Slowly, his hands moved to her shoulders. She didn’t move or protest. She wasn’t sure what she wanted, exactly. She had been so terrified with every other man at the House, but he didn’t behave like the other men.
He put his hands on her over-robe and gently slid it off her shoulders, revealing the curve of her narrow waist hugged by her sash, a glimpse of bare thighs between stockings and under-robe. All the stitches at her joints were still concealed by her clothes. She had been told some men liked to see them and some did not.
Grau looked at her, and she could see he was intrigued. She had seen that look before, of course. Hunger in his eyes. Men went about their lives all day, conducting business and working, but if given a chance, they were like wolves.
She braced herself. This was the moment she had been created for. All she had to do was let him have what he wanted. Stare at the ceiling, Pia had told her breezily. Easy for Pia to say, when she’d spent time with Fanarlem men and apparently liked it, but real men seemed so different.
Grau met her eyes again, and he seemed concerned.
“You look scared,” he said.
She shook her head.
It would be perilous to take his concern at face value and rebuff him. She could not forget that he had spent a tidy sum on her.
She unfastened her sash, letting her under-robe fall open, and then she slid the garment off entirely so now he would see the stitches at her wrists and elbows and shoulders, the curve of her small breasts under the thin fabric of her chemise.
He put his hand on her arm. His motions were careful, as if he thought she was made of glass. She tried to stay calm. No one had ever really cared, or ever really would care, if she could play the bastir or make conversation. This was all that mattered.
“You are scared,” he said, drawing back again. “You are a real woman, with feelings, and you’re frightened of me…”
“No.”
“I think this was a mistake.”
He might send her back.
A surge of desperation and unexpected horror ran down her body. She knew in this moment that she couldn’t bear the uncertainty of that place ever again.
“Grau, please, don’t think of it like that! You think I’d be any less scared with someone else? I wanted you to acquire me.”
His hand wrapped around his mouth, thinking. “You just aren’t anything like I expected you’d be. And now that I’m considering this entire situation, I must have been out of my mind. My father made it sound like I’d just go pick out a girl who would be as willing to spend her life with me as our servants are to scrub the dishes. But this is a very different circumstance, isn’t it? When I looked in your eyes I wasn’t thinking of any of that. I suppose I imagined I was rescuing you.”
“You were.” She put her hand on his chest. His heart beat under her fingers. She didn’t expect that, and almost jumped. “Grau…”
“Velsa…” He spoke her name so intimately. He took her hand and looked at it carefully, running his finger along the tops of her fingernails, which were crafted from finely carved slivers of horn. “I wanted to rescue you. Maybe it’s true about Fanarlem. That’s what I’ve always been told. But being here with you now… I can’t treat you that way. I won’t touch you.”
Until you’re ready.
She heard words unspoken. She knew he must assume the day would come when she would be ready. Even marriages were usually arranged, wives not necessarily any more willing than she was. She wondered how long he would wait.
She wondered if she wanted him to wait. Maybe it was better to get it over with.
And yet, she nodded, relief flooding through her.
“You look tired,” he said. “Maybe you should sleep.” He waved toward the bed. “It’s big enough for two. I’m going to look over some work papers before I turn in. I won’t bother you when I do.”
“It’s—it’s fine.” She hurried over to the bed, wearing just her chemise and stockings because she couldn’t very well sleep in robes; they would tangle around her. She ducked under the covers, relieved to be concealed—but at some point he would be beside her.
She didn’t know how she would sleep, although suddenly she was very tired. She really hadn’t slept well since she moved to the front of the House.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
“Yes.” It was actually rather nice, with the room warmed by the fire as the rain hammered the tile roof above. She wasn’t used to being warm on a cold night.
“Sleep well. We’re in no rush to leave early tomorrow.” He took out his papers and held the magic light up to them. She watched him for a moment, in the room’s soft glow, as he looked over papers that were crumpled from travel and smoothed back his wild hair.
“What work are you doing now?” she murmured.
“My family raises freshwater fish,” he said. “We farm it in a lake, pack it on ice and ship it to Atlantis, where it’s considered a delicacy. They have all the ocean fish they could want, so they pay more for freshwater fish. Typical, isn’t it? The ocean fish tastes better.”
“Don’t you think that because you grew up with the freshwater kind?”
He laughed. “No. My opinions about fish are surely irrefutable.”
She fell asleep without hardly realizing it, and woke when he climbed under the covers, keeping to the opposite edge of the bed. She thought she would be disturbed to have him there, but instead the heat of his body and the slow, steady sound of his breath felt like something she remembered. She dared to sniff him gently. He smelled a little like smoke and a little like horse, and maybe a little like man—but not in a bad way.
She recalled the beat of his heart, the flutter of life beneath her touch, and had an impulse to touch his chest again. Instead, she curled her hands against her own still body, and resisted the urge to draw closer to his warmth.
Chapter 4
She woke to morning sunshine. Grau was stirring a pot on the fireplace.
“Would you like any breakfast?” he asked.
“I can’t eat.”
