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WHEN LUCA RETURNED to Isen’s home, there was a litter sitting to one side, a single unfamiliar slave rubbing it clean.
“The master is here—the master of this house, I mean,” Cole explained. “He arrived maybe an hour ago.”
Luca’s stomach tightened. “I see.” If Falten Isen had returned, Luca would not be able to remain long. He would have to decide soon where he would go with his new life.
He ascended the stairs, passing by the bedchamber where he’d slept, and went onto the roof. It would be pleasant to think over his plans there in the evening sun.
But the roof was occupied, he saw. Falten Isen lay face down on the narrow bench, his back bare. Marla bent over him, working hard above his hip. Neither noticed him at the corner of the roof.
Isen tensed, a small sound of discomfort escaping him, and Marla reached for a bottle with one hand as she continued the pressure with the other. Then she bent further, leaning into her pressure, and Isen’s leg spasmed on the bench.
It was healing work, not sensual, yet Luca felt awkward at having happened upon the scene. He was turning to go when he heard Marla murmur something to Isen. The merchant shifted his head slightly. “Nerrin?”
Luca needed a moment to recall that Jarrick had introduced him as Dom Nerrin. “Forgive me, I did not mean to interrupt.”
“No, please.” Isen’s eyes closed. “I apologize for my unexpected return.”
Luca smiled. “It is your house, my lord.”
Isen chuckled and then winced as Marla struck something, and the rhythm of her hands changed. “I’m afraid I’m not much of a host at the moment.”
Luca was near enough now to see a livid slash of scarring across the lower right of his back. Marla’s thumbs were on either side of it, nudging the damaged muscle. “Please don’t trouble yourself for me. Cole and I will finish some work in the garden.”
“Oh, no,” Isen protested mildly. “My guest may enjoy my garden but not work it. Please relax. I will be finished here shortly.”
Luca descended and went out among the plantings, wandering between the ornamentals, cut back for winter, and the vegetable and herb beds toward the rear of the house. The fountain splashed noisily. It rarely grew cold enough to freeze on the coast, and the fountain would play through the winter. He sat on a brick border and rested his chin on his cupped hands.
After a moment, he felt he was not alone, and he glanced up to see Cole watching him steadily. Disconcertingly. When their eyes met, Cole spoke. “I talked with the drudge, the night you left me in Ivat.”
The words were mild, the tone mostly level, but the sentence carried an undercurrent of meaning. Luca hadn’t considered that Cole might have resented being left behind, unexpectedly abandoned in the house of a man who disliked him.
“He said the first time he saw you, you had a Furmelle collar.”
A thin wire of fear lanced Luca, the long dread of association. “Yes.”
At the word, Cole’s hard expression turned to awe and even admiration. But as he looked at Luca, it faded to disappointment and then quiet disgust. “Oh.”
Luca squeezed his fists, muscles clenching all through his arms and legs. Furmelle had been his first introduction to terror, and blame and retribution had trailed him from Furmelle across the Faln Plateau to Davan and then to Alham. He was humiliated by his fear, but he did not deserve Cole’s disdain.
“That’s why you haven’t freed me, then. I suppose in Furmelle you were with them.” Cole regarded him with a pinched, downturned mouth, resentful. He rolled a shoulder and spat into the bed of empty stalks.
Cole would have fought in the revolt. Again, the recognition stirred that Cole had been one of the enemy, and Luca tried to quell his sudden unease.
“I wasn’t with anyone.” Luca closed his eyes against the memory. He had lived horrors with the Gehrn, but they were different horrors than the fighting in Furmelle, the brutal murders of women, children, slaves, freemen, anyone caught in the streets by any prowling band to whom they hadn’t sworn fast enough.
But memory could not be stopped by the dark, and Luca had to open his eyes, fixing them on the broken stalks of the garden. He licked his lips and repeated, “Free you.”
It had not occurred to him, in all his worry, that they could free Cole. The law permitted it here. Luca had grown too accustomed to helpless acceptance of how things were.
But Furmelle was a wound, and Cole’s derision was salt. “You haven’t mentioned Andrew’s release. Are you arguing your principles or your wants? Would you free the slave you’d bought?”
