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Belle slept poorly, the night before the new slave arrived. Nightmares are not usual for her, as the day’s labors generally leave her too exhausted to dream, but that night she jolted awake in a cold sweat, her eyes thick with the tears that had formed behind her closed eyelids.
Eyelid, she reminded herself, gasping, with a shred of mocking humor. She reached up in the dark to touch the empty socket on the maimed side of her face, and to trace the ugly scar dragged beneath it.
(Mairon took her eyelid before he took her eye, carving it away as precisely and calmly as a child would peel away a butterfly’s wing. In her dream, she had been back beneath that knife, and had felt again the double shock of the irrevocable loss of both beauty and vision, all at once.)
She did not go back to sleep. Neither did she dare slip out of the women’s quarters in search of Gwindor, for they had met after dark twice already in the last week, and people were beginning to murmur. Instead, she sat in the corner of the room, the join of the two walls solid and reassuring against her shoulder, and she listened to the sound of the children sleeping, slowly matching her breaths to theirs.
Later that day, when she looks up to see Knox shove a tall, mute man towards their company—when she sees the metal mask that gags him, and the thick scarring at his wrists where his shirtsleeves are too short—she will suppose that the dream must have been a warning.
*
The new slave is meek as a woman, as Lem would say, and as weak as a child. He works with his head lowered awkwardly, and is silent except for when movement drags a mangled whine of anguish from his tortured mouth. When Belle passes near him, hauling a bucket to be filled, she smells copper, and at a glance can see the strings of bloody spittle hanging from the metal mask. The device must be bladed, or else they cut his tongue out before they gagged him. She thinks this without pity, without grief. She recognized Mairon’s work at once, of course, the creative cruelty and workman’s art turned to horror. What did this man do, for Mairon to play with him this way and yet let him live?
(The scars at her own lips tingle with remembered pain. For just a moment, seeing the new slave’s throat spasm as he staggers, the stink of the hot tar burning her eyes, she remembers how it feels, to choke on your own blood.)
For just a moment, over the stench of the tar and the blood and the sweat, she smells something else.
*
“He was Bauglir’s,” Gwindor hisses, rubbing at his upper lip with one knuckle, his expression like thunder. “He had a face, when I saw him then, but the hair is the same. They kept him somewhere in the upper levels, not down in the cells or even in the room with the rest of us. He would be hours in Bauglir’s study, and sometimes you could hear them. Talking.”
“A spy?” Asks Lem, narrowing his eyes. Gwindor drops his hand with a bitter twist of his mouth.
“Among other things, I wouldn’t wonder.”
“Other—“
“For Christ’s sake, you saw him. You think Mairon would let him keep his pretty looks, if Bauglir did not order it? And he stinks of the man, even now. You smelled it, didn’t you, Belle?”
The men swing round to look at her. She nods, just once.
“You see? If anyone here knows that bastard gentleman’s pine-sap stink, it’s Belle.”
“Goddamn,” Lem says, in a voice torn between disgust and laughter.
Belle, her arms drawn tight enough across her middle that she can feel the painful press of her elbows beneath her ribs, pushes to her feet and walks away, leaving her food unfinished.
*
She has already claimed her corner of the sleeping quarters, tattered shawl drawn tight over her shoulders, when the spy limps through the curtained partition. In the dim near-dark, she cannot quite make out his face, but she can see the mask is unexpectedly gone. The shape of his throat, exposed, is slim, and she can tell he has no beard. He moves like moving hurts, hunched in on himself as though the very space he fills frightens him. When he retreats to an empty scrap of floor, she can see the dark shape of him shivering, even though the night is warm.
Still, he is soundless.
The mask is gone, but he still smells of blood, and bile, and sweat, and him. Melkor Bauglir, just as he had smelled that day in her father’s house when he asked for the honor of her hand, smiling like a hawk.
Estrela cannot sleep, that night.
*
The next day, she finds out from whisperings what Lem and Gwindor did.
