‘I must have missed that part,’ Partnis said.
Nona swallowed the blood. She let the pain run through her – the cost she paid for taking money from Giljohn’s pocket. Some of the children, sold by their own fathers, almost saw the child-taker as their replacement. Stern, certainly, but he fed them, kept them safe. Nona took a contrary view. Her father had died on the ice and what memories she kept of him warmed her in the cold, tasted sweet when the world ran sour. He would have known how to treat a man like Giljohn.
The gerants had no such choice to make, their size argued their case without need for demonstration. Though in Saida’s place Nona thought she might have agreed with Partnis when he accused her of being fifteen.
Partnis took them in exchange for ten crowns and two.
‘Be good.’ Giljohn, a father to them all for three long months, had no other words for them, climbing up behind Four-Foot without ceremony.
‘Goodbye.’ Saida was the only one to speak.
Giljohn glanced her way, stick half-raised for the off. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.
‘She meant the mule.’ Tooram didn’t turn his head, but he spoke loud enough for the words to reach.
A grin slanted across Giljohn’s face and, shaking his head, he flicked at Four-Foot’s haunches, encouraging him through the doors that Partnis’s man had set open once more.
Nona watched the wagon rattle off, Hessa, Markus, Willum and Chara staring back at her through the bars. She would miss Hessa and her stories. She wondered who Giljohn would sell her to and how a girl unable to walk would make her way in the world. She might miss Markus too, perhaps. The miles had worn away his sharp edges, the wheels had gone round and round … somehow turning him into someone she liked. In the next moment they were all gone.
‘And now you’re mine,’ Partnis said. He summoned the young man mending the net, lean but well-muscled under his woollen vest, hair dark, skin pale, but not so dark or so pale as Nona. ‘This is Jaymes. He’ll take you to Maya who is your mother now. The slapping kind.’ Partnis offered them a heavy smile. ‘I don’t expect to notice any of you until you’re this high.’ He held his hand to his chest. ‘And if I do, it will probably be bad news for you. Do what you’re told and you’ll be fine. You’re Caltess now. Bought and paid for.’
Maya stood more than a foot taller than Partnis, arms thick as a man’s thighs, her face red and blotched as if a constant rage held her in its jaws. To compensate for her complexion the Ancestor had given her thick blonde hair that she braided into heavy ropes. She stood on the attic ladder after shepherding the new arrivals up it, only her head and shoulders emerging into the gloom.
‘No lanterns up here. Ever. No candles. No lamps. Break that rule and I break you.’ She made the motion with heavy-knuckled hands. ‘When you’re not working you’re up here. Meals are in the kitchen. You’ll hear the bell when it’s time. Miss it and you won’t eat.’
Nona and the others crouched close to the trapdoor, watching the giant. The musty air reminded Nona of James Baker’s grain store at the village. Around them the shadows rustled. Cats most likely, rats and spiders of a certainty, but also other children watching the new arrivals.
Maya raised her voice. ‘Don’t pick on the new meat. There’s time enough for that down below.’ She stared at a patch of darkness seemingly no darker than any other. ‘I see any lumps and bumps on Partnis’s new purchases, Denam, Regol, and I’ll knock your heads together so hard you swap brains. Hear me?’ A pause. ‘Hear me?’ Loud enough to shake the roof.
‘I hear you.’ A snarl.
‘Heard.’ Chuckled in the distance.
The others emerged as soon as Maya withdrew. Two long-limbed boys dropped from the rafters into the midst of the newcomers. Nona hadn’t seen them lurking there. Others scampered in from the shadows, or strolled, or crept, each according to their nature. None of them as small or as young as Nona, but most of them not many years older. From the direction in which Maya had stared came a huge boy, a scowl beneath a thick shock of red hair, muscles heaped and shifting below his shapeless linen shift. Moments later a lad near as tall but willow-thin joined him, black hair sweeping down across his eyes, a crooked smile hung between the corners of his mouth.
A throng gathered, many more than Nona had anticipated. Huddled and watchful, waiting to be entertained.
The red-haired giant opened his mouth to threaten them. ‘You—’
‘Oh hush, Denam.’ The dark-haired boy stepped in front of him. ‘You’re newbies. I’m Regol. This is Denam, soon-to-be apprentice, and the toughest, fiercest warrior the Caltess attic has ever seen. Look at him wrong and he’ll chew you up then spit out the pieces.’ Regol glanced back at Denam. ‘That’s the gist, ain’t it?’ He returned his gaze to the newbies. ‘Now we’ve got the chest-thumping out of the way and saved Maya the bother of spanking Denam you can find yourself a place to sleep.’ He waved a hand airily at the gloom. ‘Don’t tread on any toes.’
Regol turned as if to go then paused. ‘Sooner rather than later someone will try to convince you that the reason so many of us up here are titchies like yourselves is that Partnis eats children, or there’s some test so deadly that almost nobody survives it, or sometimes Maya forgets to look before she sits down. The truth is that you’ve been bought early and cheap. Most of you will be disappointments. You won’t grow into something Partnis can use. He’ll sell you on.’ Regol raised a hand as Denam started to speak. ‘And not to a salt mine or to be used as the filling in a pie – just to any place that has a need you can meet.’ He lowered his hand. ‘Any questions?’
A cracking sound filled the immediate silence and it took Nona a moment to realize it was Denam’s knuckles as he formed fists. The giant’s scowl deepened. ‘I really hate you, Regol.’
‘Not a question. Anyone else?’
Silence.
Regol walked back into the darkness, stepping rafter to rafter with the unconscious grace of a cat.
Life in the Caltess proved to be a big improvement on an open cage rattling along the back-lanes of empire. Truth be told, it was an improvement on life in Nona’s village. Here she might be the smallest but she wasn’t the odd one out. The isolation of the village bred generations so similar in looks you might pick any handful at random to make a convincing family. Nona alone hadn’t fit the mould. A goat in the sheep herd. The family Partnis’s purse had furnished him with mixed every size and shape, every colour and shade, and in the attic’s gloom they were much of a muchness even so.
In addition to the four dozen children Partnis kept immediately beneath his roof, he housed a dozen apprentices, and seven fighters in their own set of rooms around the great hall. The apprentices shared a barracks house out in the rear of the compound.
Nona found a spot wedged between grain sacks larger than herself. Saida had more difficulty finding a space to squeeze into and was turned away by older residents time and again, even those she dwarfed. But in the end she settled on the boards close to Nona’s sack-pile, further back where the roof sloped so low that she had to roll into place.