The days of riding and mistreatment by my captors had seemed to flow into each other and I had been surprised when we rode into the city of Capeacal. I had never at that time been so far south before.
The city of Capeacal's market place was nothing like I had ever seen before. It was far grander than Cassis's marketplace. Cassis's marketplace had sold assortments of fruits, vegetables, and house hold wares, but Capeacal's marketplace dealt primarily in a higher priced commodity, slaves.
I was shoved into an ill smelling dark room beneath the marketplace's floor. At first I had thought I was alone in the room and then after a moment of silence, I'd heard the sounds of many captive people begin to resume in the packed quarters of the room. I'd made my way to the side of the door and leaned back against the slimy wet wall seeking shelter from both whomever was in the cell and those who had put me here, but there was little security to be found in such places.
A dreary vision of the future had begun to take place within my mind and I had been unable to shut it out, as it had overwhelmed me with its depressed vision of the road ahead of me. Caught up in my own misery as I was, I had been ignoring the hushed conversations taking place all around me.
It was a foreign sounding dialect that wasn't familiar to me at all. I listened to it for a while and then it dawned on me that I had heard it before. It was a dialect of speech that the Imerickian Traders of the Tranquil Islands used. I had heard them speak a couple of times, when I had been with my father trading in the city of Sharpe, which we had done but rarely. Sharpe was a seaport town on the western side of the Southern Settlements. Sharpe was the farthest south that the Tranquil Islanders liked to venture to trade, because they like the Valley Landers to the northeast were not on good terms with the Zoarinians.
Out of the sea of foreign voices I'd overheard a conversation that I'd understood since it was in my own language.
"Krista listen carefully to me. You will be separated from me tomorrow."
"No momma!"
"Yes Krista it will happen and you must promise to do as I say! You are young, but it's apparent even now that you will be beautiful one day. Tomorrow you have to take advantage of how pretty you already are and carry yourself with pride! Keep yourself as clean as you can tomorrow and they will put you in a special class."