“You should be kinder to him,” she tells Gwindor, after. She doesn’t bother arguing with Lem, because Lem never listens; Gwindor sometimes does.
He does not listen today. Instead he flings his good arm up across his eyes, and sucks in a breath through clenched teeth. His face is white, haggard in a way she recognizes too well. His shoulder; always, his shoulder.
His pain makes him cruel, and cruelty, from Gwindor, is silence.
“Why do you care?” Lem jeers from the corner, where he was mulishly attempting to dig a splinter out from the joint of his thumb. “What does it matter to you how we warn off Bauglir’s whore spy? His crying keep you up at night?”
Estrela folds her arms, and lifts her chin.
“No,” she says, very coldly. “It is only that I find I have a care for anyone Bauglir has touched, Lem—aye, and Mairon, too. Would you like to ask me why?”
Lem pauses, and looks up to contemplate anew her face—her eye—her mouth. He looks a little ashamed, and she tries to feel it like a victory: that the sight of her can make a man like this feel ashamed.
“No, Belle,” Lem mutters, lowering his attention back to his thumb, which has begun to bleed.
Gwindor does not stir.
*
So beautiful, Bauglir smiled, pressing cold lips to the back of her hand. Estrela—a lovely name for a lovely girl, if somewhat cold for your warm coloring, my dear! Still, there is the poetry of it: even the golden sun, after all, is a Star.
*
The man with the red hair does not weep in the night. He does not cry out; he does not thrash in the grip of nightmares. If awake, he lies curled awkwardly on one shoulder, fingers clenched tight, legs folded close, face to the fetid wall. If asleep, he lies stiffly on his back, as though shackled to the floor with invisible irons, his limbs locked rigid. His hands twitch; his eyes beneath their fragile eyelids twitch. Besides this: nothing.
* * *
“He has no old scarring”, Gwindor says, passing the ladle back to her. They have contrived to take their allotted water break at roughly the same time, giving them five minutes in which to whisper. Belle takes a mouthful of the warm and silty water, holds it in her dry mouth a precious moment, then swallows.
“However he fell out of favor, it happened recently,” Gwindor is continuing, eyes narrowed as he glares across the throng of workers to where the spy is crouched alone, tearing his bread into crumbs. “He must be desperate to escape this punishment. He is clever; I have seen him listening, when we talk, and his meekness is more an act than his nature, I think. Be careful, Belle, when he is near you. Watch him.”
Belle shrugs, and refills the ladle for her friend.
“All right,” she agrees. “I’ll tell you if I learn anything.”
*
Belle watches the spy from a distance, and these are some things she learns: that his mouth pains him, so that he scarcely eats. That his back and legs are stiff, and that he favors one shoulder in a way that reminds her, paradoxically, of Gwindor. Also perplexing, for a spy, is how quiet he is. As far as she can tell, he is no more talkative with the mask off than he was with it on. He asks no questions, and does not slip out at night like some do—like Belle does, to meet with Gwindor. He moves like a man who wants to be forgotten, and she begins to oblige him by the end of the first week, as the work grows harder and she has less energy for spying of her own. Her interest fades as the new slave settles in as nothing more than another dull set of hands, anonymous and nervous and silent.
Then, on the eighth day, the spy drops a hammer he was using to break stones to gravel. At the sound it makes, striking the dry earth at his feet, he startles so badly that Belle jumps too, edging back.
Knox sees, and shouts.
“Oi, you there! Big Red! Pick it up!”
Haltingly, the spy stoops and stretches his hand out for the offending hammer. His head bows, exposing the back of his neck.
In the fragile skin there, crudely cut around the protruding bones of his spine, is the shape of a lidless eye.
*
“It is His eye,” she tells Gwindor the next morning. “Mairon did not only torture him, Mairon claimed him.”
