Aya is quite aware that she'd revise this opinion if her opinions had any power over the fate of the old lady. Since they do not, she will stand here and silently call down curses.
She was supposed to be willed to herself. She had plans. She was going to sleep in the temple attic and work for the post office and save up enough to go to Carthapane. She was pretty sure she could be enrolled in a college by twenty-five, doing something useful by thirty - she was undecided pending her more formal education between illegal human export and working within the system for debt relief or purchase-to-manumit programs -
And now she'll just count herself lucky if she gets bought by someone with loose enough security that she can flee over the border without falling into a magic, attempt to teach herself Tsopixi, and do - she doesn't have a plan after that, now. Her plan went up in smoke when the old lady's will was read and she was left to the idiot grandson and the idiot grandson traded her to a reseller for enough to cover his bad investments. She can't go work for the post office with marked heel and no papers.
And she is keenly aware that she is sixteen going on seventeen, which is a much different situation than she faced when she was on the block a decade ago being advertised for her literacy, assessed for her ability to take dictation.
She shifts position. The chain between her collar and the wall jangles. She watches people going by, browsing, reading the sign posted in front of her.
"Ayabel" - 125 seo
16 yrs, healthy
Reads & writes (Esevi, some Ancient Sudre)
10 yrs housegirl experience, previously farming
No history of rebelliousness
Yeah. No history of rebelliousness, because the old lady was old and coming up on the end of her life, the old lady let her read books and left her enough free time to think and draw, the old lady was going to will her to herself and then she could get started on her life.
This history won't last long, Aya doesn't think.
Most especially if anyone looks at the second line and brings her home for the obvious thing.
"The selection is execrable," the duke is telling his servant. "For all the good the border markets are doing us, we could have stayed home."
The stole means "duke", which means - decent household security, probably, but also luxury, and also probably a relatively limited set of people with access to her. She could wind up sold to some kind of labor rental outfit, or to somebody who doesn't have the scratch to make keeping slaves practical but does it anyway to look richer than they are. The color means Viore, which is a step closer to the border than she is right now.
She ducks her head and approximates a polite curtsey, like the old lady's niece made her learn once.
"Hello," she says. "My name's Berete. Housekeeper for his grace the Duke of Viore. Have you served in a large household before?" (Comparatively unlikely that she's served in a duke's house, there being only one of those per province, but plenty of rich folk have estates of comparable size.)
"I cooked, cleaned, did the laundry, took dictation and read her correspondence aloud for her, ran errands in town, kept the flower garden, prepared rooms for guests and looked after them, minded her budget, nursed her when she was sick, and translated parts of her library from Ancient Sudre."
Maybe not. Maybe this was a miscalculation, insofar as she has any leeway to calculate.
She holds quite still and waits.
"Come along," Berete says to Ayabel as the duke starts walking back the way they came. "It's not that far to Chiyavio by carriage; we should be home not long past sundown."
Aya's not going to try to start a conversation, much as there are things she'd like to know. She notes what there is to note about the carriage, takes discreet looks at what Berete and the Duke are wearing from a shorter distance - mostly their shoes, where it won't look so odd to stare - and derives vague wisps of predictions from that. She looks out the window, makes a note of the route, compares it against her mental map of Eseo.
They arrive in Chiyavio after a few hours, but it's a little longer before they stop at the duke's house.
The duke has a stupidly huge house.
He leaves the carriage with a dismissive, "Put her somewhere," over his shoulder.
"Yes, your grace," says Berete, although he is gone before she finishes saying it. "Hungry, Ayabel? I believe the kitchen counts as 'somewhere'."
They're in front of the main gate; Berete leads her around to a smaller and less impressive door in the wall that surrounds the house, then along a succession of paths through at least three different gardens, the last of which is clearly growing herbs and vegetables. From there, they enter the kitchen directly. A woman, younger than Berete but older than Ayabel, greets them with obvious relief.
"Oh good, you're back. I hope I got everything right."
"We'll see," Berete says cheerfully. She points Ayabel to a stool in an out-of-the-way corner, then sets about inspecting the culinary efforts in progress. Ayabel gets samples of everything.
