“I'm choosing you,” she says. “Not because of the oath. Not because of protection. Because I want to.”
“You shouldn't.”
“Probably not.” She smiles, small and tired. “But I've never been good at doing what I should.”
A woman in gray robes appears at the door. She checks the number on Maren's slip of paper and gestures her inside. Standard procedure. The bride waits in one room, the bidder in another. They don't see each other again until the platform.
Maren stands. My hand catches her wrist before I can think. Her bones feel so fragile under my fingers. I could snap them without trying.
“Maren.”
“I know.” She covers my hand with hers, and her palm is warm, steady. “I'll see you on the other side.”
Then she follows the woman through the door, and it closes behind her.
The auction hall is on the second floor. I find platform three and take a seat in the back row, where the ceiling is higher and I can stretch my legs and see every exit. The chair is too small. They're all too small. I fold myself into it and force my thoughts away from the fact that she's in a room somewhere below me and I can't see her.
The hall fills. Buyers settling into seats, talking in low voices, leafing through printed lists of today's offerings. I watch them arrive. Merchants. Minor lords. Creatures of half a dozen species I can name and a few I can't. All of them here to bid. All of them here to buy.
A man three rows ahead turns and looks at me. His gaze travels up, and up, and his face goes carefully blank. He turns back around and doesn't look again.
The auctioneer takes the platform. A heavyset woman with a voice that carries, wearing the same gray robes as the woman who took Maren. She calls the first number. A young woman climbs the steps, hands clasped, chin up. The bidding starts low. Three hands go up. The woman on the platform watches the bidders and her face gives nothing away.
I can't focus on anything except the door where Maren will appear.
They call six numbers before hers. I watch six women stand on the platform while strangers bid on their futures. Some look terrified. One looks bored. One cries quietly while the auctioneer reads her qualifications and the bidding climbs past four hundred. She chooses a broad-shouldered merchant with kind eyes. They leave together through a side door.
The woman who looked bored chose the lowest bidder, a creature with feathers instead of hair and a narrow, beaked face. He offered ninety gold. She stepped off the platform, took his arm, and walked out without looking back at the men who'd bid higher.
Her choice. Always her choice.
“Number forty-seven.”
Time stops.
“Healer. Eight years itinerant practice. Strong blood, good teeth, proven fertility unknown.”
Like she's livestock.
My jaw aches from clenching.
She comes through the door and she's wearing her own clothes, road-worn and practical, my cloak still knotted at her waist. She didn't change. Didn't dress up. Didn't do any of the things the other women did to make themselves more appealingto the room. She walks up the steps to the platform and stands there in her travelling clothes with dust still on her boots and looks out at the hall with those gray eyes.
She's looking for me.
She finds me in the back row. Holds my eyes for a beat. Then she turns to face the room.
“Opening bid for the healer,” the auctioneer says. “Who will start?”
Three hands. Then four. The numbers climb. One fifty. Two hundred. Two seventy-five.
Each one sends a spike of heat through my chest. They're bidding on her. On Maren. On the woman who saved my life, who walked toward the berserker instead of running, who makes the beast go quiet just by existing.
I grip the armrests of my chair.
Movement to my left. A figure rises from a seat near the aisle and crosses toward the front. Scaled skin, green-gray, the kind that looks wet in certain light. Sharp teeth visible when he turns his head. Tall. Not as tall as me, but tall enough. Vashar. Water-dwelling, strong, territorial. The kind of grace that speaks of hunting and killing.
He's looking at Maren.