It is rare that either of them speak of Mairon, and Gwindor’s own eyes darken instantly, the pale, stubborn light in them blown out. Belle would feel guilty, seeing that, but she knows this is important, even if she cannot understand why. She feels stupid with exhaustion, uneasy, and there is a headache pulsing behind her empty eye socket. She did not sleep much, last night.
“What does that mean?” Gwindor asks. Belle shakes her head.
“I don’t know,” she answers, helplessly. “But they did not only tire of him, Gwindor. Whatever he did, he made them angry.”
(Beautiful, Mairon had said, rolling her eye gently in his red palm. He had offered it to Bauglir, who accepted it daintily between finger and thumb, regarding it like a curiosity, and then looking thoughtfully to where she gaped, stunned with horror, half-blind and hurting.)
(Is there anything left of her that you loved? Mairon had purred, rolling his thin knife between his nervous fingers like her father had used to roll cigars, once. And Bauglir had paused, as though hoping she would beg, and then frowned.)
(Her smile, he had said, closing his hand around her stolen eye, and Mairon had smiled himself, and seized her by the jaw, and pushed the bloodied knife between her lips.)
Gwindor is looking, mouth tight, across the compound to where the spy is easily picked out by his red hair. He is half turned away, and the Eye is only partially visible, above his pulled-up collar. She wonders what Gwindor is thinking, but does not want to hurt him by asking. She, looking where he looks, is remembering the scarring at the new slave’s wrists and ankles, which she has seen sometimes when he is sleeping. She is trying not to imagine what else Mairon did.
There is no point in imagining, because whatever horror she contrives she knows it was immeasurably worse. That is who Mairon is.
*
Russandol, Frog chirps one night, poking at Belle’s shoulder with a tiny, skinny finger. He has crept in at the window, as he sometimes does when he is lonely or vexed, and Belle should not be so cheered by his visits but she loves them all, the children. That is a part of her that was the same Before.
Belle smiles her hideous smile and reaches out for him, but instead of scampering into her arms he hesitates, looking around the dark room.
Frog-boy, she whispers. Don’t you want to sit with me?
The secret child shakes his head. Belle, feeling wounded and a little stupid, lowers her arms slowly.
Then why are you here? Sticks is on washing duty tonight; she won’t be back until late.
It is unusually empty in the filthy room, actually, because Sticks and much of the other children are out late washing the guardhouse’s supper dishes, and the spy was not dismissed to his bed with the rest of them, instead being ordered to the stables, to curry the horses by lamplight and polish all the tack before he slept.
There have been more of these little cruelties lately, most of them targeting the spy, who remains quiet and shrinking and unremarkable. Belle supposes the men must be growing bored, and that they take out their frustration on the newest slave for the novelty of it. They gave him no water, yesterday, except what they poured on the stones at his feet, and he had done nothing but watch it disappear into the thirsty earth, silent, swaying a little in the noonday heat.
Russandol, Frog repeats, shifting his bare feet, and Belle realizes for the first time that it is not just baby talk; it is a name. He looks around the room, searching, frowning at the falsely-scarred faces of the women still awake.
Belle sits up on the straw and asks him: Who?
*
Frog is too little, to tell about the pit he fell into, and about how the new slave, the spy, lifted him out. It is Sticks who explains in detail the next morning, a story that does not seem real.
Still: Belle does not trust much, but she trusts the children. When she approaches their Russandol on the tilled field that afternoon, under the hot blue sky, she is trying to see what Sticks claims to see: a protector, an ally, a friend.
She does not see any of that.
What she does see, fully for the first time, is a man only about her own age, very tall, but made even taller by how thin he is. The veins at his wrists and throat are blue; his nose and brow and cheeks are burned but the skin beneath his jaw is white as milk. His filthy hair, even matted dark with sweat, is copper-red, bleached almost teak-bright at the ends and stained wet mahogany at the roots. She does not know the color of his eyes, as he always keeps his gaze lowered. She does not know the sound of his voice, because he rarely speaks, and never above a whisper, and never to her. But when she addresses him now he startles and stares and so it is that she sees for the first time: wide eyes the color of liquid mercury, a grey so bright she half-expects to see her own reflection there as if in plate glass.