“Your brother can afford it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Cole scowled. “I would free my slave if I were as rich.”
“And if money were scarce? That’s how I became a slave, when scruples became a luxury for the rich.”
That stung Cole into quiet, if not into contrition.
Luca turned his head, irritated with both Cole and himself. Cole had been an overseer and enjoyed its power. For all his contempt about Furmelle, he was less concerned with opposing slavery and more with opposing his own. But Luca, too, had thought only of his own situation.
What would Cole do if freed?
What would Luca do, entirely on his own and without another voice, even a distant, subservient one?
Still, chained to the tinker’s cart, he would have given anything for a chance at freedom. He could not in good conscience neglect to offer that to Cole.
“My brother paid eight hundred for you. I’m sure he’ll take the same. I can help you earn that to buy your freedom.”
The slave’s eyes snapped to him. “How?”
“I’ll seek work in accounting or clerking. You can come with me and hire yourself out. I’ll want forty pias a month for your keep, and the rest you can keep toward your freedom.”
Cole scowled again, but with less force. “So I would be your slave—and working?”
“I won’t have much use at home for you. I hardly need a personal servant, and I don’t think you’ll want to help with clerking. If you can hire out—”
“I could bring as much as eighty pias each month, in overseeing, or thirty or forty in lesser labor. If I do well, I could be free in under two years.”
His ready calculations surprised Luca. “What is your basis for eighty a month?”
“My master before Orcan, Master Barbame, let us keep a tenth part of our hiring price, if hired outside, and we could earn a share of profit if we did his work well enough. I did very well. Some of the others drank their earnings, but I wasn’t so stupid.”
Luca nodded, encouraged.
“I’d saved about six hundred before Rand started cheating—he swore the dice weren’t weighted, but it’s not natural to lose like that. I lost nearly four hundred fifty in a week. You know that’s got to be bad dice.”
“You gambled it all?”
“I lost some to the dice and the rest when Barbame sold me on to Orcan. I gave a third to a fellow overseer, to—to use the whip lightly. The balance my master took back.”
“That was a considerable loss.”
Cole nodded with a barely perceptible scowl and wince.
Luca tipped his head. “Yes? Go on.”
Muscles twitched in Cole’s jaw. “I was angry. I wanted my savings, and—I argued with my master.”
“You argued with him?”
Cole looked across the garden. “I struck him. More than once.”
Luca winced too. “You paid for that.”
“Yes, master. And I did not have another hundred to spare my back a second time.” He smiled grimly. “But Barbame did not tell Orcan of it. He wanted the price of a reliable overseer. So I didn’t fall as far as I might have.”
“You have now,” Luca answered frankly. “You’re a common laborer, and you’ve lost your savings.”
“But my price has fallen from two thousand to merely eight hundred, so I am nearer than ever.” His mouth turned up in a wry smile.
Luca laughed. “That’s true. Does that mean you like the offer?”
Cole’s smile faded. “Two years is a long time.”
Luca rubbed his earlobe and said nothing.
“It’s longer some places than others.” Cole looked back at the house, and then he took a handful of dry stalks from the beds. He rolled them over one another in his fingers. “Who would hold the money?”
“What?”
“The money I earned. For myself. Who would hold it, you or me?”
It meant little, in fact; a slave had no property, so any money Cole earned would legally be the Roalds’. But there was a pledge to be made. “It would be your money, Cole. You hold it until you have enough.”
Cole nodded once, a tight motion that did not dislodge his frown. After another long moment, he snapped the dry stalks with a savage motion. “Do you remember when I said some slaves were too stupid for freedom?”
This was a moment to tread carefully. “I remember you telling how some had no practice in managing for themselves.”
One corner of Cole’s mouth quirked, acknowledgment of Luca’s charitable weaseling. “I’ll say it plainly, then—I earned more than six hundred under Master Barbame. But six hundred was the most I had at once.”
“That’s a good sum.” Until you gambled it.
“Until I gambled it.” Cole chewed his lip. “I can’t afford to miss this chance. I’ll never be so close again. If I can land a good position—it could be a year and a half. I can’t drop this.” He dropped his head and blew out his breath. “You must think me stupid. Another dumb brute who can’t control himself.”