“Oh. Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”
She pulled on her clothes and realized she didn’t even own a comb now. The girls left with only the clothes on their back; everything else was their new owner’s responsibility.
“I have a comb by the washstand,” Grau said, when he saw her fingers messing with her locks.
She stepped into the small room, which had a basin of water and a small mirror, and a lidded pot on the floor for flesh and blood people to do their business. An unpleasant reminder that Grau was a real man, and the girls in training were always warned to try and hide any revulsion they might feel from a real man, with all their sweating and digestion.
At least Grau seemed like he kept clean. He had obviously already been here to wash up this morning and comb his own hair. Last night he looked a little wild, but it was the end of a rainy day. She carefully combed the sleep tangles from her own thick black hair—always trying to lose as few strands as possible—while regarding herself in the mirror. She looked the same as ever: big golden eyes with thick lashes, a perfectly shaped red mouth with ever-so-slightly turned up corners so her expression always had the vague suggestion of a mysterious smile. The girls’ faces had been made so they looked youthful but knowing, and seductive even without trying. In some strange way, Velsa felt this made life easier, because when she looked in the mirror she saw a girl who looked like she knew what she was doing, and this made her believe it might be true.
Grau was spooning rice into a bowl. “I feel so inhospitable eating while you do nothing.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Wherever you go in this country, it’s all people do. They feed you and they pour you drinks. We don’t even know what to do with ourselves otherwise.” He cracked a raw egg on top of his rice and garnished it all with some herbs and salt. “Can you taste?”
“I can, but it really doesn’t matter. That food doesn’t look too appealing anyway.”
“I suppose I could eat, if I spit everything out when I was done. The food has to go somewhere.”
“There must be some magic to allow it. If you already have a vanishing spell applied…to one place.” He looked a little embarrassed.
She hugged herself, embarrassed too. “I really don’t need to eat. It would cost you money and the food would go to waste.”
“Hmm. Perhaps, but it seems almost criminal not to enjoy food.”
When they left the inn, he asked her lots of questions about her life at the House.
“So you were only for sale for two weeks before I came along?”
“That’s right.”
“That isn’t too long, then.”
“It seemed like forever.” Questions like that only reminded her of the immense gap between their perceptions of life. She could never convey the horror of it.
“I guess you’d meet some pretty unsavory characters in there,” he said.
“Yes, but they couldn’t touch,” she said, to reassure him that she was a maiden, as advertised.
“What did you do before? Did you go to school? Can you read?”
“I can read, yes. We had some schooling. Some of it was learning and lots of it was moral lecturing…”
“I see. About Fanarlem souls.”
“Yes.”
“What if it wasn’t true at all?” he mused. “And you spent your entire life trying to cleanse your soul of sins you never committed?”
Velsa was silent. She had wondered this herself, in the private depths of her mind, but never heard a flesh and blood person voice the idea before. The other girls barely touched on the subject. It was not a hopeful idea. She couldn’t imagine flesh and blood people would accept Fanarlem as equals.
She wasn’t sure how he expected her to answer. “If it is true, and I don’t accept my penance, I’ll keep coming back to life as a Fanarlem over and over,” she said.
“Hmm.”
They had reached a crossroads, where a man was urging an oxen through the wet, rutted road. Shops with overhanging balconies crowded around a square, where a few groups of nicely dressed ladies walked with their servants, who carried their packages. Grau stopped to pull out an unwieldy map of the city, its folds so large that they draped on her lap. “Never any signs in this town,” he said. “Not like Atlantis.”
“You’ve been to Atlantis lots of times, I guess?” She had read about the capital city, and the many things to see there. Ruins of old palaces. Canals that ran beneath the streets. Tall ships in the harbor. And the world’s wealthiest merchants, dealing in magic and spices and cloth by day, and by night, frequenting the gambling dens and smoky dance halls. A lot of the girls dreamed of being purchased by a merchant from Atlantis who might take them around to all the night spots and buy them the latest fashions.
“Here and there,” he said. “It’s a lot like Nisa, only bigger. Crowded, dirty, wet…”
“Surely it must be better than Nisa.”
“Well, you’re right,” he said wryly. “It has signs.” He clicked his tongue, urging the horse down a narrow alley. “Some people seem to enjoy it. It is certainly lavish, and perhaps more enjoyable if you have more money than you know what to do with.”
Just ahead hung a sign depicting a hand with a stitched wrist and a pair of scissors.
The Fanarlem parts shop. He hadn’t mentioned anything about this. Was he going to change something about her appearance?
“Wait here,” he said. “Fern won’t go anywhere.” He patted his horse on the neck and slipped into the shop, oblivious to her distress. He had left the map with her, and she tried to distract herself by studying the maze of streets and notable buildings. Almost all of them were unfamiliar to her. The girls were rarely taken out. They might easily be snatched.
Someone could snatch her now, in fact.
She smoothed Fern’s mane, a nervous gesture that the horse didn’t seem to mind. The lane was empty but she remained tense. Grau hadn’t brought her in with him, so he could only be making an inquiry.
A few minutes later, he walked out with a bottle and a triumphant expression. “I’ve got it!”
