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There was this keep, they stood on a cliff overlooking it, holding mom's hand. When the wind was tugging it was never easy to tell what was a nun's veil and what was her coal black hair. That's right, it had felt like she would tumble down the cliff if she wasn't constantly clutching her sleeve.
– See that Honey, that is going to be our new fort, our home.
Little silhouettes milling about inside of the walls: it was a siege. Clutching mom and not asking about where the people who lived there would go. Someone with a crossbow would climb to the top of the walls and aim at the laborers who were digging a tunnel beneath the walls. The wailing laborers, foremen cracking whips over their heads. The word she'd just learned was “slaves.”
Before the crossbowmen could shoot, Soldi swept down, emerald wings and emerald flame. Remembering she had seen him melt people, turning around. Strong winds carry sounds and smells very far.
She saw the uniformed person coming up the cliff, staggering but his gaze feverishly fixed, soot blackened face like he'd dug himself out of a scorched field. She saw that the uniform had the right arm and collar torn, blood splattered on the chest. Not daring to look away. His sunken face, like a ghoul, tugging at mom, begging her to turn and spot him.
– Are you here to leave a rapport, soldier?
Clearly not a soldier, but glancing at Seraph’s humored smile: of course her mom knew, only a joke, as he replied something with a ravaged voice.
– I didn't quite catch that?
She took a step toward him. He a step as well, held up the shaving knife that must've slit the throat of the uniforms previous owner. Did he come from the fortress or the labor camps? One of those places, she thought, that made disguising himself in order to kill them understandable, and he leaped with the knife held over his head, fell with his neck twisted like a scouring cloth.
– May heaven receive this misled soul.
Staring at the first dead (mom was a killer) she had ever seen close. Close enough to hear the sigh when his twisted throat let out a rattle.
The second after she thought of him as her first she wondered if that really was the truth, because maybe he'd already been dead even as he staggered up the cliff toward them. That seemed to be how it was: the slaves shoveling dirt and the kids like her chained up in the ships were dead already, and her entire life she’d seen corpses.
– Oh, don't touch that Doxie. He could carry disease.
She hadn't done as she was told, had crouched and put a hand to the man's chin, which was already cold he was so thin, and thought sorry to the ghost who had lost his family probably and been willing to die trying to kill her mom.
– Unruly child, Seraph sighed.
When she looked up at her face she knew, though none had ever told her, that nobody is made a slave out of his free will, and that when her mom looked down at that fort the silhouettes clustering within the walls looked like ants to her.