(He looks at her like a wild, frightened, animal thing, and that is the reflection she recognizes in a flash, after all, even though his eyes are whole. Even though his mouth is not maimed.)
His lips are burned and peeling, his face all over freckles beneath the darkening sunburn.
(He is very young, and very beautiful. She can think that—suddenly—even here.)
Estrela says, through Belle’s broken mouth: Sticks says you’re a help to her.
He does not speak, when she tries to smile. His hands are filled with growing things. She leaves him there, and returns to Gwindor, and tries not to imagine anew how his voice must sound.
*
(He does not like to look at her, as she does not like to look at him, and for much the same reason. Still: she cannot help herself. There are times—glancing—drawn magnet-sure despite herself—that she catches again a mercury flash, as he jolts his unwilling eyes away—as they catch each other, guilty, looking.)
*
Be careful with him, she says, softly, on a night. Russandol is asleep, and Sticks has crawled to lie pressed close to Belle’s hip. The little girl huffs.
I do not think we need to be careful, she protests. He is not cruel.
I never said he was. But still, be careful. He cannot hide the way you can.
Because he is so tall?
Not only that.
Sticks frowns.
He cannot hide, and so he is hurt. I see. Still, he is good to us.
I know he is. So you be good to him, too.
I will be careful.
*
They are all three of them careful: Sticks with her guileless questions and Frog with his desire to be held and Belle with her understanding of the makings and markings of pain. They are careful even when Lem swears vengeance on Big Red in a humiliated rage; even when Estrela, seeing the blood seeping through Gwindor’s shirt, cries out How? and he replies: It was Him.
(She was right after all, in a way: Bauglir’s men have grown restless. They began the cruel match fights again, a few nights ago, and it would seem that here, too, their favourite target is the red-haired spy. Belle—Estrela has not seen him fight, but she knows he defeated Lem. It is a thing hard to believe, seeing him in the day, limping a little and his head ducked quietly, but the men all swear it: in the firelight, in the dark, he was a devil.)
(It was a fight to the death, everyone says, hushed, but Red let Lem live. Think on it, think on it, what does it mean.)
They are careful, and thus Estrela does not tell Gwindor what she has seen: how Russandol always flinches, when anything comes close to touching his face, and yet he still allows little Frog to touch his red hair. How he almost smiled once, when one night he looked down to realize that Sticks had fallen asleep against his arm, drooling a little on his sleeve. How that smile, surprised, shivered too quickly to a look of stricken grief, instead. Estrela keeps Russandol’s secrets, and does not confess to Gwindor what she is beginning to believe: that Russandol is not a spy at all.
(She watches him, and thinks: Who were you, Before? It is a dangerous question. Before she was Belle, she was Estrela, mapmaker and daughter of a mapmaker, accomplished and educated and arrogant without knowing it, in love with her freedom and her cleverness and her beauty most of all. She was a girl who stepped into her father’s study to meet his new patron, saw for the first time the face of Melkor Bauglir, and was repulsed, not afraid.)
(She was someone who thought two eyes was a thing you simply had, in the world.)
Belle catches herself remembering these things more, these days. She catches herself forgetting the name Bauglir gave her. It is Russandol’s fault, she knows: after her torture she was cast aside invisible to die, and invisible she has remained ever since, but Russandol is still clearly, awfully, seen. She finds she begins to ponder less on what he is planning to do, and more on what he has already done. Where did Bauglir find him, in this wild land? What did he do, to earn Mairon’s hate? Where did he learn how to speak to children, and to smile when they fall asleep?
She has not asked him why he is here—has not spoken to him, in fact, since the field and the planting—but she is certain that the Mountain has not done with him yet.
She wonders if he knows this, too.
