away from her, the king had taken her voice too.
A scribe had, at the king’s command. She may not ever get it back.
If he wouldn’t be punished, he would undo it himself in an instant.
But he pushed his luck enough already. It had taken years of simpering and flattery, but Edgard liked him; let him take liberties no other scribe could, especially not an indenture.
For example, he never forced Sy to dress up his dolls for him.
Only to fix them after they’d been broken.
Nevertheless, if he loosed her tongue, he would be punished, and Edgard would only have her silenced again, or replaced with someone else plucked from the streets, like all the others, and this girl too, no doubt, had been.
Some, one of the women he saw often had told him, saw the position as a privilege, a step up in the world, and went willingly – as willingly as one could when one’s choices were all varying degrees of staving off starvation.
The worst parts, she had said, were not much worse, and the best parts far better, than what they had left behind – or what they had to look forward to.
When rumors of this predilection of Edgard’s crept their way into conversation, the response was always the same: downcast eyes, concerned tutting, but a certainty that whatever happened to those girls in that room, it was better than what would happen to them living on the street.
Weren’t they clothed, weren’t they fed, weren’t they safe under a roof after all?
And surely, they must have done something to end up on the street in the first place – too much drink, too much sex, too much indolence, too much, too much.
Sy did not know where those rumors stemmed from.
Certainly not from him, nor from the women themselves, who were kept isolated in the palace.
They must have come from the spellscribe who shaped the girls to Edgard’s liking.
He prayed it was not someone he knew. The secrecy was a wound that would never heal; but the truth might kill him.
It was far from what he had imagined when he’d been handed his golden pen.
The King’s Grace. How easily it could be him in her position, or her in his.
How foul that inevitably, someone must fill each role, with only a roll of the dice as to who it might be.
Where would this girl be instead if she had been born the same year as him, had a father who bought her charcoals?
If her father had inherited a copper mine, or her mother a country estate?
Where was the grace in any of this?
“I’ll have you better in no time at all,” he had said softly, pulling out a long scrap of vellum, rolling his left shoulder in anticipation.
Injuries so extensive required a good deal of blood, and, despite Edgard’s command to be quick, and the anticipation of retribution, he intended to be very thorough.
Since she could not speak, he relied on his senses and was careful with his hands and with his glyphs.
He couldn’t charge for it, but if she had a cough from a childhood illness, or bones thinned from malnutrition, she would not by the time he was done.
All through it, his breath did not waver; his fingers did not twitch.
She of course noticed his ministrations were more thorough than instructed. When he finished, she looked at him for a long moment, then gestured to his paper and nearly empty pen.
He hesitated. Ordinarily, he would never allow another soul to touch his pen, let alone wield it. He did not know this girl, and had no reason to trust her. But her voice had been stolen with a pen just like this, and by the same man who had graced Sy with his.
Against his better judgement, he handed it to her, hoping she could appreciate the trust he was showing her in allowing her to hold it. He held his breath as she scrawled in clumsy block letters. One word.
Marie.
He left her to face Edgard, who was less than pleased at being kept waiting.
In addition to his heart, which needed near constant maintenance, it seemed, in the interim, he had found several other minor afflictions in need of attention, many of which Sy quickly discovered were completely fabricated.
Even so, he attended to them: he had no choice.
Instead, he chose to conceal his awareness, knowing his indifference would drain the game of its fun, thus draining less of him.
Each spell he wrote was perfect, and had no purpose, and no effect.
When it was over at last, a page escorted him to the back entrance.
It was only then he felt the impact of all the blood he had spent that night.
Lightheaded, winded. Dreadfully thirsty.
A headache pounding like a hammer to his skull.
But he’d still had to wind his way home, through the dark garden, back to the empty streets, then up the stairs to his tiny apartment, where he sat now, holding the invoice the page had left him with, reflecting how much of his debt this job, labeled Miscellaneous, had repaid.
Not even a dent.