"She can draw," says the seller. "It's not on her sign 'cause the bloke in Eseo who sold her didn't know about it but I've seen her."

"I can check if that made another hundred materialize in my pocket." She counts the money. It did not.

"I got cheaper ones over there. If you just keep giving her paper and taking the drawings you'd make that much back, you like the look of this one you can pay what she's worth."

"Have proof of the drawings?"

He gives the slave a sheet of paper. She looks annoyed at him but she picks up the pen he supplies with it and draws.

It's an embroidered fish-crab thing, fins branching into articulated legs, claws curving from its ribs, scales of all sizes tiling its body.

Huh. 

"FIne, two thousand."

He takes the fish crab and pockets it. "Pleasure."

"I don't have the money, I'll have to come back."

"I'll bill you," he says, "for the extra, just get it to me in two weeks, I'll need your name and address anyway."

"All right." She can do paperwork! She will have to do more paperwork to get it certified she has an extra vote.

And now she has a new foreign slave, who mercifully seems to understand that this transaction has taken place.

"I'm Amait."

...nod?

The name on her paperwork is in Esevi. She gestures at it in case this helps clarify the source of confusion.

"Ayabel."

"Thank you." She starts walking.

Ayabel follows her. Trips. Gets up.

Trips on something or just at random?

Some unevenness in the road. Continues like that's normal.

Okay. She lives in the nice part of town, big old stone place built around a courtyard.

Ayabel assesses it without speaking.

She goes and finds her mother. "You can write Ancient Sutre, right?"

Her mother says something in what is presumably Ancient Sutre.

...Ayabel blinks. "...I - have to - guess pronunciation," she says.

"I have to guess pronunciation," she corrects her. "You learned it from a book?"