“What?”
“The spell that allows you to eat!”
“I—I thought maybe you were going to replace some of my parts.”
“Certainly not.” He handed the small bottle up to her. “Drink it. It’ll disappear. The fellow in there said it was safe. I want to see how it works.”
She opened the bottle and took a tentative sniff of the contents. It smelled much like the spirits they served the men in the House. One slow evening all the girls tasted them; swished them around in their mouths and spat them back in the bottle with no one the wiser.
She poured the contents onto her tongue.
“You have to swallow it,” he said.
“Haw?” she asked, around the little pool collected in her mouth.
“Maybe…tip your head back so it gets into your throat.”
She lifted her chin, and as her head craned back, the potion dropped into the passage built into her neck. It was constructed like a small pocket that ended halfway down, but now as the potion collected there, it all opened up and she had an abrupt and instinctive understanding of how to swallow the rest. It felt exactly right, and now she wondered how she had ever been able to stand having her throat closed off.
“It worked!” She put a hand to her neck, her fingers meeting the golden band. “It didn’t even feel strange.”
He snapped his fingers. “Now I have to get you something nice. Something delicious. Is there any food you’ve ever wanted to try?”
“Bread,” she said, without even needing to think. There was a little bakery just down the road from the House. On fine days she would wake herself up by drinking in the air that smelled of fresh bread.
“That’s too easy.”
“I don’t know much about food…”
“Then, we’ll go to a nice bakery and see what we find.” He climbed back on the horse, briefly putting his arm around her waist as he resettled behind her. An unfamiliar wave of feeling passed over her for just a moment—that someone was taking care of her, protecting her, delighting in her delight.
It was not without uneasiness. For all his promises, she was still a possession, and he had complete control of her destiny. He seemed to find her an intriguing novelty, but she dared not take this for granted.
They came to a cafe on a little tucked away street, where the walls were painted yellow and the doors and window frames were painted blue, and plants grew indoors in clay pots. Even on a chilly autumn day, the cafe reminded her of summer. Everyone inside seemed in a summer mood, light-hearted and festive. A fireplace burned gently on one side of the room, where women had shed their coats to drink cups of coffee and bask in the warmth, laughing and chatting. At one table, another woman shared a pastry with a little girl with blue ribbons woven through her hair. Velsa had never been surrounded by so much ease, by arms slung casually over chair backs, the din of conversation, the spoons gently stirring sugar and cream into cups.
A long counter displayed dozens of pastries, cakes covered in chopped nuts and doughy circles drenched in golden syrup. Small glass cups filled with three different layers of cream, and square pies of dough filled with berries.
Behind the counter, three girls with dusty aprons covering their clothes moved with a frantic energy managing customers and products; grabbing long loaves of bread and filling sacks with rolls, reaching with tongs for just the right chocolate dipped fruit.
Some of the customers lingered for long moments in front of the glass counter, puzzling over what to order, brushing off help. Grau, meanwhile, was decisive. He asked for five different pastries, a loaf of dark bread, and butter. One of the girls presented them to him on a plate and it seemed to Velsa that he paid a sizable for sum for the food, but then, she wasn’t
sure how much food ought to cost.
“This one is my favorite,” he said, setting the plate down at one of the few free tables. “Raspberry tart. I went overboard ordering. But this is a special occasion, the first meal of your life. And I don’t suppose you ever have to worry about getting too full.”
She thought she knew what taste was; like smells on the tongue, but no, it was far more potent. She could have eaten forever, as if she had a lifetime to catch up on. Each pastry was different; one was soft and buttery with a glaze of sugar, one was made of very fine layers with a nutty paste inside, one had flower petals baked into the top and tasted as delicate as it appeared.
“I told you I didn’t need to eat,” she said, feeling sheepish at trying them all.
“Eating is such a huge part of being alive. If I was always eating and you never were, it wouldn’t feel right. You’re enjoying it, aren’t you?”
“I am.” She ventured a smile. All of this hardly seemed real.
A man having a cup of coffee at a nearby table kept looking at them. As he stood up to go, he stopped by Grau and said, “From the House of Perfumed Ribbons, eh?”
“Yes.”
“You married?”
“No, sir.”
“Be smart and keep it that way. She’s a beauty. And if you marry, the wife will be kicking your doll to the curb before you know it, even if she says she won’t. They always get jealous. Believe me.” He laughed knowingly.
Grau’s responding laugh was terse. “I got Velsa precisely because I don’t intend to marry.”
“Hold onto that spirit. I envy you,” the man continued. “To have such a pretty little creature to command for all your days, instead of the wife always telling me what to do…and getting older, too. If she keeps going to the shape-shifter, she won’t have a face left, and I won’t have any money.”
“Hmm,” Grau said. “I don’t think I could show my face to my mother again if I talked about a woman that way, Velsa included.”
“Ah, youth. I haven’t worried about showing my face to my mother in a long time.” The man chuckled, moving along.
The Sorcerer's Concubine (The Telepath and the Sorcerer Book 1) Page 4