“But you do,” North says with an edge of acrimony as he slams his book shut and slides it back in his pocket. “Especially if Baedan’s paying.”
“She’s paying if the price is right and the pieces are all accounted for.” Kellig makes a face at the basket of seeping, amputated limbs for sale on the table. “But I admit, it is tempting to make a personal purchase this time. A redhead on one side, a blonde on the other. You don’t get faces like that this far south.” Straightening, Kellig calls out. “Hey, Fanny. How much for the redhead alone?”
“Fifty,” says Fanagin.
“Where is Baedan?” asks North, glancing over his shoulder.
“She gets jealous when I look at other women.” Snorting, Kellig releases his hold on the cage and folds his arms across his chest. “She makes a scene, people die, wars are started. Where’s your boy at? He can smell out magic thin as a thread. What’s he smelling here?”
North doesn’t answer him, looking to Fanagin instead. “I’ll give you seventy-five for both,” he says.
“Gentlemen, please!” Fanagin wrenches me up and pulls me tight against him. A calloused hand stretches over my stomach and clenches the fabric of my dress, hiking the muddy hem toward my knees. “She’s rough at the edges but still soft like a woman where it matters. Forty for her, minimum.”
“She’s already broken,” Kellig says, derisive. Blood and mud flock every inch of my dress; my hair hangs in matted tangles. I can only imagine the bruises that cloud my face. “It looks like you already chewed her up and spat her back out.”
“Ah,” Fanagin says with a grin. “But you know it’s what’s inside that tastes best.”
Growling, I elbow Fanagin in the stomach. It’s not a good hit but it surprises him enough to release me, and I use the advantage, grabbing the front of his shirt and slamming my head against his mouth. Bright stars crowd my vision as Fanagin staggers back against the cage, flabbergasted. Shifting my weight, I balance myself, prepared to kick, but he catches my ankle and twists me onto my stomach. Raising his leather band, he strikes me across the shoulders, the back of my neck. I hiss in pain, cowering on the ground at Bryn’s knees.
“For gods’ sake,” she says, “keep your head down!”
She’s no better than scrap out here in Avinea, and yet, somehow, she’s still somehow more than the stink of urine and sweat and rancid flesh around us. Regal and beautiful and untouched by the frustration, the anger that seethes through me. Is she that balanced, to have such control over her own emotions?
Not me. I learned to fight for what I wanted, that it would take more than desire and wishes on stars. My palms are not on the floor and I am far from defeated. After a lifetime of having my choices made for me, I relish this brief moment of power over my own actions. Control, I think.
Faces gape at me through the bars, torn between amusement and awe, but it’s North whom I challenge with my scowl. His expression isn’t hungry like the others, merely curious. Almost concerned. He doesn’t belong here any more than we do.
Pressing me down with one knee, Fanagin drops his leather strap and pulls a knife from his belt—Bryn’s knife. “I’m not opposed to selling in pieces,” he calls to the crowd.
“I’ll take her hair,” a woman says, her hand stretched through the bars, fingers grasping toward me.
“Twenty tretkas,” Fanagin says.
“Fifteen,” the woman argues with an offended frown. “It’s not that pretty.”
“Twenty,” a second calls, her own hair brittle, matted against her scabby head in a nest of wisps and blackened stubble.
“Sold,” Fanagin says, pointing to the second woman, who claps with delight. Slamming my face into the dirt, Fanagin winds my hair around his wrist, tight and tighter before I feel the blade swing, so close to my neck that the tip draws a narrow line across it.
The crowd roars their approval. Fanagin releases me and I turn in time to see him brandishing my hair like a trophy, spinning it in circles above his head. Anger turns to hate, bitter black and poisonous. Thaelan loved my hair so I loved it, and to see this filthy man trading it for twenty copper tretkas feels like an indignity.
It’s worth at least a silver kronet.
Pushing myself back to my knees, I run my tongue over my teeth before I realize Fanagin left the leather strap on the ground ahead of me. Lunging forward, I pull it into my lap, glancing to see if anyone noticed.
North noticed, and he arches an eyebrow. Interested.
“He’s going to start pulling your teeth out if you don’t stop squirming,” Bryn says.
“And he’ll sell you to the highest bidder if you don’t start acting like you’re not worth the trouble,” I say. “Nobody wants a girl who might bite.”
Standing, I edge closer to the center of the cage, to give my rope tether some slack. When Fanagin turns, I strike the smile off his face, hard as I can.
It feels better than it should.
As he recoils, I slide my arms over his head and pull back, choking him with the rope. The knife hits the ground, just out of reach of my foot.
“Bryn,” I say with a thrill of adrenaline. “Bryn, get the knife.”
She glances over but doesn’t move, eyes locked on something in the distance.
Fanagin twists, yanking the slack of the rope and knocking me off my feet. My skirts hike up as I scramble to reclaim the blade.
He reaches it first, elbowing me hard in the back of the neck. “Who wants her face!?” he roars.
“A hundred for both,” says North, “but as is, no blood spilled.”
Fanagin hesitates, greed at war with his wounded ego. A harsh welt crosses his face and poison puddles through the furrows, spreading over the bridge of his nose. “A hundred,” he agrees at last, spitting in my face before releasing me. Panting, I scramble out of reach, frantically rubbing my face dry against my shoulder. “A bargain for such a good breed. She bleeds fire, boys.”
“She bleeds,” Kellig agrees, but his expression narrows, turns calculating, his attention on North instead of on me. He’s not here to buy body bags; he’s here for North. All of this is superfluous baiting. “One twenty,” he says. “At the very least, they’ll both carve pretty divots in my sheets.”
And bloody divots in your skull, I think.
“Two hundred,” says North.
Fanagin straightens with a grin. “That’s more like it, my boys!”
Bryn blanches and rises to her feet, earning catcalls of approval and wild shouts from some of the men and women pressing closer. Her fingers sink through my arm in warning. “Loomis,” she says with a nod toward the crowd. “Part bloodhound and full idiot.”
I tense. A dark figure cuts through the marketplace, face shrouded by a cloak and hidden behind the beaked mask of a councilman. How did he find us?
Fanagin recounts bids as Loomis slinks to the opposite end of the cage, his eyes a bright, vivid blue against the band of dark skin visible above his mask. They flick past Bryn to rest on me, sizing me up, assessing my threat, trying to place my identity before he rattles the door to the cage.