My breath catches in my lungs. “Crescent moon…”
The maid hides her bruised cheek with both hands. “Please… just let me go.”
“He’s going to kill you.”
As the words jump out of me, she twists around and looks up at me in horror. Instantly, I make a catalogue of the bruising pattern. It’s the exact match to what I saw yesterday. My stomach drops.
“What say you,” she whispers.
“You heard me.” I brush some of her hair back, checking another wound on her temple. “And it’s going to be soon.”
The timing is in that red on her cheek, and the knot on the side of her forehead. It’s also in the rash around her throat, and the cut on the side of her mouth.
My voice is grim. “You need to leave, now.”
“Please, just let me go—”
I put my hands up. “I’m not touching you. But I’m telling you, he’s going to finish this. You need to take your things—”
“I have nothing, and there is nowhere to go—”
“—and I’ll help you.”
The maid stares up at me with such confusion, I nearly meet her eyes again. “Why would you do that?”
We’ve been speaking in hushes, faster and faster, and suddenly crash into a silence.
Now I want to take her hands in my own, as if that will help my message get through, but I fear that if I make contact with her, she’ll spook and run.
“Because I am you.” I have to clear my throat. “I’ve worked as you are, andI’ve been alone, and I’ve been convinced nothing can or will change. Let me help you.”
She looks away from me, and I study her profile.
“You can trust me.”
“You can’t help me.” Her hand lifts to her cheek, the fingertips skipping along the surface of where she’s been hit. “It’s always thus with him. Since he bought me from my parents five years ago.”
I smoother the urge to scream that she was bartered for. “Don’t you want something else? You make the bread, don’t you? And you clean. Wouldn’t you like a position in a safe home or an inn?”
I think of the dead cows outside of my village and of the Fulcrum. Some savior I am, promising things I fear cannot be delivered anywhere in Anathos.
I place my hand over my heart. “I will help you.”
The maid looks over my shoulder toward the massive hearth. “He needs me to work herein.”
“You owe him nothing, and you shouldn’t feel bad for saving yourself—”
“No, he’s not going to kill me because he needs the labor. He’s careful only to correct me so far as I can heal from.”
Lowering my head, cold despair washes through my whole body… as well as a hot fury. “There are others who work here. I beg of you, fate is offering you an exit—”
“He’ll go after my sister.” The maid rubs the back of her neck like it hurts. “She was part of the brokerage, but she was bought by the stable master. He’s a kind man, and he and his wife have treated her well. She needs to stay with them.”
Frowning, I speak of strangers as if I know them. “So they’ll protect her—”
“He tells me that will not matter.” Her hands tangle in front of her chest, as if her heart is skipping beats. “She’ll be forced to fulfill both obligations. He says that is the way of twins in the law here. We are indivisible, and so he will do what he’s done to me… to my sister.” There’s a pause. “All of it.”
Those hands pull the collar of her undershirt closer together at the base of her neck.
