The auctioneer motions for the next woman to step onto the stage. She’s tall, dark-haired, scanning the crowd with proud eyes, and the bidding starts immediately. I watch her and wait for the pull, the recognition every golem grows up hearing about, the thing that’s supposed to tell you when you’ve found the one person in the world who can keep your stone alive. I feel nothing.
When the bidding stops and a transaction is made, another woman steps onto the stage, then another, and so on. One of them cries silently but goes through with it, another plants her feet firmly and lifts her chin, and the bidding for her is generous. I don’t raise my paddle for any of them. I know what the absence of the pull feels like after twenty-three failures, and when it’s not there, wanting it won’t change a thing. I watch each bride leave the market with whoever bought her, and I think about the Stillhalls and about my mother standing under the open sky, and the empty space beside her that’s the right size for me.
The auctioneer calls the next number, and yet another woman comes through the side door.
My body notices her before my mind does.
She’s small, thin, and sharp-boned. Her hair is golden blonde, tangled, falling to her waist. Her skin is fair and covered in bruises, with a dark, swollen mark running along her jaw, and another spreading across her left cheekbone. Her sleeves have ridden up her forearms, and the bruises there are older, yellowing, layered over each other. Someone hit her and grabbed her more than once, over time.
She’s shivering, and it’s not a small tremble but a steady, full body shake that runs through her arms, legs, and shoulders. Sheholds herself around the middle with both arms wrapped tight, and she stares at the crowd the way an animal stares at a pack of predators it can’t outrun.
The auctioneer calls for an opening bid, and no one moves. He waits, calls again, but the monsters watching are silent. No paddles go up, because she’s too small, too bruised and damaged, and no one wants a woman who looks like she might die before any arrangement holds.
My chest seizes. I feel a hard blow behind my ribs, so sudden that I lose my breath. It’s not the dull ache I’ve lived with for months. I don’t know what it is, only that it’s different, so I decide it has to mean something. I stare at the blonde woman, and the pull is there, I’m almost certain. It grabs the center of my chest and drags me toward her.
I raise my paddle. My shoulder grinds and the elbow resists, but I hold it up and call out a generous sum. The auctioneer’s eyebrows rise, he scans the crowd again, but no one challenges my bid. He calls it, and I nod and start the slow journey toward the stage.
Every step is a negotiation. My right knee catches, releases, catches again. Only twenty paces, but it takes me a long time to cover them. I can feel the crowd watching, all of them staring at the crumbling golem dragging himself toward a woman no one else wanted. I need to remind myself that they don’t know what’s happening to me, why I’m moving so slowly. I do my best to ignore the stares and pretend like I’m taking my time intentionally.
I reach the foot of the stage and look at her. She looks up at me, at my cracked stone skin, the moss growing in the fissures along my arms, and at the size of me. She’s afraid, but it’s not just that. She’s trying to read me and determine if I’m a better option than whatever she’s running from.
The auctioneer clears his throat.
“Does the bride accept?”
She nods. “Yes. I’ll have him.”
The tension behind my ribs loosens by a fraction.
We move to a table along the wall where an assistant sits behind a ledger and a stack of contracts. I sign, and my fingers barely close around the pen, but the signature comes out legible enough. I pay the fee, and the assistant counts out her share and pushes the coins across the table. She takes the money without hesitation and produces a cloth pouch from inside her bag, sweeping the coins in with one motion. She ties it and tucks it back into her bag.
We walk inside the building and toward the portal. I move at the only speed I’m capable of, and she matches it without comment.
“My name is Korrvun Thaldren,” I say. “Korr.”
“Sorina,” she says, not offering a family name.
I look at her while we walk. The bruise on her jaw is dark enough that whoever hit her did it hard, and the green edges mean it happened a day or two ago. The ones on her wrists are older, which means someone hurt her over a stretch of time. I want to ask who, but the question presses against the back of my teeth, and I leave it where it is. She’s known me for ten minutes, and I don’t have the right to her past yet.
“Where do you live?” she asks.
“Inside a mountain,” I say. “A citadel called Steinheim. There’s a whole city carved into the rock, halls for living, working, markets, taverns, all of it. Golems and humans live there, a few hundred of each.”
“Both species live together?” she sounds surprised.
“Yes, for generations. The humans run the trade routes and the cutting workshops, and we mine the deep shafts and keep the mountain safe. You will, of course, have your own room. Your own space.”
She nods and keeps walking, and she doesn’t ask follow-up questions. She takes the information, stores it, and moves on, building a picture of a situation she can’t control yet, mapping the walls before she decides how to deal with them.
We reach the portal which is already shimmering. I give the operator the coordinates for Steinheim.
“It’s disorienting,” I tell her. “The first time is the worst.”
She nods, her jaw tight.
Maybe I shouldn’t assume that she’s never traveled by portal before, but I do it before I can stop myself. It’s just the fact that she’s dressed in simple clothes and doesn’t seem to have many belongings with her. Since she doesn’t contradict me, it means I’m right.
We step through together, and the transit squeezes my chest so hard my vision goes dark at the edges. I fight to stay on my feet.
