When Gargaron leaves in the morning the priest in charge has the guards bring me from the stall where I’ve been chained up overnight. He examines me as he would a tomb spider found crawling across his bed. Tomb spiders are frightening creatures, big and brown, and it’s said their severed shadows haunt the dreams of any person who kills one.
“You look to be a sturdy girl, and better looking than most of your kind. If you behave, I will allow you to live quietly in the house.”
“No.” I’m not afraid of him. My head is in the game. Challenge accepted.
“No?” My refusal stymies him. He wrings his hands nervously.
Shivering through the night in a pile of musty straw as mules farted in neighboring stalls has cleared my mind wonderfully. Of course Mother was right. Of course Lord Ottonor didn’t die of ill health. Garon Palace wanted Maldine Harbor as a staging point for their bid to take the throne. They wanted control of the isolated Inkos temple where boys are taught the arcane and precious secrets of priestly magic. They wanted these gold mines. They wanted my father under their thumb. Gargaron spun paths through these Rings long before I even knew they existed.
“I know my place, Your Holiness,” I say, although the priest doesn’t look soothed by my hard tone and blunt stare. “I belong in the mines with the rest of the criminals and slaves.”
I still love Kal, despite everything. But I choose Ro’s words and Ro’s path. My place is here, in this trial, because I will find a way to defeat Gargaron and bring my people to the victory tower with me.
18
Despite my demand to work in the mines, the priest assigns me to work in the big kitchen, where all food is stored, cooked, and measured out in strict rations. The head cook is a Saroese man but his toadying Efean assistant is the one who enforces the rules with slaps and whippings.
I begin a slow sabotage as I observe the routine. I grind grain so slowly that I’m whipped. I slop soup so it spills. I burn bread on the griddle even though Mother made sure we girls all know how to cook.
Just before the other kitchen workers are ready to dislike me, I volunteer to take over for the girl who makes the water rounds in the mine. She’s grateful because the guards assault her every day. The head cook does not care; working in the kitchen is a coveted job and if the girl complains, he will simply replace her. The priest is concerned only about meeting the temple’s quota for gold every month.
“What’s your name again?” I ask as I sling full pouches of water across my back. I’m working hard to learn names and stories, as Kal would.
“Djesa.” She never once offers a welcoming grin like those I am used to from Efean girls in Saryenia. It’s as if she’s afraid to smile lest any scrap of happiness be torn up and stomped into bits.
“You’re from Ibua, you said. How did you get here?”
“I’m one of six girls. My mother sent me north to live with her sister, who has no daughter. The boat I was traveling in was stopped and everyone on board arrested and marched here.”
“For no reason.”
“Why do they need a reason? They needed people, so they took us. That was a year ago.”
She’s too thin, like everyone here, coated with a second skin of dust, and suffering from a persistent cough. Her once-pretty sheath dress has been torn off at the knees and the extra fabric twisted around her shaved head. There are bruises on her arms. With a shy glance, she goes on.
“Is it true what they’re saying, that you were the king’s lover and he callously cast you out?”
Ro would tell me to give my tale the sharpest turn, but I can’t name Kal as the villain. “His wicked uncle kidnapped me.”
With a pitying look, she rests a hand on my arm. “The Saroese take what they want. Beware of the guards.”
My wry smile surprises her. “What the king claims belongs to the king, even here. The gods will know of their impiety if they try anything with me. But the truth is much greater than Saroese gods and rulers. I am come here on the wings of the Mother of All. Stone by stone and heart by heart, we will fight them. Be patient. Spread the word. Efea will rise.”
Days turn to weeks as my life falls into a numbing routine of delivering water to the guards and slaves. Today is no different. When the guards see me coming they smile in a peculiar way I still cannot interpret after over a month at the mines.
“Here is Lady Bountiful, the king’s beautiful mistress, come to pour water into the pit of the dying.”
“Someday you will be the one begging for water as you lie dying. You will receive what you have earned as the gods measure the lightness of your souls against the heaviness of your misdeeds.”
I always expect to be slapped for my insolence, but as usual they instead call me a vile name, then give way to let me enter the mine.
One spits at my feet while the other sneers, “Make way for the grand procession of the King’s Mule.”
Two women trudge out past me into the staggering heat. Each is bent under a basket full of rock. By the lines on their faces, they might be my age or twenty years older, and that is a question I’ve never asked.
“Honored Ladies, will you have water?”
One mutters, “Mule.” She keeps going.
The other halts. The basket slides down her back, and I catch it, stagger, and barely get it back up on her shoulders. It’s heavier than I expected.
I open the seal of one of the pouches slung over my back and she opens her mouth to let me squirt liquid in. With my body hiding the action from the guards, I secretly pass a hunk of flatbread into her hands. She slips it into the band of dirty cloth wrapped around her chest, which together with her ragged keldi are the last remnants of the sheath dress she must have come here in.
“Blessings on you, Honored Lady,” she murmurs.
“Efea will rise,” I answer, for we speak in the language the guards do not know.
I move on. Another guard supervises the main shaft that cuts into the rock. Workers are hauling on a rope-and-pulley mechanism that brings up a platform with laden baskets. By the shaft a woman named Beswe sits cross-legged on the ground, shoulders bowed, head resting in her hands. I kneel beside her and offer from a different pouch. The supervisors think it is all water from the well but in fact it is a salty chicken broth stolen from the priest’s kitchen.
“My thanks.” She barely has a voice, and judging by her wheezing breaths I fear she will soon be too weak to work. Those who don’t work are given no rations.