The bed is massive, wider than anything I’ve ever slept in, and it’s covered in thick furs and heavy blankets that look impossibly soft. A narrow window in the outer wall lets in natural light.
He prepared all this before he left for the bride market. The fire was set, the bed was made, and the furs were stacked and smoothed for someone he hadn’t met yet. And he never plannedto put me in his own room. This bedroom is all mine, and I can close the door and not have to be with him if I don’t want to.
This is too good to be true. I wonder if there’s a catch.
Korr sets my bag just inside the doorway. He carried it the entire way from the market without my asking and without mentioning it.
“You can move whatever you want,” he says. “Change anything. If you need something, ask me.” He pauses. “Meals are taken down in the Corehalls with the other golems, but I can bring food up here if you’d rather not go there yet.”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and I get the impression that he wants to say more, but he doesn’t know how. His mouth opens and closes. He looks at me, and I watch him and wait, because I know this part. This is when the door shuts and everything changes.
But he doesn’t step closer. He doesn’t even lean into the room. His eyes move over my face, and I’m aware that he’s studying the bruises there. They probably look worse than last night. Eventually, he averts his gaze without asking the questions he obviously has.
“You’re safe here,” he whispers.
He makes it sound like it’s obvious. Well… to me, it’s not. I appreciate him saying it, but again… Can I trust him?
I’m standing in front of him, covered in marks that tell a story I don’t want him to know, and I’m grateful that he doesn’t ask me about it. I’m ashamed of how I look, ashamed of the proof pressed into my skin that someone put their hands on me and I didn’t stop it, and I’m grateful that he gives me the dignity of silence.
Korr nods once, turns, and walks away. I listen to his heavy footsteps, then the creak of a door, probably to his own bedroom. When silence envelops this new, strange space that is mine now, I cross to the door and close it. That’s when I seethere’s a bolt on the inside. I slide it shut and stand there, my hands trembling.
I can’t believe the door has a bolt and I can lock myself in. Even if he has a key, it doesn’t matter, because the bolt is heavy iron and it has to be removed from my side.
I’m tired beyond belief. I back away from the door, not daring to look away from it yet. I sit on the edge of the bed and try to figure out what kind of trap I’ve walked into.
The furs are thick under my hands, the fire is steady, and the door has a bolt on the inside. Beyond it, there’s a golem who asked nothing of me and touched nothing he wasn’t invited to touch. I’m inside a mountain, surrounded by stone, and I belong to a creature I met less than an hour ago.
I take a few deep breaths and press my palms to my eyes. This isn’t a trap, I tell myself. I’m far from Tessana, and that’s what matters. Nobody will find me here. If anyone back home hears that I went through a bride market, they’ll assume I’m gone, and after a while, they’ll stop looking, because there’s no point.
I think about my parents. My grandmother. I haven’t spoken to them in too long, and every month that passes makes it harder to imagine what I’d say. I should write them a letter. I should tell them I’m alive, that I’m somewhere far away, that I’m all right. But not yet. First, I need to find out if I actually am all right, or if the comfort I’m surrounded by is just a different kind of prison.
I chose Korr because he was the only one who bid on me. I stood on that stage, bruised and shaking, and the market stayed quiet until his paddle went up. I didn’t have the luxury of waiting. I needed someone to buy me, and he was the only one who was interested.
I hope he’s the right choice.
I lie down and look up at the ceiling, where a thin vein of quartz catches the firelight and holds it in a faint glow. Aftera while, I curl onto my side and tuck a hand under my tender cheek. My eyes close as I fall asleep. I keep my boots on.
Chapter Four
Korr
The diamond won’t stay between my fingers.
I pinch it from the tray, hold it up toward the magnifying lens clamped to the edge of my bench, and my thumb slides off the facet before I can get it into position. The stone drops back into the tray. I try again. My forefinger barely bends past the first joint, and my thumb grinds at the knuckle, stiff and slow. I get the diamond pinched sideways, not the grip I need, but enough to lift it, and bring it toward the earring setting held in the bench clamp.
The first earring is finished, sitting on a square of dark cloth to my left. It’s a drop design, a small diamond in a four-prong gold setting at the end of a short stem. It’s simple, balanced, and understated. Irrva will sell the set through her contacts in the Narrowhalls market once I finish it. The second earring is clamped in front of me with its four prongs shaped and waiting, open around an empty setting. I formed them before the trip. Now I need to seat the diamond and bend the prongs down over it to hold it in place, but my hands are making an hour’s work feel like I’m learning the craft all over again.
I manage to drop the diamond into the setting. It sits crooked. I nudge it with the tip of my setting punch until it centers, then I pick up the small pliers and start bending the first prong down over the stone. The pliers feel heavy in my grip. They shouldn’t, since I made them myself, sized and balanced so I could use them for hours without strain. That was two years ago, and my hands were different then.
My workshop is my sanctuary. I spend more time here than in my quarters. The bench takes up most of the space, and racks of tools line the wall behind me. There are tweezers, files, pliers in three sizes, a small hammer, setting punches, and a solderingtorch on a hook. Trays of sorted stones sit on a shelf above the bench, each one labeled by cut and carat. Spools of gold and silver wire hang from pegs near the door. A few finished pieces rest on a display shelf by the entrance: two rings, a pendant, a chain with a clasp that took me eleven attempts to get right. The walls are bare stone, and the electric light overhead gives off a low buzz that I stopped hearing years ago. The room smells comforting to me, of metal filings, rock dust, and the faint char of old solder.
I used to spend my days in the mine. I supervised the deeper shafts, managed the crews, and knew every tunnel, support beam, and fault line in the lower levels. I was good at the work, it mattered to me, and when the calcification took my ability to do it, I lost the one thing that told me I had a place in Steinheim. A golem who can’t mine, can’t haul, and can’t swing a pick… Well, I don’t know what that golem is for. Irrva tells me I’m worth plenty, and she says it with such force that arguing with her is pointless. But Irrva loves me, and love makes people generous with the truth.
The jewelry started because I had nothing else to do with my hands. I watched the human cutters and polishers in the Forgehalls for years while I ran the mine, and the precision fascinated me, the way a single adjustment to an angle changed how light moved through a stone. I taught myself by ruining a lot of gold and silver, and eventually Irrva looked at a ring I’d made and said she could sell it. She sells most of my creations now, and they bring in good money. The pieces I make with my failing hands end up on human women’s fingers, necks, and ears, and that is one of the few things that still makes me feel like I’m putting something into this citadel instead of just taking from it.
I tighten the third prong and inspect it through the lens. It’s clean, and I’ve got one prong left.
The detail work is supposed to stop my mind from going where it wants to go. When I focus on the pressure needed to bend gold without cracking it, on the alignment of a prong against a facet, on the symmetry between two pieces that need to match, there’s no room for anything else. That’s why I came to the workshop instead of staying in my quarters, where the silence is too deep and Sorina’s door is closed on the other side of our common living space.
