Free Trade

[Solana]

That was the question, wasn't it? From the mouth of a prostitute. Solana's ears rang with the question, and for a moment the pert way it'd been asked made her spine stiffen. Who was she? She was Querida Solana Beraza de Morua, assistant to the Spymistress of the Morua Duchy of Corezo! She was an aristocratic woman, and a lady of impeccable reputation!

It was a knee-jerk response to Stella's question, and as soon as she opened her mouth and the humidity reasserted itself, and the weakness of her legs and the stiffness of her back ached and pulsed at her, the intended words died. "Nobody," she said, though her voice was almost too quiet to be heard, even by someone so near as Stella. The disgusting throng of people who frequented the market provided a babble of noise around them, making it hard to even hear oneself think. She was delusional. Solana was a slave. "I am nobody."

[Stella]

The slave was nobody. Stella paused, and raised an annoyed eyebrow.
"Do yeh at leas' have a name? Didn't tell it to me before," she said, flitting her eyes nervously to the entry to the butcher's for Lyla. "Weird to knaw a face withou' a name."

Inside her head, she schemed at the same time as she spoke. How could she possibly get Jamil to like her? Her only hope was surely her appearance, and perhaps her native Eyropan. Something told Stella that he would prefer it if she didn't speak the slur of the Marnian lower class. A frown reached her lips.

[Solana]

"Solana," she snapped. The whiplash between the place she'd recently made for herself as ant beneath the boot of Kamesh and the person she'd been for so many years of her life was extreme. It made her dizzy, and her face went lax as she struggled between the reaction the brat provoked and that which had been ground into her skin over the past. . .days? Had it only been days? Better not to think about it.

Had she been told the other's name? She honestly couldn't remember. She honestly didn't care. But if she wanted to continue this farce, to continue without being. . .without. . .

She looked away again. "What's yours?"

[Stella]

Solana. Stella could not place its origin.
"Stella," she said. There wasn't a soul alive who still knew her as Zaskia. There was still always a part of her that wanted to say her real name whenever asked that question. Even though she had been asked hundreds of times without revealing it, the urge remained.

"I will do wha' I can. I need time." It was a fact. Such meetings were difficult enough to maintain secretly as it was. It was better that Solana and Stella rarely, if ever, saw one another. Jamil would take a lot of convincing to come around.
"Come to the markets when you have stuff fehr me," she said, "I'll be here."

Just then, a man brushed past her. He wore a grizzled expression and was covered in the reeking odor of a working man. Sweat poured from him. Stella was used to such stench, but they nonetheless made eye contact, and he sidled in front of Solana to stare at Stella. The timing was impeccable, for Stella had nothing more to say. Now, it was time to turn her attention to her purpose at the market: advertising for Jamil's Tavern.

[Solana]

Disgusting. Deplorable! How many times in Solana's life had a peon in such a lesser position dismissed --

the thought stopped cold.

Right. Of course. They were equals now, or something similar and not worth thinking about. Mouth open to protest, hand creeping close to perch on her hip: Solana turned away. Instead she was left with a dangling piece of meat, set to trap her into something that had once consumed her mind, but now? Now she had a few days to think, at the least. This girl, this Stella, she would not be expecting something for her on the morrow. What if Solana just . . .disappeared? What if she simply forgot about this idea and went to the wind? Would Stella have the wherewithal to lay things bare out of some form of spite? Surely not. Then again, it really wasn't about Stella. It had never been about her.

Solana turned, her limbs feeling impossibly leaden, and returned to Hamah's side. She followed the older slave, moving on instinct rather than conscious decision. Fetch this, stand here, do that -- it didn't matter. Inside, Solana was circling around the same point as the past few weeks. She didn't want the issue to be her problem. She didn't want to make a decision. If things went to the gutter, if they progressed to the point that there would be no return, she didn't want it to be her fault. And that realization, that discovery -- it burned her. Worse than she could have imagined. It froze her out and put her within an impasse. It wasn't something she wanted to recognize. It wasn't something she wanted to think about. So she didn't. Still, it ate at her as she focused on her misery, on the heat and Hamah's bitchy attitude, on the long walk back and the humbling chores she was asked to perform. None of that could fully distract her, but even so she did her best.

Their return to the estate went without fanfare. Solana did as she had been bid, feeding herself and seeing to it that she received enough water. She returned to Kamesh, and not even her fear of him could break through the fugue. She did what she was told. She did it without complaint, but with care. She didn't tremble before him -- so numb, so weak of her to just -- and she did not even much look at him to determine what he thought or felt. In return his demands were not so pressing, and maybe that was a sign that he was pleased. What did it matter? What did any of it matter? Wasn't she stuck? What choice did she have?

But she knew. The point was that she didn't have to think about it. She could keep her head low, and she could survive forever, until age or sickness took her, and that would be that. There would be no more risk. She could be safe. Forever. And when she went to sleep that night, when she lay on her pallet shivering -- the girls having taken her blanket again -- she tried to convince herself that was what mattered most.

[Stella]

They returned to the tavern without much interference. After Stella had been approached by three men, they made their way back with their groceries which would serve the next meal for the girls. The expensive items would feed none but the most superior people at the tavern.