* * *
So: the slow weeks have passed, and Estrela has watched Russandol, and betrayed her task, and does not tell Gwindor—hard with rage and bitter humiliation—what she has learned. It seems not the right time, as Lem storms about the guttering room, roaring; as Gwindor sits stonefaced beneath her ministrations, and young Haldar stares at the blood on her hands, on his hero’s back, like it will make him sick.
She knows a crisis is coming. To defeat Lem is one thing, for while the man is respected among the thralls he is not loved. To shame and wound the Soldier, though—that is another thing entirely. On the morrow, she will approach Russandol again, and discover from him in full the truth of how and why he is here. She believes, by now, that if she can make him trust her he will tell her the truth. And if Gwindor is given time to cool, she knows, he will listen; and if he listens, then he will believe what she believes. That is partially why they are friends, she and the Soldier—they each understand the other, and their thoughts run along the same paths. Gwindor’s temper is a terrible flame but it is not quick; he has suffered too much to ever be quick again, in seizing at something irrevocable.
And this is the core of her failure: that she sees Russandol, and she understands Gwindor, and she—
forgets—
*
“Haldar,” Russandol is begging when she runs up and draws short, taking in one glance the immensity of the disaster she did not foresee. Haldar’s nose drips blood from his chin, spattering onto Russandol’s chest. He has Russandol pinned, somehow, hands trapped at his sides. Russandol is whispering frantically. It is more words than Estrela has ever heard him speak. His thin arms, pressing obediently into the dust, look suddenly—strong.
She realizes, with a suddenness enough to break her heart, that he is not begging for himself.
*
(Haldar has always been a good child. He would have been a good man. A prince, he reminded them frequently when he was younger, though increasingly less in recent years. A prince, who has still somewhere beyond the edges of the map a people who love and remember him, and somewhere in the wilderness with them: a sister. A twin, he used to say, just like himself. If you saw her, you would know her like lightning.
Haleth, he used to prattle proudly in his own tongue, eager to give them his own language as they gave him English, Spanish, Portuguese. Belle never made the effort to learn; she does not think anyone did.
Haleth. It means Woman and Chief, all together in one.
*
(Belle never spent as much time with Haldar as she did with Sticks. In this frozen span of seconds, as he trembles over Russandol’s prone body, eyes wide—as Larsen rears back, rushes forward, shouts—)
(She cannot think of why.)
*
She stands fixed, helpless, when the cane strikes Haldar. The boy’s thin body lurches, surprised, beneath the blows: he has never before been singled out for punishment, will not recognize this feeling, will not know how to bear—
And then Russandol pushes himself up with staggering hands. He rolls up onto his front, panting, spins about, and throws his whole body, long and lean as a hunting cat, against Larsen’s booted ankles.
*
Estrela does not know she jolted forward until she realizes Gwindor, beside her, did the same. She does not remember him arriving, from the men’s lines. When she looks around wildly, confused, she sees all the men have gathered, shoving their way forward through the crowd of women and boys.
Larsen wields the cane like he would a hammer, driving the steel ties into the earth. The sound is brutal, as Russandol draws his arms up over his head, and buckles inward, trying to protect his throat, his face, the leg that lies bent wrong beneath him. He does not make a sound, and Estrela—Belle—Estrela remembers how he had flinched away, frightened, when the heavy hammer he dropped struck the ground, all that time ago.
She looks for Haldar, who is pushing himself to his feet, still trembling. He is not running, brave boy, foolish boy. He is staring at where Russandol is being beaten.
(She wants to beckon for him, to cry out to him to Escape, escape, don’t you see he is giving you a chance? But there is no escape, here. There is no chance.)
(Why did Russandol do it, when there is no chance?)
*
(I shall allow you, Bauglir said with marked generosity, one more chance to change your mind. Estrela, I should not like you to—regret—)
*
When the cane cracks down on Russandol’s twisted leg, he heaves with a retching, moaning sound, and drags at the pitiless earth with his hands.
