The woman drew back, her cheeks turning red. “Please, spare me the rhetoric. We’re a higher breed. You know this as well as I do. You simply put on blinders and call it altruism. I call it willful ignorance. Those of us who are blueblood became so because our ancestors rose from the ranks of unwashed mobs. They were the thanes, the chiefs, the leaders of their people. The betters of the rest by virtue of their abilities and will. We’re their descendants. They climbed to power, and we maintain it. It’s that simple. These people you’re accusing me of crimes against live like animals. In many cases, being stripped of their freedom is the best thing that ever happened to them.”
Charlotte stared at her. “The function of a noble title is to serve the people. Seven blocks from here, there’s a body of a boy whose eyes have been gouged out with his mouth sewn shut. He was still alive when they did it. What is wrong with you? Are you human at all?”
“A regrettable but necessary casualty.” The bookkeeper crossed her thin arms on her chest. “But you are right, perhaps we should’ve left him with his lovely family to live in squalor while his parents drank themselves senseless in an effort to forget their own laziness and beat him when his existence reminded them of their baseness. Those who are capable act. They amount to something in life. They don’t live in filth, gorging themselves on cheap food, drowning in addictions, and rutting to produce yet more of their ilk. We rescue children from that. We provide a valuable service.”
Unbelievable.
Charlotte made a choking noise.
“Your condemnation means nothing,” the bookkeeper said. “This enterprise was conceived by a mind far superior to yours or mine. Think about it, when a blueblood buys a pretty young girl, she has a shot at a better life. If she’s smart, she will elevate herself by having his child. Just the other day, we fulfilled a special order for a childless couple. They wanted a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, between the ages of two and four, resembling both of them. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to find suitable children? Yet we’ve managed. Slavery is an opportunity. It’s regrettable you can’t understand that.”
Nothing either Charlotte or Richard could say would ever make this woman see reason.
“Kill her,” Charlotte said. “If you don’t kill her now, I’ll do it myself.”
“We need her testimony and information.” He approached the table. He had no idea how they would make it down the hill and to the port with a captive, but by gods, he would try.
“Killing me won’t be necessary.” The woman raised her chin. “Unlike you, I know my duty to the spear.”
She grasped her pendant.
Richard lunged to stop her.
The stone crunched under the pressure of her fingers. A blinding spike of light shot out into her chin, through her head, and out of her skull.
Charlotte gasped.
The bookkeeper sagged in her chair, dead, her head drooping to the side. The whole thing took less than a second. She had been wearing an Owner’s Gift necklace. He should have seen it, gods damn it.
The world screeched to a halt. He felt like he was falling.
All this time, all this work, and the arrogant scum killed herself. Was there no justice in the world?
Maybe Charlotte . . . He pivoted to her.
“Very dead,” she said, her face disgusted. “Irreversibly dead.”
“Damn it.”
His mind whirred, trying to reassess the situation. Wallowing in defeat never served any purpose. No, he was kidding himself. Even if they had managed to take her alive, neither of them could have gotten her to the ship in their present condition, and if they did, by some miracle, manage it, she would never testify. But it wasn’t over, he reminded himself. Not yet. They might not have the bookkeeper alive, but they still had her office and everything within it.
Duty to the spear. Only one spear came to mind. “Gaesum,” he thought out loud. The symbol of the Adrianglian royal family.
“That would explain her devotion,” Charlotte said. “If she thought she was serving the crown in some capacity, she couldn’t permit herself to acknowledge that they could do something base, or her entire worldview would come crashing down.”
They looked at each other. In Adrianglia, the crown was revered. The power of the royal bloodline had its limitations, but the monarch still held the presiding position over the Council, wielding much of the power within the executive branch. The royal family was looked upon as the epitome of behavior and personal honor. The idea that the crown could be involved in the slave trade was unthinkable.
“There has to be a trail somewhere. She was a bookkeeper; she had to have kept financial records.” Richard strode to the shelves and pulled a stack of books out. He handed them to Charlotte. She leafed through them while he rummaged through the desk. His search of the drawers turned up a wooden box, unlocked. Inside, necklaces lay in a row, each with a simple large gemstone in a variety of colors. Unlike the bookkeeper’s pendant, their chains were short. Once fastened around the neck, they couldn’t be removed by slipping them over the head.
“Is that what she used to kill herself?” Charlotte asked, her voice dry.
He nodded. “They’re called Owner’s Gifts.” He picked one up, dangling the false ruby pendant. “They’re given to young attractive slaves who are used for sexual gratification. They have a one-time lock: once fastened, they’re impossible to take off without cutting through the chain. Each contains a small magic charge designed to kill the wearer. The necklace detonates if the chain is cut or the stone is damaged. A pointed reminder that if you disobey or displease, your life can end in an instant. They work much better than shackles and are a lot less obvious.”
She clenched her teeth, and he read a mix of horror and disgust in her face. “Every time I think I’ve reached the limit, this place shocks me.”
And that was true, Richard realized. He thought she’d grow callous or numb, but every new evidence of cruelty cut a new wound into her. Again, he wished he hadn’t brought her here. There were only so many wounds one could take.
“What do you make of this?” Charlotte showed him a hollowed-out book.
Hope stirred in him. “Was there anything inside?”
“No.”
And the newborn hope plummeted to its death. “We have to keep looking.”