Rasia had barely disappeared into the trees when Timar locked a steel chain into the loose link of Kai’s choker. She glared at her scavengers as she hooked the chain to her belt. Kai made a note of that, the fact Timar didn’t entirely trust her own people.
“Strip.”
Kai blinked. He glanced over at the no-faces waiting obediently for an order, or rushing around at tasks or errands, all naked. Despite Rasia’s threat, he feared Timar might brand an “x” on his face, which would effectively raze all Kai’s hopes and dreams to the ground.
Timar read his thoughts. “I know better than to court her fury. I’d make sure Rasia is dead first, then I’d do it. But I need her, so your face is safe, for now. Clothes. Off.”
Kai gritted his teeth under the scrutiny of the surrounding scavengers. The longer he defied her, the more attention he attracted, but Kai stood firm in Timar’s own admittance that he was safe from harm, for now.
Timar glowered at the blatant challenge to her authority.
“I wouldn’t have thought the runt of the Grankull would be so prideful. You think you’re better than our no-faces? You think because you’re born of the Grankull that you’re better than us?” Timar nodded to the scavengers behind him. “You’re weak, and the weak serve.”
The scavengers rushed him from behind. Pain lanced up his right arm from the shoulder injury. Kai grunted when his face hit the ground, soft with dirt and wet leaves. They twisted his wounded arm and pinned him, helpless.
They snatched the shroud from his waist. They ripped off Rasia’s shirt, and pants, then his loincloth. All eyes stared at his scarred, whipped back.
Kai was so tired of never being strong enough.
The chain rattled as Timar’s boots stepped into his line of sight. “Did you defy the Grankull too when they whipped you? Or did you let them do it?”
The collar tugged up, cutting into his neck, and Kai scrambled, half-dragged, onto his feet. He had no choice but to follow after Timar’s departing figure.
Timar collapsed down on her throne, under her canopy of swaying heads. She glanced at Kai, with her eyes traveling up and down his scars.
“You could find a home here, you know. You could be free here. You could touch anyone you want. You can fuck anyone you want. You could choose any face you want. You could be and do anything you want.”
“I want to go free.”
“Tsk. This chain is for your own protection. You are the key to untold riches and all the food anyone could ever eat.”
“You’ve been lied to. The Grankull doesn’t have that sort of food.”
“That I know, but the deal still has its benefits. Unfortunately for you, most scavengers are born here and don’t understand the Grankull’s subtleties. I’m the one person standing between you and their hunger. Undermine my authority at your own risk. I consider you under my protection, but I make no promises if you decide to leave it. No matter how much you have endured and suffered to get this far, there is always more pain. You can either break or harden. I suspect I know which one you are, but you could skip all those hard lessons and just do what I say.”
Kai realized Rasia wasn’t the only one planning to renege on their end of the deal. Kai accused, “You’re not planning on letting me go.”
“Ha! Of course not. I think you and Rasia will like it here.”
“Rasia isn’t staying here.”
“Do you truly believe the Grankull is big enough for her?” Timar laughed at that. “The Grankull doesn’t deserve her. Or you, for that matter.”
Timar motioned to a no-face holding an amphora of water beside the chair. As ordered, the no-face came around and held the pitcher out to Kai.
Timar raised an eyebrow, testing him to see if he would obey this time. She was right that this could be a lot worse. Even now, Kai could feel the interest of the scavengers, some of them looping around more than once to get a look at his eyes. With a shoulder injury, no weapons, and stark naked, he had little chance of escaping on his own. Kai took the water.
Kai held the pitcher with his good arm, ordered to remain at Timar’s side. He poured the water straight into Timar’s mouth every time she asked for it.
When he wasn’t busy following her every command, Kai studied that dragonsteel sword at Timar’s side—tah’s dragonsteel sword. Kai had never asked Nico about its absence.
From atop her throne, Timar talked to her facehunters about strengthening their defenses. She lectured her apprentices. She ordered around no-faces.
Kai often couldn’t follow the thick scavenger’s dialect. He didn’t understand a lot of words even in context. Timar switched flawlessly back to the Grankull schoolroom-taught diction when she spoke to Kai.
Around sunset, drums banged throughout the camp. The scavengers gathered, and the no-faces ushered out dinner.
Dinner provided a good view of all the distinct scavenger groups. Both facehunters and the general scavengers wore tallies along their arms to mark their kills, but the facehunters wore sleeves of them. The apprentices wore unmarked arms and red accessories. The branded no-faces weaved through dinner, serving food and an alcoholic drink that, as Timar explained unprompted, was made by infusing a whole snake and scorpion in red wine, aniseed, and the blood of their enemies. Kai didn’t know if she was joking or not, but the scavengers called the drink Deathsblood.
Timar stood and lifted the large goblet of red liquid in toast.
“To eating what we want! To fucking who we want! To killing who we want! And to Death, the one true god!”
The scavengers cheered and drank their goblets empty.
A no-face handed Kai a dinner plate. Timar gave him leave to sit and eat. Most of the fruit he’d never seen before. The main dish consisted of a mushroom he didn’t think grew wild. The quantity of it suggested it might be cultivated in some manner. It would explain Timar’s power if she had control over a food source.
