“Drinking song. Something rowdy, please.”
Nina snorted. “Only for you, Wraith.” She cleared her throat and began. “Mighty young captain, bold on the sea. Soldier and sailor and free of disease—”
Inej started to giggle and clutched her side. “You’re right. You couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
“I told you that.”
“Go on.”
Nina’s voice really was terrible. But it helped to keep Inej on this boat, in this moment. She didn’t want to think about the last time she’d been at sea, but the memories were hard to fight.
She wasn’t even supposed to be in the wagon the morning the slavers took her. She’d been fourteen, and her family had been summering on the coast of West Ravka, enjoying the seaside and performing in a carnival on the outskirts of Os Kervo. She should have been helping her father mend the nets. But she’d been feeling lazy, and she’d allowed herself another few minutes to sleep in, drowsing beneath the thin cotton covers and listening to the rush and sigh of the waves.
When a man had appeared silhouetted in the door to the caravan, she hadn’t even known to run.
She’d simply said, “Five more minutes, Papa.”
Then they had her by the legs and were dragging her out of the wagon. She banged her head hard on the ground. There were four of them, big men, seafarers. When she tried to scream, they gagged her. They bound her hands and wrists, and one of them threw her over his shoulder as they plunged into a longboat they’d moored in the cove.
Later, Inej learned that the coast was a popular location for slavers. They’d spotted the Suli caravan from their ship and rowed in after dawn when the camp was all but deserted.
The rest of the journey was a blur. She was thrown into a cargo hold with a group of other children – some older, some younger, mostly girls but a few boys, too. She was the only Suli, but a few spoke Ravkan, and they told their own stories of being taken. One had been snatched from his father ’s shipyard; another had been playing in the tidepools and had strayed too far from her friends.
One had been sold by her older brother to pay off his gambling debts. The sailors spoke a language she didn’t know, but one of the other children claimed they were being taken to the largest of Kerch’s outer islands, where they would be auctioned to private owners or pleasure houses in Ketterdam and Novyi Zem. People came from all over the world to bid. Inej had thought slaving was illegal in Kerch, but apparently it still happened.
She never saw the auction block. When they’d finally dropped anchor, Inej was led on deck and handed over to one of the most beautiful women she’d ever seen, a tall blonde with hazel eyes and piles of golden hair.
The woman had held her lantern up and examined every inch of Inej – her teeth, her breasts, even her feet. She’d tugged on the matted hair on Inej’s head. “This will have to be shaved.” Then she’d stepped back. “Pretty,” she said. “Scrawny and flat as a pan, but her skin is flawless.”
She’d turned away to barter with the sailors as Inej stood there, clutching her bound hands over her chest, her blouse still open, her skirt still hiked around her waist. Inej could see the glint of moonlight off the waves of the cove. Jump, she’d thought. Whatever waits at the bottom of the sea is better than where this woman is taking you. But she hadn’t had the courage.
The girl she’d become would have jumped without a second thought, and maybe taken one of the
slavers down with her. Or maybe she was kidding herself. She’d frozen when Tante Heleen had accosted her in West Stave. She’d been no stronger, no braver, just the same frightened Suli girl who’d been paralysed and humiliated on the deck of that ship.
Nina was still singing, something about a sailor who’d abandoned his sweetheart.
“Teach me the chorus,” Inej said.
“You should rest.”
“Chorus.”
So Nina taught her the words, and they sang together, fumbling through the verses, hopelessly out of key, until the lanterns burned low.
Jesper felt about ready to hurl himself overboard just for a change in routine. Six more days. Six more days on this boat – if they were lucky and the wind was good – and then they should make land.