And then the great gates were opening, and we were inside.
The cheery irreverence of the road camp was nowhere to be seen. Instead, hundreds, maybe thousands of women were milling around corrals, like cattle. Most of them were dirtier than the ones in the cage outside, the rain having mostly missed this place, and a good number looked haunted, like they’d been there too long. Which would have been five minutes for me, because the place stank like a sewer.
I gasped, eyes watering, as I was towed forward. Past pens of bleating sheep and screaming goats, past a mass of camp followers around tables and cauldrons, trying to turn the animals into dinner, past a bunch of servants scurrying around with armloads of firewood, past wagons piled high with barrels or vegetables, past a tent filled with gray-clad fey doing something I couldn’t see because I was pulled by too fast. Past a hundred other sights, smells, and sounds that slapped me in the face, like the billowing smoke from a passing cook fire.
And into a corridor made up of two long rows of tables, one on either side, where new arrivals were being processed.
At least, it looked like that was the idea. But there was only a narrow space in the middle, which was completely filled with screaming, crying, desperate women. And struggling guards, who were attempting to organize the new arrivals, strip them of their possessions, and get them into outfits similar to mine.
It might have been going better, except the women’s possessions apparently included their children. Who were being separated from their mothers and passed over the backs of the tables, to waiting carts. I doubted they were going to be hurt, considering how much the fey prized kids.
But the women obviously didn’t know that.
One screamed as her daughter was ripped from her arms, and then leapt after her, scrambling frantically onto one of the tables. And sending baskets of runes and amulets, wands and rings, scattering everywhere in the process. And kicking and screaming, and calling the girl’s name over and over, when one of the guards grabbed her and tried dragging her back.
Until she clawed his face with her nails, drawing long lines of blood, and he took out a batonlike club and punched her in the temple. Causing her to collapse like a dropped rag doll, her flame red hair brilliant in the torchlight. Almost as much as the blood seeping onto the ground around her probably fractured skull.
“What are you doing?” Rosier whispered as I realized that I’d unconsciously started toward the woman.
The boy was tugging at my hand. “Come on! Come on!”
But I didn’t come on. I just stood there, my fist clenched on the pack rope, as several guards converged on the fallen woman. Only someone else reached her first.
There was a sudden commotion, loud enough to be heard over the din, and a small form shot out from under the table. “Mama! Mama!”
I didn’t have to ask whose child it was; the hair was bright as flame. As bright as her mother’s when she threw herself on the body, sobbing and repeating that same word over and over, while the two spills blended together. Impossible to tell the difference.
“Listen to me,” Rosier said, his voice low and urgent. “There’s nothing you can do. If she’s dead, she died fifteen centuries ago—do you understand? You can’t help her. You can only hurt us!”
“I understand.”
“Then why are you still moving?”
I wasn’t sure. A male fey in gray had just knelt beside the fallen woman, holding off the guard with a raised hand. Another fey, female this time, ducked under the table and put the child to sleep with a touch to her cheek. She carried her away while the slaver’s boy practically pulled my arm off, yelling, “You come! You come!” loud enough to draw the attention of two nearby guards.
There was suddenly nothing left for me to do.
Except the obvious.
I knelt and picked a bundle off the ground and then got to my feet, just as the guards reached us.
They seemed more interested in the ongoing scene beyond me, where the fey in gray was saying something the spell couldn’t translate to the red-faced guard, who didn’t seem to like it. His hand tightened on his weapon, causing an audible gasp to run through the nearby crowd. But he hadn’t raised it before what looked like an officer caught his arm, his grip as fierce as his expression. And all but threw him at the two guards in front of me.
One of them grabbed him while the other reached for me. “What did you pick up?”
“What?”
He grabbed my wrist. “Show me what’s in your hand!”
I spread my hands open, both of them, palms up. “I stumbled,” I said. “No shoes.”
He looked down at my feet, and then back up at me, eyes narrowed. But the impatience—and fearlessness—of an eight-year-old saved me. “She been checked already,” the boy told him, tugging on me. “She Budic’s girl!”
And to my surprise, we were waved on through.
It wasn’t much calmer on the other side as we fought our way through the crowd outside the pens. Fey were wandering about, sizing up the merchandise on offer, while a small army of humans rushed around, putting smears of paint on the women’s tunics in various colors. Both groups ignored the weeping, traumatized chattel desperately asking after missing family members, insisting they shouldn’t be here, or begging for help. Or, in more than one case, rocking mindlessly in the mud, with vacant looks on their faces.
“What’s going on?” I asked Rosier, my lips numb.
He had climbed partway out of the pack and onto my shoulder and was staring around with big eyes. “This can’t be happening—”
“Well, it looks like it’s happening to me!”
“You don’t understand. There’s a treaty. It governs how many women the fey can take at one time. There are strict limits—”
“This is limited?”
“No.” He stared around some more. “No.”
And then we were dragged up to a harassed-looking man in the middle of the concourse, who pointed the boy toward a tent. One like all the others crowded into the back half of the enclosure, except that this one had a cluster of guards standing in front. And was pitch-dark inside.
At least to me. The torches burning outside the entrance had blinded me as we passed through, but I guess that wasn’t true for everyone. Because I’d no sooner come through the door than somebody swore.
“What the hell is that?”
“The hell indeed,” someone else said as the boy dropped my hand.
“You stay here,” he told me as I looked around blindly. “You go out, the guards kill you. You understand? They kill you dead!”
“I understand,” I said, my eyes straining to identify some gray blotches scattered here and there, in between pulsing afterimages.
“They kill you dead!” he repeated, just to be sure we were clear. Then he left me alone with the blotches. A few of which were starting to drift closer.