BRYN
The block is higher than it looks from the floor. Six inches of elevation turns the crowd into something like a painting: a swirl of bidders along the center aisle, merchants at the edges, house guards stationed and bored.
The woman to my left is weeping. Rehearsed. She must think it’s going to increase her price. The girl to my right keeps her hands folded at her waist, chin lifted. Demure. Someone taught her that. Probably the same someone who taught her not to look at the buyers’ faces.
My mother was an adventurer. She taught me to check a room as I walked into it. Count the exits. Watch the hands.
She meant it for wilder places than this, but the principle stands.
The auctioneer is a thin man in a long coat. He reads from a card held at arm’s length. Obviously he needs glasses but won’t wear them. His voice is a reedy tenor that he pushes into his chest because he thinks it sounds authoritative.
“Next lot. Female, human, twenty-five years of age. No formal trade designation.”
Nothing stirs. The wolf lord at the front scratches his jaw.
“Self-entered.”
The stone troll in the second row shakes his head slowly. The kind of headshake a man gives when he sees something he’s seen before, and it never ends well.
Self-entered means I walked onto this block by choice, paid my own entry fee. Nobody put me here. It means I’m either desperate or crazy, and either way, I’m cheap.
Two creatures at the back confer. One of them, a big antlered thing in a leather harness, leans to his companion. I catch enough. Something about no trade and not enough of her to be worth the feed bill. Laughter follows.
The auctioneer raises his wooden hammer.
“Opening bid.”
The wolf lord bids. Insultingly low. Lower than the ones before me. His eyes go to my hips, my chest, and slide off. Not enough to hold his interest. He expects to walk off with the no-trade lot for pocket money.
The stone troll raises. Unhurried. He’s buying domestic labor, probably. Lifting, carrying, the kind of honest work I’ve done before and could do again.
The antlered creature bids fast and high, which means he’s rich, stupid, or both.
The wolf lord re-enters. The stone troll folds his arms and steps back.
I look past all of them.
There is a fifth bidder at the back of the hall, taking up a quarter of the room. A Naga’s coils do not fit in a human space without rearranging the human space around them. He has arranged himself as tightly as possible, great looped folds of teal-green scales stacked against the back wall, the tip of his tail curled in against his own body.
The humanoid half rises from that coil: shoulders, a long column of throat, a face. Gold armor wraps his upper body. Old work. Filigree across the chest plate, shoulder guards workedinto stylized serpents swallowing their own tails. The gold has darkened in the seams. One of the shoulder plates is slightly loose. The buckle is original. That armor is older than he is.
I want to draw it. That is the first thing I think. The second thing is less professional.
He is watching me.
Measuring me against the room. Deciding whether I will break walking out of it.
I don’t look away. I don’t drop my eyes, I don’t lift my chin, I don’t do the thing the girl beside me is doing with her folded hands. I look at him. He is a thing in the room, and I am not afraid of things in rooms.
Interested is a different problem.
His expression changes, the muscles under his jaw plates shifting a fraction tighter.
He bids.
The voice is confident but not loud. The number goes through the hall anyway, because no one was expecting it. The price doubles the highest bid.
“Going once.” A hush takes over the room as the auctioneer briefly surveys it. “Going twice.”