The assistant does not have cause to worry about the quality of her cooking.
"His grace decided, what with his son turning seventeen, that he should get a suitable present. Maybe if he'd ever talked to the boy for more than five minutes at a stretch, he would have known better. Anyway, here you are. And you're to be a surprise, so I have to keep you out of Hal's way until his grace sends for you tomorrow."
"I think we both know what most people would expect a seventeen-year-old boy to do with a pretty girl he got as a birthday present, and I think the chance of Hal going that way is somewhat less than the chance of him running into a magic to see if he sprouts wings. Not that I have the faintest idea what he'll do with you instead."
It does prove to be the case, when she leads Aya there, that the servants' quarters have about twice as many empty rooms as occupied ones. There are plenty of available corners. She installs Aya in a tiny room just about big enough to contain a bed and a lamp, and leaves her there with the instructions, "Don't go anywhere. I'll collect you in the morning."
Aya inspects the room in case there are any contents besides a bed and a lamp, concludes that there are not, wonders whether she's going to get the spare supplies to do any drawing - the old lady used to think her doodles of embroidered animals and exotic plants were cute and encouraged them. The new household might not.
She sighs, flops onto the bed, and decides to catch sleep until collected.
It's a big house. They take a few minutes to get where they're going.
Then: "Here she is, your grace," she reports as she brings Aya into a small sitting room. There are three people seated inside: the duke, a beautiful woman with long hair who is presumably his wife...
He opens the closed one and says, still evenly but with a hint of tightly controlled emotion, "This can be your room. Do whatever you want with it, I don't care if you move things or break things or - whatever. I'm gonna go have a tantrum and then come back and talk to you."
Then he stalks over to the open door - which presumably leads to his bedroom - and closes it very carefully behind him, very much with the attitude of someone who would really, really like to slam a few doors and is refraining with effort.
In many respects this is promising for her sake, even if he doesn't seem to be as reassured by the structure of the situation.
Aya doesn't want to break things, but she does move them a little, exploring the contents of the room.
She finds, mercy of mercies, a fully equipped secretary's desk, with ink and pens and paper, and sets about drawing, as fast as she can while leaving the lines "legible" to her and plausibly part of a doodle to Hal if he wants to look at it later. The last thing she needs is to drop a privacy measure that has worked for her only to find out that her new owner will look at a pidgin of Ancient Sudre, modern Esevi, and idiosyncratic symbology and hit her until she translates her inner thoughts. So embroidered animal doodle it is, some unfortunate lizard that fell into a magic and came out with extra legs and horns and spines, patches of feathers with patterns hidden in their barbs and patches of fur with information encoded in the placement of hairs. She has the thing composed to give her a place to draw smaller thoughts in a few minutes, and the basic sketch of those thoughts embedded in the drawing a little later. She adds detail at smaller and smaller levels of granularity while she waits for his attention to swing back to her.
This place will be hard to get out of. She will keep an eye out, just in case, but there are worse trajectories for the next few years than having an opportunity to ingratiate herself with the heir to Viore, so she might not even try.
She's a birthday present for a seventeen-year-old boy. She may have made a mistake, but she might not have, and she might have wound up here regardless of her behavior at the market. So that's not worth dwelling on.
The seventeen-year-old boy in question comes with a vouch from Berete, who seems nice and has no obvious motivation to lie to Aya, but you never know with freeborns. (The old lady seemed like she meant it when she talked about manumission.) Aya tentatively trusts Berete, which means she shouldn't be too jumpy around Hal, though she suspects enough jumpiness to remind him who he's dealing with and what her situation is might not be amiss.
The room is nice enough. It has paper. If he's giving her a room with a secretary's desk she might continue to have access to it. That's just about the most important thing, after avoiding punishments, and she's pretty good at that - although that might only be because the old lady and her relatives were not, actually, sadists.
She draws self-soothing circles of thought into the scales of one of the lizard's tails. Wait and see, wait and see, wait and see.
Eventually, the noises stop. There is a period of quiet.
Then Hal emerges from his room. There are small fluffy feathers clinging to his extremely tidy and fashionable clothes, which are much less tidy than they were half an hour ago. His hair has escaped any semblance of order and turned into a nest of tangled curls. His eyes are a little red, as though he was crying.