When Gothmog’s bullet cracks through the startled air, dropping Larsen where he stands, Estrela sees Russandol jerk as though it were the sound of another blow falling, crashing into his ribs.
*
When Gothmog snaps Haldar’s neck, it is the first time she hears Russandol scream.
* * *
These histrionics are unbecoming, Bauglir told her after a pause. Delicately, as though he had not heard her at all, he added: I shall await your answer, then, my love.
His face, already cadaverous, was now become like a skull. The sickly scent he always wore was overwhelming. She stepped from behind the sofa, shaking with rage, and opened the parlor door herself, not bothering to call the footman.
Get out, she blazed, drawing herself very tall, her pulse thundering. I would rather die, than marry you.
His eyes—gleamed.
I shall keep that in mind, he replied evenly, turning his hat in his hands. His fingers crawled, white and twitching, across the brim. Still: I shall allow you one chance to change your mind, ma belle. I should not like you to regret your answer.
Then depart in good cheer, sir, for I shall not regret it, she hissed. Now leave, before I call for my father.
He did not move, at first. But just as her fury began to cool into the first uncertain shades of fear, he blinked, flatly. He set the stovepipe upon his gleaming hair.
You may reach me at my hotel, Bauglir told her in parting, where I shall wait until you send me word. Do not disappoint me, Estrela.
When he had gone, she took up the pretty, stupid little barometer he had gifted her, and hurled it at the wall.
*
All the blood drains from Russandol’s face. His eyes are so dilated they look black, even in the full and searing daylight, as he stares at where Haldar’s body sprawls. When he has fallen at Gothmog’s feet, his leg giving out as though broken, it is as though he knows what is going to happen next. Maybe he does. His despair is a vivid, breathing thing, even before Gothmog gives his orders.
Tie him ‘twixt the poles and strip him, Gothmog says before he strides away back to the guardhouse, not even caring enough to see the look on Russandol’s face as the hammer falls. The overseers pull Russandol up from the ground, and force him across the courtyard, to where the whipping posts stand pitiless beneath the still-rising sun. They shove him so that he nearly falls, catches himself on his bad leg, and nearly falls again, gasping thinly. When they force him to step over Haldar’s corpse, he closes his eyes. He looks, horribly, as though he is about to faint.
Estrela, like everyone gathered in that place of death, follows him. The pity she feels is wrenching, awful, and wholly useless.
* * *
When the overseers have marched Russandol to the very feet of the posts, they push him viciously to the ground. He does not fight, remaining eerily and awfully silent, but they brutalize him anyway, shoving and wrenching at his limbs, tearing at his scant clothing. Flat on his back, hands clenched, he tries only to curl away from the eyes of the other slaves, but Goodley forces him back with a hand pushed hard at his sternum and a knee pinning his inner thigh. Russandol, breathing fast, makes a noise like a sob, and Goodley strikes him across the mouth. Harris shoves his hands into the sweaty collar of the slave’s shirt and tears, and as the thin fabric gives way, Russandol shuts his eyes, raises one hand. Estrela thinks with terror that he has broken at last—that he will strike back—that they will kill him.
Instead, Russandol hides his face in the pitiful crook of his lifted arm.
*
Harris scoffs, when he notices. He seizes the offending wrist and drags the arm down, and Russandol does not try to shield himself again, as they strip away the rest of his shirt in ruined shreds, the rest of his ragged trousers. When the men finally fling him down and stand back to survey their work, Russandol is shivering badly. Haltingly, he pushes himself slowly up on trembling hands, but he stays hunched on the ground, head down, shrinking from the silent crowd. He stares at the earth as though he wishes he were buried beneath it. There is new bruising vivid on his shoulders and the backs of his hands, where Larsen struck him, and Gwindor struck him, and Haldar—
Goodley snarls his fingers in Russandol’s hair, and pulls. Harris has fetched the rope. Russandol staggers to his faltering feet, gasping, and there across his naked skin, there across his gaunt and shaking bones—
*
There now, Bauglir had told her sadly, reaching out to lightly caress where her scars were still weeping red.