Luca shook his head. “I think planning around temptation is excellent management.”
Cole didn’t look at him, but Luca saw his expression soften.
“I’d be happy to hold it for you. And if you choose, I can help you invest it to bring returns.”
Now Cole looked at him, mouth open. “I don’t understand much of that.”
“It was just a thought.”
“No—no, I’d like that. More money, sooner. I’d like that.”
It was the largest statement of trust he could give, obliquely committing his freedom to Luca, and it gave Luca a swell of pride such as he had not felt in long years, long before his own enslavement. Luca breathed deep, feeling taller even as he sat on the planting border.
Now he had only to settle his own life.
Luca took one of the fallen stalks and began to fidget with it. “Where would you go, Cole?”
“Master?”
“If you had the choice, if you could go anywhere, where would you go? Say whatever comes to mind. Where would be a good place to make our way?”
“Not Fersiam,” Cole answered, as if reluctant to speak it aloud.
Luca smiled grimly. “Not Fersiam,” he agreed. That was the site of the largest concentration of iron mines. “Nor Ginar, nor Kinnau, nor Salfield.” Silver ore, gold ore, and the salt harvesting flats.
“You’re a good man, master.”
“Hn,” Luca snorted. “Neither of us wants that labor, that’s the truth.” He propped his chin in his hand.
Isen’s voice called from the rear of the house. “Nerrin? Are you here?”
“Here,” Luca called, leaping to his feet and barely keeping himself from adding, “my lord.”
Isen rounded the corner. “I’m sorry to have surprised you this afternoon. My trip did not last as long as planned.”
“As I said, it is your home. I can hardly complain if you return to it.”
“It’s your friend Jarrick Roald who influenced my return,” Isen said amiably. He glanced toward Marla, following with juices, and sat down opposite Luca. “He and his brother are revising their house’s interests, and they’ve asked me to be an agent for them. Thank you,” he told Marla. “And stay for a moment, you’ll need to hear this.”
Marla nodded and stood a few paces from Cole.
“I’ve agreed to be the Roalds’ agent. So I’ll be leaving Ivat and Abbar.”
Marla gasped. “Where, my lord?”
“They just signed a major supplier in Damas.”
Marla wrinkled her nose in dismay. “Damas? But that’s a horrid place. All pinewood and nomads and burnt rock.”
“And the best wool prices for five hundred leagues,” Isen added.
“Cheap because it stinks of sulfur,” Marla said uncharitably. “Nomads don’t have public baths. How will you fare there, my lord, without your soaks?”
“Eh, you make a good point,” Isen conceded. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing that we’re not going to Damas, but to Alham.”
“Alham!” Luca and Marla said together.
“The Roalds have a new supply contract with the Chrenadan military,” Isen explained, “but Jarrick said he needs someone else in Alham to manage it.”
Luca smiled a little. No, Jarrick would not return to the city where he had betrayed his co-conspirators to trade with a man he had tried to murder.
Marla’s smile lit her face. “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Then she made a ferocious scowl. “Damas, you said.”
He laughed, and she grinned and returned to the house.
Luca hadn’t realized he was staring after her until he noticed Isen watching him. He jumped and tried to look as if he hadn’t been looking, which of course only made it more obvious.
“Are you thinking of my aelipto?” Isen asked. “Have you been disregarding my single injunction to you?”
“No!” Luca blurted before he saw the joking smile. “No, I haven’t. She did work on my back, but she offered—”
“Easy, friend,” Isen offered. “I can see well enough she’s at ease about you. But you are thinking of her, yes?”
Luca hesitated. “She was kind to me, when I came here. She has been very—useful.” His words sounded awful in his ears.
“Useful.” Isen separated his hands and drummed his fingers. “She is that.”
Cole remained very still, unobtrusive.
“Well.” Isen set his hands on his knees. “I had better go and speak with Marla about when we can leave." He rose cautiously, favoring one side, and smiled sadly. “She does good work.”
Isen and Marla, the nearest he had to new friends, were going to Alham. Everything Luca wanted now was in Alham.