WREN
The platform was splintered wood, rough enough to catch on the hem of my dress if I didn’t step carefully. Three steps up. A turn to face the crowd. The auctioneer’s hand on my elbow, positioning me like furniture.
“Scribe,” he announced. “Literate in five scripts. Good health. Twenty-four years. Starting bid.”
Not my name. Not that I expected it.
I kept my chin up. My hands steady at my sides.
This is fine, I told myself. This is just standing. I’ve been standing my whole life. I can stand for ten more minutes.
Sorley bid first.
I knew he would. He was my uncle’s creditor, a thick-necked trader who’d been circling our household for months, watching me carry documents back and forth, watching me work. He smiled when our eyes met. The smile said:I already own you. This is just paperwork.
“Ten thousand gold.”
A murmur ran through the crowd. High bid. Very high for a scribe with no particular beauty, no virginity to sell, nothing special about her except ink-stained fingers and a talent for being useful.
But Sorley wasn’t paying for me. He was paying to own my uncle’s debt and everything attached to it. Including me.
Other bids came in. Lower. Testing. Sorley swatted them away without looking, his eyes still on mine, still smiling that smile.
“Eleven thousand.”
I did the math without meaning to. Eleven thousand cleared my uncle’s debt with fifteen hundred to spare. Enough for Sorley to feel he’d gotten a bargain. Enough for my uncle to gamble away in a month.
Eight years. Eight years of copying documents until my hand cramped, of managing accounts he was too drunk to read, of being the silent machine that kept his household running. Eight years of standing between my uncle and my sister, making myself so useful he never looked twice at Elspeth.
She was fifteen now. Three more years until she’d be old enough for this platform. Three more years I’d bought her by being valuable.
And this was where it ended. On a splintered platform, being bought by a man who’d looked at my hips before my face.
I was not going to cry.
The bidding slowed. Sorley leaned back, satisfied. The auctioneer opened his mouth to call it.
And then I felt it.
Someone watching me. Not my body. Not the useful parts of me that could cook and clean and calculate. Something else.
I found him at the back of the crowd.
He stood perfectly still. That was the first thing I noticed, because no one stands that still. People shift their weight. They scratch their noses, adjust their collars, fidget in a hundred tiny ways they don’t even notice. This man was motionless. A statue. A held breath.
Tall. Taller than anyone around him, and broader too, his shoulders blocking the torchlight behind him. A cloak of iridescent feathers caught the light, bronze and black and gold. It moved without wind, rippling like something alive.
His face was shadowed, but I could see his eyes.
Amber. Fixed on me with absolute focus.
No. Not on me.
On my hands.
I felt it like a touch. Like he’d reached across the crowd and pressed his thumb to the inside of my wrist. My hands, ink-stained, callused from years of gripping pens, nails cut short and practical. My hands that no one ever looked at except to put more work in them.
He was looking at them like they meant something.
