He had long felt like a bumpkin lost in the tightly circumscribed manners of the nobility, and the customs of slaveholding were the most opaque to him, and made him more reticent than anything else.
It was baffling to him that when he made mistakes, if anything erred on the side of being too nice—giving a gratuity or looking a slave in the eye or apologizing—slaves resented those slips most. It was as if they were saying, ‘Don’t break the rules. They’re all we have.’
They knew how to deal with abuse, or with being ignored or taken for granted, but making them remember all the privileges of freedom was too hard.
“Hmph,” Verity said. “You’re a woman married now, Mistress, and it’s time you face facts. Your duty in the bed chamber is to provide my lord with children. It is his to satisfy your carnal desires fully. But you have no reciprocal duties on that count. If he desires activities you don’t enjoy or even ones you do more frequently than you wish to indulge him, he has a room slave for that. Of course, as the lady running the household, it is your duty to procure a room slave pleasing to your lord husband.”
“Orholam have mercy,” Tisis said.
“It is his mercy,” Verity said. “What else are slaves for, but to ease the burdens on my lady?”
The old Kip would have shrunk back, would have accepted the slave’s sly insinuations.
Kip swept the folding screen crashing aside. Verity was dunking a cube of soap into her bucket. Kip hauled her up and pinned her against the wall, his fire-scarred left hand around her throat.
“You listen to me,” Kip growled. “I keep my oaths—all of them, including my wedding oaths—and if you impugn my honor again, I swear to Orholam, I’ll throw you overboard for the sharks.”
“My lord, I wasn’t—”
“We both know you were.”
She’d gone limp. Just another slave being abused by another master.
“Look at me. Look at me!” he shouted.
She looked at him with the cold impassivity of a woman who didn’t value her life much. Or perhaps the cold terror of a woman who thought she was going to die.
“You can hate me, but you will not pour poison in my wife’s ears about me. Not while I’m here. Not while I’m gone. Do I make myself understood?”
“Perfectly, my lord.”
He released her. “If you can’t stand to serve us loyally, we’ll sell you immediately. I’ll even let you choose which offer for you we accept. I won’t send you somewhere terrible as a punishment, but I also won’t have you here.”
“Yes, my lord,” she said quietly.
“Now take the laundry and get out. I’ll have your answer by tonight.”
She moved around the cabin more nimbly than Kip would have imagined possible, gathering Tisis’s cast-off clothing and noticing but making no comment on the tears. She mopped up the spilled water, and Kip realized then that he was still naked. Tisis was staring at him, but there was no teasing now. She was holding a cloth up in front of herself, and she looked a little scared.
Oh hells. Did I just jump the wrong way?
“My lord?” Verity asked. “Do you wish me to launder your tunic as well?”
He was holding it in his hand still. “Uh… yes? Yes,” he said. It did actually need laundering. He’d been training on deck daily with the squad, and though he washed himself daily, he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning his clothing. At the Chromeria, you put your dirty clothes in a basket and they magically appeared the next day, clean and folded on your bed.
But he didn’t hand over the tunic.
Verity handed him a towel. “For your sponge bath, milord,” she said. It was big enough that he could hold it in front of himself while he handed her the tunic.
She walked to the door with her pile of laundry. “Oh, milord? Just in case my lady is too delicate to speak of such things, and since you’ll be washing yourself. Do make sure to clean well under your foreskin. A lady’s perfumed garden ought to be fragrant, but a gentleman’s oak should smell only of soap.”
Kip was so aghast that he couldn’t say anything. Tisis snorted. Kip just shook his head, acknowledging that she’d scored a point.
Her mouth pressed to a line briefly to avoid smiling, Verity walked out the door. “I’ll return in due time to dress milady and take the dishes. My lord. My lady.”
It was only as she closed the door behind herself that Kip realized the parting tease had been a test, too: Was Kip the kind of master who would hurt her at any provocation, or had her adultery insinuation crossed one of a relatively small number of important lines? It was the kind of thing a slave would want to know.
He sat down on the bed, not knowing whether he’d passed or failed, or what either meant about him.
Tisis had pulled the screen back into place, and she was continuing her sponge bath. “You scared me, but it was a good distraction.”
“Huh?” Kip asked, coming out of his reverie.
“Distracting her like that so I could wash myself. She told me yesterday I didn’t smell like sex.”
“As if I’m that smart.” Kip only realized he’d said it aloud afterward, but Tisis said nothing from behind her screen. Kip pulled on his underclothes and his clean blacks.
When Tisis emerged dressed in her moss-green tunic and breeches with a leather belt that emphasized her slender waist, she had an odd look in her eye. “So you knocked down the screen because you were actually angry?”
“Yes?” Kip said. Was this a trick question? “Am I a bully?”
“You’re a lord,” Tisis said as if it were a strange question. “The gentry know your titles, but they also know what you were before you came to the Chromeria. We’ll devour you if you let us, Kip. Even our slaves. That’s what we do when we’re threatened.”
“Is it always to be battles and contests, even with my own side?” Kip asked.
“Only if you lose the important ones,” she said. She saw he didn’t understand. “Kip, in Lucidonius’s time, Karris Shadowblinder was a theatre girl. It was considered the next thing to a prostitute by polite society. No one talks about her as a theatre girl now. She became a Name. There is no middle path for people like you and her. You’re suddenly elevated greatly, and everyone wants to know if you deserve it. Me? I can be some lady born to a great family with one or two excellences, but little else worthy of comment. That path is closed to you. You come in suddenly at the top, and everyone else feels like they’ve been knocked down a notch. You have to prove yourself.”
“Even to slaves?”
“Slaves take not only orders but also cues from their masters. Verity was Eirene’s governess. Eirene sending her to serve me? You think that wasn’t a little dig? My sister was implying that I was acting like a child. But it’s also because she trusts Verity.”
“If I’d known that, maybe I wouldn’t have threatened her with death,” Kip said, grimacing.
“About that. Were you angry because it was true, or because you wanted her to think it was?”
Something about her intensity drove all thoughts out of Kip’s mind. “Because what was true?” Kip asked.
“That you keep your oaths.”
So of course Kip thought immediately of the oaths he hadn’t kept: one to his mother, to avenge her rape by his father—a story that had all been nonsense from an addict. And then he’d sworn to Gavin that he would destroy Klytos Blue. He’d been doing his best to investigate the Color through the forbidden libraries, but he’d never found anything damning there, and had broken that oath, too. He said, “Maybe I was so furious because I’ve failed oaths before.”
And he told her about them, without too many specifics. She was still a Malargos, after all.
“But you consider your wedding oaths binding, and plan to do all in your strength to keep them?” she asked.
“Yes! Absolutely,” he said.
“But you love her.”
Her. Teia. It was a gut punch. So Tisis wasn’t oblivious. Kip hadn’t said a word about Teia. Tisis had picked that up from what? A few glances?
Do I lie?