“It’s done.” My voice shakes now that it’s allowed to. “Sunday next, in the garden. I’ll wear blue at my engagement party. They discussed the alliance, the stability, the family’s future, and my duty, and while they decided my whole life, nobody asked me one question.”
“Oh, Esme.” She guides me to the vanity bench and starts pulling the pins from my hair. “Then there’s still time before the party. Maybe your father…”
“The bride market is the Saturday before.”
I wipe my tears with the back of my hand and stare at myself in the mirror. There, I said it. I didn’t expect it to come out so resolute, but I have no choice.
Darina goes still, her fingers tangled in my hair.
“What?”
“The market. It falls on the Saturday before the engagement party.”
“No.” She comes around the bench to face me. “No. Tell me you’re not serious. Monsters buy women there, Esme. Actual monsters. You’ve heard the same stories I have. They take them from the human cities, sometimes to places that aren’t on the map. Those women get sold.”
“My parents are already selling me. Only with music and champagne.”
“That’s different.”
“It’s tidier. That’s the only difference. You know what Father thinks about monsters. He calls them beasts over dinner, and signs trade agreements with them before lunch. Because they’re powerful, and power gets respect in this city. Fine. Then I’ll go where real, honest power is. And the market has the one rule that actually gives me a choice. The bride decides. The buyers bid, but the woman picks. If you ask me, it’s more civilized than what my parents and Wycliffe discussed in the study just half an hour ago. Even if I’m choosing between monsters, I’m the one choosing. Say the same thing about Sunday, and I’ll stay.”
She presses her lips together, her eyes fill with tears, but she shakes her head.
“When did you decide this?” she finally asks.
“Tonight. In the study, counting Father’s books on the shelves. I stood there smiling, and I understood very calmly that I won’t survive it. Not the wedding, and not the marriage. Not that man’s hand moving on my waist while he tells me what helooks forward to.” I shudder. “He’ll put his hands in other places once he has me.”
“You can’t go,” she says.
“I’m going. The only question is whether you’re coming with me or not. I need you, Darina. Please don’t let me do this alone.”
She takes my hands in hers, and her fingers are cold.
“Of course not,” she says. “If this is your decision, then I will follow you. Anywhere.”
I pull her into my arms, and I hold on to her the way I couldn’t hold on to anything else tonight. In my parents’ eyes, Darina is only a servant girl, but to me, she’s my best friend, the only person in this house who knows me and cares about me.
Over her shoulder, I see the room in which I grew up – the silk curtains Mother chose, the jewelry cabinet full of things picked for me, the balcony above gardens trimmed into obedience – all of it beautiful and perfect. I won’t miss it at all.
I’m already listing everything that can go wrong between tonight and Saturday, so I press my face into my friend’s shoulder, and hold my one impulsive decision steady. Because if I start counting the ways this could end badly, I’ll still be counting on Sunday, when that man puts an engagement ring on my finger.
Chapter Two
Osric
The thornbrush in this garden died before I ever owned the place. The roots go deeper than anything still alive here, because whoever tended these beds gave up on them, and after the tending stopped, the brush grew wild. Now it won’t come out of the ground without a blade and my full weight behind it. I work the blade under each root ball, cut through, and drag the dead brush to the pile against the outer wall. My hands have learned the rhythm of it: dig, cut, drag.
Underneath the brush, the old stone beds are cracked and dry at the joints. I’ll repair them next. After the beds comes the broken shade screen on the east terrace, and after the screen comes the dry fountain in front of the house. I’ve already put the tasks in order, because the order is the point; the work itself doesn’t really matter. No one is going to eat from these beds, and if things go as they’re most likely to go, no one is ever going to stand looking at this garden when it’s ready. Not even me.
I keep clearing it anyway, because a mind attached to working hands stays quiet. And quiet is the only thing I can aim for these days.
The house is at the edge of Haara, where the city thins into black stone, thornbrush, and open desert. It’s old, part dwelling and part watch post, built back into the dark cliff, with heavy doors and deep rooms. When I bought it, sand was packed into the corners of the rooms, and the terraces were cracked through. I’ve made the main rooms habitable – cleared, repaired, reopened – and now that the inside is done, I’m working outside.
Nim hunts along the base of the wall while I dig. She’s a duskcat, a small desert predator, about the size of a housecat but with a longer body, oversized ears, black paws, pale sand-colored fur, and a ridge of small scales running down her spineto protect her from the things she kills. She works the cracks in the stone beds while I work the roots. Her ears turn, she goes still, then her paw snaps into the dark and drags out whatever was living under the stone. She pulls out insects, a pale thing with too many legs, and one small, venomous reptile that she eats head first.
Scorpii don’t keep pets, but duskcats are free creatures that sometimes attach themselves to a lonely house at the edge of a city, where the hunting is good and nothing bothers them. I never put food out to draw her in. She came through a gap in the terrace wall while I was repairing the lower rooms, watched me work, and stayed. She disappears into the rocks when it suits her, sleeps in the warm stone hollows when she feels like it, and she’s suspicious of everything alive except, for reasons she’s never explained, me. I talk to her, and she watches my face with interest. When I feed her pieces of meat, she’s grateful.
The heat rises in my blood while I’m working the blade under another root.