"Welcome to the duke's house," he says wryly, running both hands through his hair (which does nothing to improve it). "You met Berete, right? She's as nice as she looks. Nicer. Father's secretary is completely useless. So's my mother. You won't get any trouble from them on their own accounts; he doesn't so much as sneeze without he's told to, and she doesn't care about anything that she can't eat, drink, or wear. I don't know the kitchen help or the cleaning staff so well, but Berete picks friendly people, she won't stand for a troublemaker in the house. The main thing is not to get Father angry with you. Just avoid him if you can manage it. Sometimes he gets angry for reasons, but half the time he just picks the nearest target."
"He doesn't hardly come up here, anyway, so you should be all right if you stay here. But you'll get bored, I bet, I know I do - hmm, do you want to see my attic? I have an attic full of things I don't want. You can have things from it, it's all mine and I don't care about any of it."
There's a lantern at the bottom of the ladder; he lights it and brings it with him.
The attic is, indeed, full of things. Many of the things are packed away in chests or trunks, but some are just sitting loose on the floor, or piled on shelves. Little to no organization can be observed in the mess. Clothes, musical instruments, what seems to be a set of watercolour paints next to a case of brushes and a large roll of paper, a dusty stack of wooden decorative masks, small ornate boxes of various materials, piles of appropriately masculine jewelry, fancy pens and coloured inks... things.
"Yes, my lord."
She looks through the things. She doesn't touch any of it yet. She can't get attached to material possessions. Even the drawings, even when the old lady kept them and tacked them to the walls, were not suited for diarying because they weren't hers, nothing is hers. But there might be something she could get value out of borrowing for an unpredictable amount of time. She could probably add a lot to the information density of a doodle with ink color; maybe there are books, hiding somewhere, for her to read.
"Come up here whenever you want, take things back to your room if you want them, do whatever you want there. I'll leave you alone if you ask, or I'll talk to you if you'd rather. I can show you the back ways to the kitchen so you don't run into Father going through the house - now or when you're hungry, either one. In case you haven't had time to notice, Berete really likes feeding people, and she's in and out of there all the time. If you show up she'll give you something."
Is he going to really leave her completely to her own devices? She supposes if she's a surprise it's not that ridiculous, although she still supposes it somewhat likely that he'll come up with some need or other and she'll be the most convenient way to address it, even if the need isn't the obvious thing.
He extinguishes the lantern, which doesn't substantially affect the light levels where they're standing - the attic has a large glass window just behind them, which is letting in enough morning light to illuminate all but the most crowded corners. And he goes back down the ladder, and leaves the lantern there, and leads Aya along the back ways to the kitchen.
'Back ways' prove to be a series of bare, narrow hallways leading to a set of bare, narrow stairs from which they emerge into the hallway that runs between kitchen and servants' quarters. The door to the kitchen is open, and emitting pleasing smells. Hal smiles.
The lizard gets two sets of wings to take down her new information - she takes her time with them. She puts the drawing somewhere visible (she doesn't want to be seen to hide things) but out of the way.
The selection is wide-ranging and disorganized, which seems to be something of a theme in Hal's life. If she wants a treatise on outdated military fortifications, volumes of popular poetry from every province in the country, or a collection of recipes for simple rural food, she's covered. There's even an epic poem in Ancient Sudre, sitting on a bottom shelf looking like it hasn't been touched in several years.
- finishes the poems
- goes and gets lunch from the kitchens, and a nonperishable to keep in her room for snacking with fewer stairs in the way
- draws an embroidered bird with an extremely elaborate set of tails that dominate most of its page
- selects another volume (one of the history books) to read, and begins reading it, also in her room with the door open.
He covers his face with his hands and adds, somewhat muffled, "Sorry about the ranting."
sits very still for a moment,
and then she gets out another sheet of paper and draws a mismatched butterfly. She comes closer to actually writing on butterflies than anything else, and saves them for special occasions lest someone be suspicious of the little curlicues and personal ideograms passing for wing designs.