Even though the food looked edible, Kai found it hard to stomach with the eyes of the oasis kids burning into his back. They watched him full of hatred, angry at the fact Kai got to eat instead of sitting starved in a cage alongside them.
A tray of food dropped after a no face tripped over a foot intentionally thrown out to stumble them. Then a facehunter came over with a branch and beat the no-face bloody to crude laughs and jeers, as if entertainment.
On the other side of the field, scavengers finished their dinner and, as if demanding a second helping of food, ordered naked no-faces into their laps. Their blank stares gazed out into the forested graveyard of bones. Some of them were young enough to be in shrouds.
Kai looked away. He glared at the white moonflowers around Timar’s throne, feeling sick with revulsion.
Sex was an exchange, a physical bartering like trading items at the belly market. It might not always be an equal exchange, and the other person could cheat you, but the expectation was that both parties always gained something in the end. Even whoring was a mutually agreed-upon trade. But this violent robbing was something Kai didn’t have a word for.
“Rape. The scavenger word is rape,” Timar told him, reading the horror on his face. It felt right for it to be a different word. “The weak serve, and the strong choose their faces. That’s the scavenger way.”
“Some of them are children.”
“Funny how the Grankull believes a shroud can protect them. It didn’t protect them when their families sold them off. It didn’t protect them from starving. It didn’t protect the little orphan tents kids, or the unwanted, or the imperfect. The shroud is a lie. It’s nothing but a tool the Grankull uses as a means to control. We aren’t the Tents relying on the Grankull like an engorged tick on its host. Here, we are free.”
It was no wonder why the oasis kids hated him. They had to witness this every night, knowing it could happen to them once the Forging ended, while Kai waited to be saved.
“A freedom at the expense of others,” Kai criticized.
Timar laughed. “All freedom is at the expense of others. The only difference between a kuller and a scavenger is that we’re honest about how our shit smells. The Grankull might not have a word for it, but rape happens within the bones. Just because there isn’t a word for a thing, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
Kai couldn’t imagine it. The Grankull had only ever had two rules when it came to sex: no unapproved pregnancies and don’t touch children. The rest was a free for all. Adults often had multiple partners and flames, unless they were in committed relationships, and even that was negotiable. There were always, of course, bad people, but the Grankull was a place where leaving someone sexually unsatisfied could be grounds for demanding a blood price. In more atrocious situations, it was the triarch of the family that would come collecting that debt. Bad sex could literally get you killed.
Kai tried to reconcile the things he understood with what he saw. Perhaps without a face you lost the right to a fair exchange. But no, Kai had to shift his understanding. This wasn’t about the exchange. It was about control, and power, and one group asserting its dominance over another. It was about breaking bodies and souls and creating objects out of people. It wasn’t sex at all. It was rape. Kai thought he understood enough to hold the word in his head now.
“Your freedom is a lie,” Kai spat out.
“Oh yes, that’s true.”
The rest of the night, Timar reveled in the cost of her freedom. Kai would never understand how anyone could pay such a high price. No backstory could ever justify this.
Kai felt a nauseous combination of disgust and relief when Timar decided to retire for the night. He followed her into her personal dwelling built around the trunk of a large tree grown over the curled tip of the tail.
A furtive no-face lit candles in the rooms Timar entered. The entryway displayed a showcase of, as Timar boasted, an array of colorful bone masks from all her fallen enemies.
Timar’s bed was the tail vertebra tip, decorated with pelts and woven feathers padding the dips. One of Timar’s apprentices joined her on the bed. Curly blond hair sprouted from around the mask, and the young apprentice gently, almost reverently, removed the straps around Timar’s thigh. Timar released a relieved sigh when the apprentice freed Timar of the bone leg. Timar didn’t take off her bone mask or the belt that kept Kai attached to her.
The two began to whisper. They took off each other’s clothes, and the candlelight flickered across the long-corded scars on Timar’s back—Wait. This was really about to happen.
“Perhaps you want some privacy?”
Timar waved at him, dismissively.
“Open that chest.”
Kai opened the nearest chest and found Rasia’s two dual blades sitting at the top. He froze.
Was this a test?
Could he grab these blades, kill Timar and her apprentice, get through the scavenger camp, and find his way out of the Graveyard to freedom? Or would he get caught and be subjected to the tortures of the first scavenger he came across?
Did he trust Rasia enough to wait for her?
He glanced at Timar and found her watching him, amused by his indecision.
Freedom was a lie.
He was too valuable. She wasn’t going to let him cut his way out. There were traps here, and he didn’t know where they lay.
Kai wished he could be that brave hero in legends who slashed his way out of anything, but he had absolutely no idea how to use Rasia’s khopesh, and his dagger had been confiscated. No. He needed to observe and listen and wait for his moment, as Rasia advised.
“What do you need?” Kai asked smoothly.
“Just underneath. You’ll see it.”
Kai shuffled past the blades and pulled out the item below. Kai stared confused at the buckled straps and the oblong bone piece at the end. He blushed in realization and quickly tossed it to the bed.
In the Grankull, to dare chip off the Elder cost death.
Here, they fucked with the bones.