2
Arin was in his father’s study, which he probably would never be able to think of as his own, no matter how old the ghosts of his dead family grew.
It was a clear day. The view from the study window showed the city in detail, with its ruined patches left by the rebellion. The pale wafer of a winter sun gave Herran’s harbor a blurry glow.
Arin wasn’t thinking of her. He wasn’t. He was thinking of how slowly the city walls were being rebuilt. Of the hearthnut harvest soon to come in the southern countryside, and how it would bring much-needed food and trade to Herran. He wasn’t thinking of Kestrel, or of the past month and a week of not thinking of her. But not thinking was like lifting slabs of rock, and he was so distracted by the strain of it that he didn’t hear Sarsine enter the room, or notice his cousin at all until she had shoved an opened letter at him.
The broken seal showed the sigil of crossed swords. A letter from the Valorian emperor. Sarsine’s face told Arin that he wouldn’t like what he was about to read.
“What is it?” he asked. “Another tax?” He rubbed his eyes. “The emperor must know we can’t pay, not again, not so soon after the last levy. This is ruinous.”
“Well, now we see why the emperor so kindly returned Herran to the Herrani.”
They had discussed this before. It seemed the only explanation to such an unexpected decision. Revenues from Herran used to go into the pockets of the Valorian aristocrats who had colonized it. Then came the Firstwinter Rebellion and the emperor’s decree, and those aristocrats had returned to the capital, the loss of their land named as a cost of war. Now the emperor was able to bleed Herran dry through taxes its people were unable to protest. The territory’s wealth flowed directly into imperial coffers.
A devious move. But what worried Arin most was the nagging sense that he was missing something. It had been hard to think that day when Kestrel had handed him the emperor’s offer and demands. It had been hard to see anything but the gold line that had marked her brow.
“Just tell me how much it’ll cost this time,” he said to Sarsine.
Her mouth screwed into a knot. “Not a tax. An invitation.” She left the room.
Arin unfolded the paper. His hands went still.
As governor of Herran, Arin was requested to attend a ball in the Valorian capital. In honor of the engagement of Lady Kestrel to Crown Prince Verex, read the letter.
Sarsine had called it an invitation, but Arin recognized it for what it was: an order, one that he had no power to disobey, even though he was supposedly no longer a slave.
Arin’s eyes lifted from the page and gazed upon the harbor. When Arin had worked on the docks, one of the other slaves was known as the Favor-Keeper.
Slaves had no possessions, or at least nothing that their Valorian conquerors would recognize as such. Even if Arin had had something of his own, he had no pockets to hold it. Clothes with pockets went to house slaves only. This was the measure of life under the Valorians: that the Herrani people knew their place according to whether they had pockets and the illusion of being able to keep something private within them.
Yet slaves still had a currency. They traded favors. Extra food. A thicker pallet. The luxury of a few minutes of rest while someone else worked. If a slave on the docks wanted something, he asked the Favor-Keeper, the oldest Herrani among them.
The Favor-Keeper kept a ball of thread with a different-colored string for each man. If Arin had had a request, his string would have been spooled and looped and spindled around another one, perhaps yellow, and that yellow string might have wound its way about a green one, depending on who owed what. The Favor-Keeper’s knot recorded it all.
But Arin had had no string. He had asked for nothing. He gave nothing. Already a young man then, he had despised the thought of being in debt to anyone.
Now he studied the Valorian emperor’s letter. It was beautifully inked. Artfully phrased. It fit well with Arin’s surroundings, with the liquid-like varnish of his father’s desk and the leaded glass windows that shot winter light into the study.
The light made the emperor’s words all too easy to read.
Arin crushed the paper into his fist and squeezed hard. He wished for a Favor-Keeper. He would forsake his pride to become a simple string, if only he could have what he wanted.
Arin would trade his heart for a snarled knot of thread if it meant he would never have to see Kestrel again.
*
He consulted with Tensen. The elderly man studied the uncrumpled and flattened invitation, his pale green eyes gleaming. He set the thick, wrinkled page on Arin’s desk and tapped the first line of writing with one dry finger. “This,” he said, “is an excellent opportunity.”
“Then you’ll go,” said Arin.
“Of course.”
“Without me.”
Tensen pursed his lips. He gave Arin that schoolmaster’s look that had served him well as a tutor to Valorian children. “Arin. Let’s not be proud.”
“It’s not pride. I’m too busy. You’ll represent Herran at the ball.”
“I don’t think that the emperor will be satisfied with a mere minister of agriculture.”
“I don’t care for the emperor’s satisfaction.”
“Sending me, alone, will either insult the emperor or reveal to him that I’m more important than I seem.” Tensen rubbed his grizzled jaw, considering Arin. “You need to go. It’s a part you must play. You’re a good actor.”
Arin shook his head.
Tensen’s eyes darkened. “I was there that day.”
The day last summer when Kestrel had bought him.
Arin could feel again the sweat crawling down his back as he waited in the holding pen below in the auction pit. The structure was roofed, which meant that Arin couldn’t see the crowd of Valorians ranged above at ground level, only Cheat in the center of the pit.
Arin smelled the stink of his skin, felt the grit beneath his bare feet. He was sore. As he listened to Cheat’s voice rise and fall in the bantering singsong of an expert auctioneer, he pressed tentative fingers to his bruised cheek. His face was like a rotten fruit.
Cheat had been furious with him that morning. “Two days,” he’d growled. “I rent you out for only two days and you come back looking like this. What’s so hard about laying a road and keeping your mouth shut?”
Waiting in the holding pen, not really listening to the drone of the auction, Arin didn’t want to think about the beating and everything that had led up to it.
In truth, the bruises changed nothing. Arin couldn’t fool himself that Cheat would ever be able to sell him into a Valorian household. Valorians cared about their house slaves’ appearance, and Arin didn’t fit the part even when his face wasn’t half-masked in various shades of purple. He looked like a laborer. He was one. Laborers were not brought into the house, and houses were where Cheat needed to plant slaves devoted to the rebellion.
Arin tipped his head back against the rough wood of the pen’s wall. He fought his frustration.
There came a long silence in the pit. The lull meant that Cheat had closed the sale while Arin wasn’t paying attention and had stepped into the auction house for a break.
Then: a locust-like whir from the crowd. Cheat was returning to the pit, stepping close to the block on which another slave was about to stand.
To his audience, Cheat said, “I have something very special for you.”
Each slave in the holding pen straightened. The afternoon torpor was gone. Even the old man, whose name Arin would later learn was Tensen, became sharply alert.
Cheat had spoken in code. “Something very special” conveyed a secret meaning to the slaves: the chance to be sold in a way to contribute to the rebellion. To spy. Steal. Maybe murder. Cheat had many plans.
It was the very in what Cheat had said that made Arin sick with himself, because that word signaled the most important sale of all, the one they’d been waiting for: the opportunity for a rebel to be placed in General Trajan’s household.