On the one wing, if he's for real, this is close to the cushiest situation imaginable. Effectively unlimited quantities of food better than what she ever learned to make, a comfortable room to herself, shelves and shelves of books she hasn't read yet, an attic full of things to entertain herself with if she takes him at his word, plenty of paper, and no demands on her time.
On the other wing, he seems sufficiently distraught by her presence that he might or might not be keeping an eye out for a way to get rid of her, and while he seems like he'd manumit her if he could, she has no strong reason to believe he wouldn't consider selling her to get her out of the way a strong second choice if it ever came up.
On the third wing, she can make no progress towards her original goal from here. With marked heel and no papers, she cannot very well save up money, attend school with it, make friends and social capital, and use these acquisitions plus remaining quantities of money to create change in things that annoy her about the world.
On the fourth wing, the boy who is (the buffer between her and the man who is actually responsible for) holding her back from this plan is the heir to Viore - the relationship between him and the current duke might be a disaster zone, but there's no sign of siblings anywhere and he hasn't been formally turned out or disinherited in favor of some cousin. She might be able to completely leapfrog her plan, if he's come down harder on the "sympathetic" side than the "does not want her around" side.
The butterfly gets one antenna, and it is on the side of the first and fourth wings.
(She sounds so cringing even when she's actively trying not to be. She wonders how much papers in her pocket would have helped with that, if she'd have gone through awkward months of deferring to everyone she met if she'd been manumitted as expected. She supposes it wouldn't be an awful habit for a junior post office employee to have, and anyway that doesn't matter anymore.)
"It's like... it's like being Father's only son," he says, leaning back against the doorframe. "There is no next heir; after me it's a handful of distant cousins in other provinces, none of which even border Viore, and they all have equal claim. So if I fall out of a tree and break my neck or something, and my parents don't manage to cough up another child in time to grow up before Father dies, it means chaos and rioting at least. Worse, if the cousins get to fighting each other and the King takes too long to come clean up the mess. So every time I think about doing something that might risk my life, it's not just 'what if I die', it's 'what if I die and thereby fuck over a whole province'. You could call that inconvenient, I'd for sure climb a lot more trees without it, but the population of Viore isn't really stopping me from taking stupid risks with my life. They couldn't if they tried. It's just," he shrugs, "I'm not keen on riots. I don't know, does that make sense?"
"I don't know," he says. "Maybe? But I don't want you afraid of bothering me. If you need something you can't get by yourself, that's on my plate too. The part of this situation that bothers me already happened, and it's not something either of us can change, at least not while Father is alive. You're not going to make things worse just by talking to me or whatever."
"If it was something that might take a while, or use up something she doesn't have a lot of, she'd want you to ask her first. And she might want to know I was all right with it, but," he waves a hand to indicate the broad scope of this generality, "anything you wanna do with your time short of maybe burning down the house, I'm all right with."
"If she'd willed me to myself I was going to sleep in the temple attic and I had a job half-lined-up at the post office and I was going to save up and go to school. She left me to her grandson instead and he passed me along to a reseller at the market where Berete found me."
"Yeah," he says. "Sure. So the first step in making me that angry is to become Duke of Viore, and then arrange for me to be your only child, and then spend seventeen years treating me like my only purpose in life is to behave exactly how you want me to at all times, and then you'll have no trouble at all pissing me off. People who aren't my father don't annoy me that much because they're just - they work on a completely different scale."
"And instead I got bought by a retired old lady who wanted me to take dictation because she was getting arthritic. I've been about as absurdly lucky as I could get without manumission papers wafting out of a magic into my lap. Or her doing what she let me think she would."
She undergoes a sort of emotional unfurling over the next several days, when everything continues to be exactly as it was presented to her. She takes the colored inks and experiments with using them in coded drawings; preliminary results are promising. She finishes the history book, its companion volume, several plays, a novel, and a catalog of case studies of people who've wandered into magics and successfully come out with this or that deformity, drawback, arguable enhancement, or crippling condition - instead of dying instantly, vanishing, or becoming permanently stuck to something inside the magic until dying less than instantly. She eats the excellent household food, three meals a day. She gets her change of clothes, finds out where laundry gets done, and thereafter has a suitable schedule of personal and fabric-related cleanliness. She finds a little box of decorative tacks in the attic, puts up her lizard on the wall, confirms that Hal isn't going to make a face at there being a tack hole in the wall, and then puts up the other drawings and the new ones she's drawn since the first day. She thinks she'll take a stab at actually organizing the attic - pretty much entirely for her own convenience - one of these days.