Do you not wish, now, that you had told me yes?
*
Mairon left Belle only half a face, and only one eye. The empty socket burns, as she sees what he left Russandol: A shoulder half-carved away. A ribcage misshapen and wrong, struggling to draw uneven breath. Legs pocked and shiny with sunken new skin covering where Mairon meticulously peeled pieces of his body away. A ruinous map of scarring from blade and from fire and from other, brutal tortures she does not even recognize.
And there, beneath the heaving collarbone—there, low between the starving jut of his hips as he uselessly tries to twist away—
Words, cut by a deep and greedy knife.
*
(When they haul him up, unresisting, Russandol raises his head only briefly. His eyes are still black with shock, stunned with grief and shame and absolute animal terror. When he stares about wildly, for that one instant, he looks at her, and looks through her, and does not know her. He does not beg for mercy, from her or from anyone.)
(The beauty of his unmarred face, which she had so envied, is now as unsettling as a mask, the effect hideous when seen contrasted with his mutilated body.)
(When they lash his wrists to the posts, when Goodley strikes at his injured leg so that he falls, he makes no sound at all.)
*
Jesus Christ, Harris blasphemes, stepping back and reading, at last, the words carved into Russandol’s skin.
Russandol draws in a deep and shaking breath, his hands already bloodless in their bonds, but does not otherwise move.
*
Russandol draws in a deep and shaking breath, and Belle, standing rigid in the sun, sweating beneath her shift, wants—
Estrela, eighteen and scrubbing away the unwanted kiss Bauglir forced upon her, wants—
The boy, red head fallen forward, thin ribs flailed, the boy with whore cut deep into his shivering skin—
She wants to save the boy.
* * *
Gothmog says nothing, when he returns an hour later. The sun has climbed higher, hotter, so Gothmog arrives carrying his coat folded over one arm; this he sets carefully on the ground, and his hat on top of it. He does not react, when he sees the slave strung already only half-conscious between the posts. He shakes out the whip with leisurely precision, rolls his shoulders once, snaps his arm back, and—
*
Red ink, white paper, the silver-sharp nib of her pen tearing through the pale sheet as she wrote furiously, vehemently: I will have none of you.
The liquid mercury spilled slithering across the floor, where the barometer shattered.
The tiny hole like a star in the tabletop, where her pen stabbed through.
*
(Russandol, when the lash falls, tries again to hide his face. Russandol, jerking against the ropes, does not scream.)
*
After six lashes one of the barbs catches him badly, in the scar-ribboned staggering of ribs exposed beneath his right arm. Flesh is ripped away with the blood, scatters into the dust with a sick, wet impact. Russandol makes a sound like he is choking. His shoulderblades, pulled knife-sharp beneath his skin, heave.
She did not realize she was shaking, until she feels suddenly a hand touch hers, and she seizes at it like a person drowning might, tight enough to feel the pain of her own bones trapped beneath her skin.
“Steady,” Gwindor rasps in her ear, not even wincing at her clawed grip. “Do not look, Belle, if it makes you weep. You mustn’t—“
“I’m not,” she whispers, through numb, salted lips. She asks, faintly: “Gwindor. Where are the children?”
“Gone,” he says lowly, understanding her fear. “Safe. Sticks took the littler ones and ran, when—“
His voice fails him, as he tries to say Haldar’s name.
She does not let go of Gwindor’s hand. It is always selfish of her, she knows, to beg steadiness from him. Still, she does, and still, he gives: again, and again, and again.
*
When Gothmog finally pauses in his measured work, it is to mop the sweat from his wide brow with a white handkerchief he draws from his vest pocket. He rolled his shirtsleeves up, before he returned from the guardhouse with his whip in his hand, but the day has risen mercilessly hot, the sky like sheet metal. As he refolds the kerchief, Gothmog considers the broken body dragging in the dust, the new wounds red and open, and opening further, as Russandol twists weakly against the ropes at his wrists. He moves like he does not know he is moving, disoriented by the pain.
