After the Staryk king left me, I got up and went back to the big storeroom to see how the work was going. I didn’t have enormous hope—there was so much silver. It was just a little better than no hope, and also had the benefit of being an annoyance to my husband, even if he disposed of me, too.
But Tsop and Flek and Shofer had done more than I’d expected. It certainly went quicker to throw money away than to make it, and Staryk strength made light of the work: they’d already opened a large circle in the middle of the room, and the sledge was half full again. They’d gotten almost all the sacks out, and only loose coin was left. There was a great deal of loose coin, however. They all straightened up when I came in; magical strength or not, they looked tired, too. I didn’t feel badly for throwing away my lord’s silver, but I was making them slave away to do it, and to have any chance at all I’d need them to keep at it for me to the very end. All through this night and the coming day, and then another night and day after, every last hour I could eke out before the dancing had ended. Luckily Basia’s wedding wouldn’t begin until late, since she was a city girl. Without sleep or rest, for them as much as me, except I’d gotten myself into the mess, and why should they care?
“I need something to eat and drink,” I said. “Bring something for yourselves, too. And if I’m alive at the end of this,” I added, “you’ll bring me all the silver you own yourselves, or can borrow, and I’ll make it gold for you in thanks for the work you’re doing.”
They all three went perfectly silent and still. After a moment, they looked at one another—making certain I’d said it?—and then Tsop burst out, “We are servants.”
“I’d rather you had a better reason than that to help me,” I said, warily. It didn’t help. They still looked as uneasy as if I’d invited them to walk through a room full of snakes. Flek had her hands twisting together before her, staring down at them.
Then Shofer abruptly said to me, “Open-Handed,” saying it like a name, “though you know not what you do, I accept your promise, and will return myself for it as fair measure, if you will accept the exchange.” He clenched his fist to his collarbone, and bowed to me. Tsop swallowed and said, “And I too,” and bowed as well. She looked at Flek, whose face was wrenched and unhappy. After a moment, Flek whispered, barely audible, “I will as well,” and clasping both her hands against her chest bowed, too.
Well, Shofer wasn’t wrong, I didn’t know what I’d done, but I’d certainly done something, and it had been worth doing. “Yes,” I said at once, and Flek ran out of the room to go and bring us food, and in the meantime Tsop and Shofer began to hurl the last sacks into the sleigh as if their own lives depended on it now, and not just mine. Perhaps they did, for all I knew. It didn’t seem that gold would be enough of a reward for that, but if they thought it was, I wasn’t going to complain.
“I must change the deer,” Shofer told me when Flek came back, and I joined them in the big storeroom to eat. I nodded. We all wolfed down a few bites, and I took a drink of the cold water and went back to work in the second storeroom alone.
I think I did fall asleep once or twice during that night, but not for long; I only drowsed off drooping as I sat, and jerked back awake a little bit later when I heard the clattering of hooves in the room beyond, another load being taken away to dump into the tunnel. My eyes were burning and tired, my back and my shoulders ached, and I finished sweeping my hand over the coins on the cloth, and spilled them away again.
The hours dragged away at once too slowly and too quickly. It was an agony that I only wanted to be over, except when the line of sunrise appeared in the mirror, my heart started pounding. I’d gotten quicker once I’d mastered the trick of doing them two deep: I was a good way into the third rack. But there were three more left: I’d have to keep working this fast all the way to the end, to manage it. I had to stop and eat: Tsop brought me some food on a plate and a cup of water, and my hands shook so that the water nearly slopped up over the sides. I swallowed everything she’d brought me without tasting it, and went back to the endless grinding terrible work.
My husband appeared again just as the sunset vanished out of my mirror. I sat back on my heels and wiped my arm across my forehead. I wasn’t sweating, but I felt as though I should have been. He looked around the room with cold displeasure, measuring how much I had left to do. I’d nearly finished the fourth rack by then, but there was only one night and day left, and as far as he knew, there was that monstrous third room still to do.
“What does it mean among you to give someone a gift?” I said. I very much wanted to know what I had done, with my servants.
He frowned at me. “A gift? Something given without return?” He made it sound like murder.
I tried to think how to describe what I’d done. “Something given in thanks for what might have been demanded instead.”
His contemptuous expression didn’t change. “Only the worthless would imagine such a thing. A return must be made.”
He’d been perfectly happy to make me change silver to gold for him without any return at all until I’d prodded him, but I didn’t point that out. “You’ve given me things without return,” I said.
His silver eyes widened. “I have given you that to which you are entitled by right and have demanded of me, nothing more,” he said hastily, as if he thought I was going to be violently offended, and added, “You are already my wife; you cannot imagine I meant you to become my bondswoman.”
So a gift that couldn’t be repaid, had to be repaid with—that? “What is a bondswoman?”
He paused, once more overcome by my appalling ignorance of perfectly obvious things. “One whose fate is bound to another,” he said very slowly, as if speaking to a child.
“That’s not enough to explain it to me,” I said with asperity.
He raised his hands in impatience. “One whose fate is bound to another! Where a lord rises, so do his bondsmen; where a lord falls low, so too his bondsmen; when a lord is stained, so are they, and as he, so too must they cleanse their names with their life’s blood.”
I stared at him, queasily. I hadn’t really thought that Flek and Tsop and Shofer were putting their own lives on the line, and as much as I’d suspected it would mean my death to fail, there was something worse about hearing it plainly out of his mouth. Stained, like a ruined cloth, only to be repaired by dyeing it all the way through red with blood. “That sounds like a terrible arrangement,” I said through my tight throat, trying to coax some more out of him; perhaps I was misunderstanding. “I can’t imagine why anyone would agree to become one.”
He folded his arms. “If your imagination fails you, that is no sign I have failed to answer the question.”
I pressed my lips tight, but I’d walked into that one too squarely. I worded my final question more carefully. “All right. Then what are several illuminating reasons why anyone would either accept or refuse such an opportunity?”
“To rise beyond their station, of course,” he said immediately. “A bondsman stands always but one rank removed from their lord. Their children inherit both bond and rank, but their children’s children inherit rank alone, and whatever standing the bondsman holds, at the time of their birth, they have it in their own right. As for who would refuse, those whose rank already stands high, or who suspect the lord who asks their bond is likely to fall: only a fool would bind their fate for little gain.” He’d been visibly pleased to win his point on the question, but he paused, suddenly going wary. “What concerns you so of bondsmen?” he demanded.