Dinner with the family is a thing in this household. Hal can freely avoid his parents at other meals, and invariably does, but his presence at dinner is required. So dressing up and going downstairs in the evenings is an unremarkable event.
Usually, though, he's back in less than an hour. Today it's more like three. And while he's been known to head straight for his room after dinner and not come out for a while, today he doesn't even make it that far. He comes into the little front room and shuts the hall door behind him and then can't manage the minimal coordination necessary to detour around the couch that is in his way. Instead he collapses across it, sobbing into his hands and bleeding through the back of his shirt.
She thinks, trying to figure out which it is.
Eventually she decides to try: "There's gauze in the kitchen. I could get you some of that and hot water."
She plunks the bucket and then everything else down beside the couch. "If you want me to help I'm going to need to see," she says softly.
She dips a little of the water into the bowl for mixing with the aloe after she shreds it, and with the rest, starts doing her best to clean him up. She doesn't bother telling him it's not going to tickle.
Once she's gotten the worst of the blood away and can tell where the injuries are under it, she shreds the aloe in the smaller bowl of water, crushes the shreds until it amounts to a paste, and starts applying it. "Going to need you to sit so I can wrap you up," she murmurs.
(She never told him what she'd do after the part where she saved up enough to go to school and got herself a formal education, namely: help people. He's the only one in reach; what else was she going to do?)
She lets her hand fall back into her lap.
Sure, that's her experience, too, but that was because she was the only servant in a household in the middle of nowhere. If they'd lived in the city she could have lingered longer here or there, made friends. And she has her drawings, which as far as she knows are not a common outlet.
Eventually, he goes back into his room, and emerges dressed for dinner. He pauses to glance in Aya's door before he goes.
Berete is doing the very last of the post-dinner kitchen-tidying. There is a platter of steamed buns, decorated according to her usual convention to indicate their various fillings, in one of the spots where she usually leaves things for people to grab as they're passing through.
"Huh." Aya shrugs, bites one of her steamed buns thoughtfully, then remarks, "Your - unwarning - about him has proven good so far, but I find myself wondering how you knew to make it." Maybe he's confided to Berete that he prefers men? Maybe there have been others like her, spirited away to this or that other destination for this or that reason? Maybe he just demonstrates enough general concern for the welfare of slaves; Aya would buy that.
"...Hal is... a strange one," she says contemplatively. "Maybe because Duke Halzane asks so much of him, I don't know. But whenever he doesn't have to act the ducal heir, he does the oddest things in the oddest ways. He'll come down and cook with me, or get one of the girls to teach him how to sew or braid cord or weave baskets or wipe floors. He cleans his own rooms - not on much of a schedule, mind you, but often enough. When the Duke wanted to get him a personal servant, Hal told me he didn't want some poor soul to get beaten when he ruins his clothes, and I managed to persuade the Duke it would be a waste of money since he doesn't write letters and he looks after himself."
"Yeah. I grew up in the city; my parents were the cooks in neighbouring households, which is all the cute childhood story I've got because I was a very boring child. I grew up helping my mother in the kitchen, and then I came here when I was - oh, about your age, I suppose. Just in time to meet little Hal before he discovered the joy of biting things. And how about you? What's your story?"
"Second-generation slaveborn," says Aya, "on a farm; I taught myself to read when I was five, got noticed at it when I was six, and I was sold for enough to buy someone older and better suited to farm work in particular. My prior owner had me taking dictation and doing household chores - everything I listed for you the other day, pretty much. She wasn't bad, as these things go, usually let me make a given mistake once without hitting me, left me some time to myself - some of her relatives and friends were worse, but they always left eventually. It's nicer here, though, I'm not sleeping in front of the hearth and you're a better cook than I am and I have so much time now."