Stella quickly changed out of her sexualized outfit into something only slightly less revealing. Pondering how she was going to get into Christophe Jamil's good books, Stella sat in her dormitory for a long time. Half an hour went by, and eventually the darkness grew outside and she was called back to do the business of being a prostitute. She met with clients, spoke to them, chatted them up as she had trained herself to do since she was a teenager. Eventually the ones who took to her were taken to a back room and dealt with, however they fancied. Stella made no money. All of it was to be given to the Supervisors. The whole ordeal was slimey, but it could have been worse. Stella had been lucky to be talented enough to be here, and not be sold only for her flesh. Stella knew that girls as young as nine years old were sold for such purposes, and what they encountered was nothing short of rape every hour of every day until they could be discarded.

The moment Jamil walked in the door of the tavern, most people turned to watch his approach. Stella did not. Clients knew exactly who he was. His presence was made obvious to Stella simply by those who uttered his name, and by the way his thick-soled boots hit the floorboards.

Stella was standing in back of a John, a man wearing a red turban with dark skin. She had her arm curled around his waist. He seemed almost despondent, his head hung low and his fingers stroking his grey mustache every five minutes. He had a large tankard in his left hand, filled to the brim with beer; he had barely touched it.

The soft lull in conversation shifted back once more once Jamil had left the room. Stella twirled thoughts of him around in her mind, batting her lashes and snaking her other arm around her client. She had her hips close to his stinking body, which reeked of the sweat from the afternoon heat. His skin smelled like both musk and spices, as if he had bathed in the day-old food he had eaten. The infusion of such a stink was repulsive to her, but she was so used to it after living in this dismal place for a while that her nose didn't so much as wrinkle.

It wasn't until early in the morning that Stella was finally able to catch some rest. The Tavern did not always close at the same time, depending on how many customers funneled in after midnight.

As she was just drifting to sleep, she sat up abruptly in her bed, hitting her head on the bunk above her. Grabbing her temples and making a variety of hissing noises, she moaned as the aching pain set in. A girl on the other side of the room turned over, and Stella put herself back to bed.

Despite the failed eureka moment, Stella felt she knew how to get in with Jamil. The way everyone had reacted to him today, the same as every day, made her realize a possibility. He had more in common with her than he, or she, realized.

[Solana]

Numbness.

It cascaded over Solana in sheets, trickling through and over her mind like the water from her baths in Corezo had over her body. She went to sleep, she woke up, she relieved herself, she ate. The world moved around her, and she trailed around its edges. She was a ghost, a phantom that was barely recognized or acknowledged. She was alone. She had thought herself alone before, in Morua, but now she knew how false that pretense had been -- she'd a web of connections and possibilities, and she had torn it to pieces with her own two hands. Querida Solana had never been content, had always needed to pick and pick at those around her, see only their faults and the mechanisms through which they might be dismantled.

Now that sight had been passed onto herself, and it was the only thing she could see.

She settled into her chores for Kamesh, avoiding all eye contact and keeping her movements to a minimum. She was sluggish and dazed, the former sharp precision she'd once admired in herself worn away to something merely acceptable. There was no pride in her, not for the work she did. All she wanted was for Kamesh to leave her alone, to go unnoticed by his cruelty.

She wanted to disappear.

The morning evaporated in that dreary manner, she conscious of time's agonizing passage with every breath she took. She was the mouse beneath the owl's gaze -- there would be no happiness or ease for her so long as she remained thus. She knew it. She accepted it. But at least she would not needlessly risk herself. Her back twinged. The accounts she read through, the numbers she wrote, the small notes and corrections she made in the margins, they were nothing more than the fee she had to pay to keep herself safe. She wanted to be safe. The noblewoman had been left in Morveres, with Sarita's wretched --

A word caught her eyes. She looked away. Kept reading, kept to her accounts.

Again.

A memory twitched. It was quietly suffocated by the cringing, cowardly snake within her.

Thrice.

That time, her eyes lingered. A breath or two, three, four, it didn't matter. She forced herself to continue, the curiosity that had been with her since she was a child crippled but not yet stripped from her. Curiosity was part of her, and that word. . . Tertassos. It was a place. It was an ancient ruin. It was a wicked, chaotic place where reality bent to the whims of old magic and a thinning in the Seal. Eyropa had long ago declared it to be land under imperial jurisdiction.

Adomankh was funneling money towards it. Oh, the word was only briefly mentioned, but a map had formed in Solana's mind's eye. She knew the locations, she knew the people -- Tertassos was a place no self-respecting, power-hungry family would be unaware of, not if they held any interest at all in magic. It represented the forbidden, a chance to play with something that could shift the tides of --

"No," she blurted, hand jerking back from the page she was working on. She knocked over her ink-well, and ink exploded in a pattering spray across the documents she was working on, across the desk and floor.

Immediately, she shot up from her position on the floor, blanching, eyes darting from the black splatter to Kamesh and back to the spatter. She was not stupid. She did not stoop to wipe at the spill -- ink needed special cleaning agents. Smearing it would only worsen the damage.

"I will clean it," she said, because there was nothing else she could say.

Kamesh stood, and stepped smoothly around his desk.

It took everything in her not to back away from him as he advanced.