Federo looked up at me, though his face was mostly in shadow. “I have bought many things from many peo-”
“I am not a thing!”
We were both silent, staring at one another as some crate crashed to the floor below us.
“I know you are not a thing,” he hissed after the rumble and mutter of voices below resumed. “I am sorry for how I spoke. But please, Green, you surely take my meaning.”
Bending back to my own sewing, I grumbled that I understood. But how could he not know? How could this man buy me like fruit at a market, strip me away from my family and all my heritage, and recall nothing?
Federo resumed speaking. “I can tell you this much: A man there watches for families with children of… potential value.” His voice dropped as he blushed with shame. “F-families where there is trouble. No money, or the death of a parent.”
Which made me what? A commodity, of course. A brokered, broken child. “I suppose you have a bill of sale?” I asked in my nastiest voice.
“No.” Now he sounded weary and sad. “You were a cash transaction. I have a note in my account book.”
“Was I a bargain?”
He stared at me a long while. Then: “I believe I am done with this conversation.”
I wanted to make a fight with him. I wanted to rage at him for stealing everything from me and then pouting at my questions. Federo had claimed the privilege of power when he bought me, and now he claimed the privilege of injured dignity in order to remain silent concerning the truths of my life.
There was no purpose in attacking him. It might satisfy my pride, but anger from me would not prompt him to tell me any more than he already had. Patience was a hard lesson. My teachers had been very thorough.
The Dancing Mistress joined us that night. She brought more food, this time strips of smoked venison along with dried braids of shallots and garlic. After our conversation failed, Federo and I had spent the day sewing in silence. Occasional comments passed between us, but the best thing I could find to do with my anger was let it retreat back down the well from which it ever bubbled.
Her arrival was a fresh breeze stirring our thickening air of mistrust. She looked at us both and must have understood what had passed. Eventually I came to understand that her kind did not judge human faces so well, but they could read human scents quite clearly. The two of us reeked of the banked fire of our argument. That evening, all I knew was that she sat down and laid out a simple meal, then quite literally interposed herself between Federo and me.
“You have made great progress.”
We’d sewn over twelve hundred bells. Less than four years of my life, but a good day’s work. My fingers ached with the myriad stabs of the needle. That was progress.
“Yes,” I admitted.
The Dancing Mistress inclined her chin as she nodded gravely at Federo. Her voice was pitched low. “Your day was good enough, I trust.”
“We spoke of things past,” Federo muttered.
She turned back to me. “This upset you?”
What an astonishingly stupid question. I just stared at her.
“You are afraid,” she said.
“Angry, not afraid.”
“Fear and anger are opposite faces of the same blade.”
I’d read versions of that statement in half a dozen texts. “Don’t quote platitudes at me!”
“Just because words are often repeated does not rob an idea of its truth.” Her voice remained mild. “Some might even think the opposite.”
“I have a lifetime’s worth of anger. What am I afraid of, then?”
The answer was simple enough. “The consequences of what lies behind you. The price of what lies before you.”
“Price. Life is nothing but prices.”
“To be sure.” She picked up a needle and began to sew where I had left off to eat. “You are twelve years of age now, yes?”
“I believe so,” I admitted.
Federo winced.
The Dancing Mistress continued. “At home, you would marry soon.”
Mistress Cherlise had told me I’d be wife to some sweating farmer. True enough, I supposed, and I didn’t wish for that life. But what had I become instead?
She went on as if I had answered. “Here in Copper Downs, you were almost ready to be turned out as consort for the Duke, or one of his favorites.”
“Monthlies or no monthlies,” muttered Federo.
“What of it?” I asked.
She was implacable. “You are afraid of that change. Both your fates have been denied you. You were born onto a path that Federo bought you away from. You were trained within the walls of the Factor’s house for a different path. Even our night running work was little more than a twisting of that second way. You cut that fate away when you marred your beauty and killed Mistress Tirelle. What remains?”
“Fear,” I told the silk I had once more gathered into my hands.
“Choice,” she said. “Which you have exercised to join Federo and me in this latest effort.”
I wasn’t afraid of what would happen, I realized. That was almost beyond any control of mine. I wasn’t afraid of my choices, either. She did not quite have the right of that. Even with all her cruelty, Mistress Tirelle had always prepared me for some kind of greatness. I had been spared the jaws of the ocean leviathan. Endurance had watched over me with a purpose. The prospect of extraordinary effort did not daunt me.
Everybody died. That was fearsome, but this fear was more than that. Everybody hurt. The fear I felt was somehow still more.
I thought awhile as I sewed. My grandmother had gone to the sky burial wrapped in her shroud. My silk was supposed to be the track of my life, the thing that told my days. Each bell should have had meaning, this one when I met my husband, that one when I bore the first of my children.
Finally I decided that I was afraid for my spirit.
I looked up at the Dancing Mistress once more. Her sloped eyes gleamed in the light of our little lamp. She was waiting for me to speak.
“Do your people have souls?” I asked her.
Maybe her answer would tell me more about mine.
She thought for a while, glancing at me as she worked. The hooded lamp glowed between us. Federo picked with his needle. He seemed content to wait out the conversation.
Finally the Dancing Mistress spoke. “When a child is born, we bind the soul with flowers and food. The community feasts to share the soul. That way it is not lost if there is an accident or disease, but kept alive within the hearts of many.”
Curiosity competed with my fear and frustrated anger. “What about your names?”
She smiled. “Those are for our hearts alone.” She gathered up a handful of the silk and shook it at me. Hundreds of bells jingled, those not swallowed in the folds of the cloth. “Here is your soul, Green. Do not fear for it. Most people never find theirs. You are making yours as real as your hands.”
The sound of the bells brought me back to the memory of my grandmother’s funeral procession. I was hers, through my nameless father and his nameless hut in a nameless place on some road in Selistan. I did not know his name, or the name he called me. Federo had not bothered to ask, for to him I was just a girl.
In all the years within the Factor’s house, I had forgotten too much. If I lived through these days before me, I resolved, I would return to Selistan and reclaim my life.
We were done with the silk in the middle of the evening two days later. This time they’d both stayed with me. All of us sewed, talking quietly from time to time, working to be ready. The silk was flecked with droplets of blood from stabbed fingers, and my own hands were most unpleasantly stiff, but we were done.
“If you still agree with the plan,” Federo said, “we will guide you out of the warehouse before dawn. You can walk the streets once it is full light and the life of the city resumes. If the Ducal guards take you then, there will be witnesses.”
“Being arrested in front of witnesses tends to be healthier,” the Dancing Mistress observed.