Be still, Belle begs silently, the words beating like a frantic heartbeat against her teeth, behind her maimed and muted lips. Russandol, please.
Russandol shudders, drawing a sticky, rattling breath. One foot scuffs uselessly against the bloody earth; one shaking hand tries to clench. Gothmog replaces the folded square in his pocket, spits, and flings up his arm.
*
It takes seven blows more, before Russandol hangs from the ropes as though dead, finally fallen fully unconscious. It takes three more than that, before Gothmog is satisfied and winds the lash about his hand, letting the gory barbs dangle, dripping.
He says, facing the silent crowd, that no one is to cut Russandol’s body down. The anomaly has been dealt with; order has been restored. The slaves are shoved and kicked and otherwise bullied back into lines, and begin the march out of the compound, sweating and murmuring and too afraid to look back.
Gwindor turns away with the others. Belle, still holding his hand, turns with him, stumbling. There is a roaring in her ears like ocean waves.
*
When they part, he to the men’s work and she to go with the women, she does not immediately release Gwindor’s hand. He turns back to look at her, and his eyes are red, bleak and tired. He looks at once both older and younger than she has ever seen him.
Gwindor loved Haldar.
You saw him, she says, as best she can through her misshapen lips. Some men might pretend not to understand her, but not Gwindor. Gwindor says nothing.
You saw him, she repeats. If he lives, you must help him.
I—don’t, begins Gwindor, jerkily, but Estrela cuts him off. Her jaw hurts terribly.
You saw, she says. You know what those scars mean. Whatever he was—whatever they did—whatever they wanted—he said no.
* * *
None of the women talk today, while they work. Even Knox, watching them from the shade of a makeshift awning, is subdued. The hours crawl by hot, and slow, and pitiless. Estrela takes the water she is given, hesitates, then swallows it mutely. She does not eat the bread, but folds it hidden into the waist of her trousers, just in case.
She thinks she watched Russandol die, today. Still: she saves the bread.
Gazing across the parched and fallow earth, she remembers how startled and young Russandol’s smile for Sticks had been, in its aborted beginning, in the dark and filthy room: thin and fragile as a butterfly wing, shivering.
(Beautiful, Mairon grins, but she shoves him—away—)
Estrela remembers the blue seas of her island home, and the painted picture in her father’s house, of a dark-skinned maiden clothed in blue, with her feet standing firm upon the moon. Behind her, as though bleeding through her skin, radiant and clean: the sun.
Santa Maria, she remembers, beating the tears back from her single eye. She pushes back onto her heels to wipe the sweat from her brow, and stares up into the sun. The sailors warned her not to look directly at the sun, when she was a girl, for fear she would go blind, but what does that matter, now? The sun is searing, and white, and flat as everything is flat.
Santa Maria, she thinks, bending back to her weeding. Please, Mother, give me one chance to save him. Keep him alive long enough for that. Please, only let me try.
The sun leaves an imprint like a burning disk, throbbing behind her eyelid.
Please, she chants in silence, as she crawls across the earth and the sun crawls slowly across the sky.
Please.
She has not thought any words like this in a long, long time.
*
In the long, blue-sloping dusk, Russandol hangs dead between two posts. Hulking dark against the lights of the guardhouse, Gothmog is examining his latest corpse. His massive hand, heavy and remorseless, is at Russandol’s throat. Belle is behind Gwindor, but she sees when Gothmog looks around; sees when Gwindor, unflinching, looks back.
Take him down, Gothmog says, and he sounds almost disappointed. Take him back to quarters.
*
Russandol is all over blood and blisters. His skin is tacky and dry, nothing left to sweat. Beneath her hand, he burns and does not move, does not make a sound.
Beneath her hand, he burns.
*
Alive.