“What I have to say is quite sensitive, my lord. What do we do about eavesdroppers?”
He thought about it. “If my father brought you here himself, it means he isn’t trusting even his closest spies to know about this place. So he would have to be eavesdropping himself. He knows I may sleep for another few days, so I doubt he’d gamble his time that way. Just sitting here, waiting for me to wake, doing nothing else while he doubtless needs to do much? No. Speaking is a risk, but it’s a risk I’ll take.”
She took a deep breath, bracing herself. She looked away from his eye. “I am—that is, I was Orea Pullawr’s spymistress.”
Gavin felt as if he’d been punched in the gut.
Marissia hurried on. “At first I just met with a few of her contacts, but I did well. She kept expanding my role until, in the last few years, when she was losing mobility, I took over everything.”
Gavin couldn’t look at her. He stared straight up. Furious, he tore off the palanquin’s roof.
Marissia fell silent.
The action left him exhausted, aware again of how sick he’d been. He could only stare up—up the anus of the blue hell, as it shat bread on the poor souls within. He would be eating Andross Guile’s shit-mercy for as long as he chose to live. “And how exactly did that fit with our arrangement, Marissia?”
“I did my best to make it fit, my lord.”
He half laughed. “You did your best?”
“I never betrayed you.”
“What did the White have over you? I was here! You’re mine!” he spat. “What could she threaten you with that I could not protect you from? I’m nothing now, but I was… I was indomitable. Do you not remember what I did for you? Do you not remember the Seaborns?”
“I remember, my l—”
“People think I killed that young asshole in a rage because he’d damaged my property. I did it so no one would ever harass you again. I killed a man and ended up having to purge his entire family—for you. For a slave. And for that—for that!—I get no loyalty? From you who shared my chambers and my bed. From you, whom I trusted more than I trusted even my own mother.”
“My lord…” She was weakening, losing whatever courage she’d gathered to tell him all this.
“What did you tell the White?” he asked, voice dangerous.
“I told her nothing that we hadn’t agreed on. I swear. I swear.”
Marissia had been the White’s gift to Gavin. A young, pretty, smart virgin to be his room slave, untainted by the politics of Big Jasper or loyalties to any other family. She was a rich gift indeed, and an unusual one. She had a passing resemblance—more pronounced in those early years—to Karris. The White had obviously thought Gavin had a type.
As a young, single Prism, he could have easily had many room slaves. Wealthy subjects were always giving gifts, looking for favor, and looking to place spies near him.
A procession of room slaves wouldn’t have been a problem except for one reason: the food chute down to his brother’s prison connected to his own room. Regardless of whether a room slave’s duties were purely sexual or she acted as more of a chief slave, as Marissia had, a room slave was in one’s room constantly. So rather than trust that a hundred searching eyes would all miss one hidden secret, Gavin had decided to turn one spy to his own side. He’d assumed that the young Marissia had been ordered by the White to spy on him.
But who was the White to command more loyalty than Gavin in his proud prime?
The White had asked him to kindly give the girl a few weeks to adjust to her new life. It would be bewildering for a young slave from the reaches of the Blood Forest to adjust to life here, she said. Give her time.
Gavin had gone further than that. He had plotted how to take full possession of his newest acquisition as a general might plot a military campaign. He had seduced her as if she were a princess. It was not a hard labor, and not entirely a deceitful one, either. He’d been immediately attracted to Marissia’s obvious intelligence, her beauty, and—no less important to the young, arrogant man he’d been—her desire to please.
In that first year when Karris had left and he’d been so heartbroken and believed he would never see her again, Gavin had even thought that he was in love with Marissia.
As if one could love a slave the way one loves a woman.
It was the stuff of scandal. It was the subject of satirical stories and songs. An entire sequence of comedies was devoted to the dullard Old Giles, the henpecked lord who left his wife for his slave, left all his lands and titles to marry her, and had adventures as he cluelessly attempted the basic labors of farmers, or millers, or salt rakers, or brick makers, or bakers, always failing and always then having to try another occupation in the next story. Usually in another city. Usually because his lady wife had shown up at his place of business.
Other tales of masters and slaves in love were darker and not sung much in front of lords or ladies. Those were tales of the too-pretty room slave whose jealous mistress sold her off to the silver mines or the brothels, or murdered her outright. Like every good gift, beauty was a blessing for the rich, but sometimes a curse for the poor.
The frisson of danger for a lord, who might be mocked by his friends for being an Old Giles, didn’t compare to what a room slave had to feel, afraid on the one hand to please her master too little, and afraid on the other hand to be seen pleasing him too much.
Gavin had decided many times that instead of feeling love-love, he loved Marissia as a master loves a favored hound. You could love a hound. A hound could love you. But loving a hound as one loves a woman? Unnatural. Disordered.
Whatever his few qualms, he had won over Marissia’s heart along with his ownership of her body, and eventually, after he was sure she cared for him more than anything in the world, he’d confronted her with evidence of her spying for the White, pretending he felt betrayed by what he knew had been the point all along.
It had, of course, been unfair. How could Marissia have said no to the White herself—her owner—when she hadn’t yet even met Gavin? But his scheme had worked. After shaming and terrifying her, Gavin had made his accommodation with her: Marissia would continue to spy for the White, but she would ask Gavin what she could share with Orea Pullawr first. There would be certain secrets the White could never know.
And then, by degrees, Gavin had let her learn secrets and false secrets, always watching the White to see what she knew, always testing Marissia’s faithfulness. And faithful she had been, until Gavin had even trusted her with the bread. He hadn’t told her it was for his brother below, but she’d understood it was some awful secret, and Orea had never learned of it.
And now the White, Orea Pullawr, was dead, and she hadn’t used whatever secrets Marissia had told her to destroy him. So what kind of partial betrayal was this?
“Marissia,” Gavin said. “Why would you do this? What loyalty did you owe her?”
Marissia straightened her back, and looked him in the eye. “My name is Marissia Pullawr. The White was my grandmother. You were my assignment. I was never a slave.”
Chapter 4
Karris Guile, the White, the Chosen of Orholam, the Lady of Seven Towers, the Mistress of the Breaking Light, the Left Hand of the Omnipotent, stared out over the Jaspers from her apartments atop the Prism’s Tower. Her word was law on every bit of land her eyes could see. Every drafter in the Seven Satrapies owed her obedience. To most people, she was a figure of near-mythic stature.
She had never felt more powerless.