And before I can protest, or say anything at all, his back is turned and he’s gone, the wardrobe door swinging shut behind him.
I get to my feet shakily. It’s not so much that I’m nervous about approaching Saber as that I’m utterly stunned there’s any kind of slave market at all. Not surprised in the least that Lord Aaron knows about it; he’s always involved himself more in the world outside our own than I have. But this? Certainly I had a sheltered upbringing, even before moving to the palace. We’re a wealthy and somewhat insular people. But we’re not stupid. There’s not a nation in the world that condones slavery—hasn’t been for decades. There are places where people are overworked, underpaid, in some cases perhaps not much better off than slaves. But to mark a person like a piece of inventory?
In this respect, at least, Reginald is more truly Baroque than anyone at the court he despises.
The door of Saber’s chamber is ajar, but only a few centimeters. I raise my hand, knuckles forward, to knock, but hesitate. Knock? On the door to a room we’ve shared? Where my sense of hope in life was rekindled after I thought it had been extinguished for good? And now to knock as though I’m a stranger—no. I relax my hand and push softly instead.
He’s sitting on the bed with the fingertips of each hand touching. The pose appears casual at first, until I see that his fingers are pressed so tightly that they’re white.
“Saber?”
He startles. He didn’t hear me come in. But at least his fingers separate. He jumps to his feet and looks everywhere but at me. “Is he gone?”
“Lord Aaron? Yes.”
“We should go too.”
“I don’t think we should.”
“Why not?”
“Saber, you—”
“Nothing has changed, Danica. I’m the same person, living the same life.” He pauses, his face a tableau of sharp angles. “You still have a job to do, and, quite frankly, so do I.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What good would it have done?” he whispers.
“I don’t understand. It can’t be legal.”
“Says the person selling drugs.”
I step back like he’s slapped me across the face, but he’s not wrong. “I don’t…how? What happened?”
He shrugs as though it doesn’t matter. “My family lived in Eastern Mongolia until I was eight. When the East Asia Conflict got bad, we fled—us, and a million others. We did better than most, got as far as Paris before we ran out of money. Reginald found us sleeping in an alley and said he could get my family to North America—at a price.”
“You were the price.”
He nods. “Made sense, really. I have four younger siblings. Add in my parents and it was a choice between saving six people and letting seven people starve. We weren’t here legally—no papers, no money. Altan wasn’t even two yet. I don’t…” He hesitates. “I don’t fault them,” he says, more emotion creeping into his recitation now. “They didn’t have any good choices.”
“Ten years.” It’s not really a question, simply me doing the math. “And you never tried to—”
“Run away?” Saber asks with a bitter edge that makes my chest hurt. “You ever studied slavery? In any culture? Running rarely works out very well.”
“But you’re here. Can’t I…I don’t know, put you on a plane to somewhere?” I rush forward when he starts to protest. “I’m sure Lord Aaron and I could arrange it. I can use some of my earnings. You’d be on a different continent before Reginald even knew you were gone.”
“Stop!” Saber says, his hands on my upper arms. “You think I haven’t considered it? You think I haven’t thought about all of this before? I’m not stupid.”
“Of course not,” I say. Almost plead. I just want to get him out of this situation. It makes me sick!
He pushes his shoulders back and slips out of the tight livery jacket. I realize what he’s doing when he starts unbuttoning the cuffs of his linen shirt, and my heart starts to pound. I know what’s there. But now, comprehending the significance of it, I can hardly bear it.
He pushes the shirt up, and I look more closely at the black mark. It’s ten years old, but the lines are still crisp and dark.
“It’s code,” he says softly. “People with the equipment to decrypt it can see my…status. My name, who owns me. There are markings that can be added to say something about my skills, indicate that I’m for sale, even list a price. People like Reginald have diverse interests—drugs, counterfeiting, smuggling, you name it. And every single one of them is careful to the point of paranoia. The slave markings are one way they’ve found to do business without saying a single, possibly incriminating word.”
It doesn’t sound paranoid to me at all—it sounds insanely brazen. Tattooing sensitive information onto a human being, even encrypted, sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s so open. So obvious.