Has the servant girl run away? Has someone abducted her, as we’ve heard sometimes happens to servants? Then I see her farther down the lane. She steps out of the shadow of a stall where racks of plain white linen-over-wire masks stare blankly, empty faces awaiting decoration. She is speaking to a person out of my sight, and she grins with a brilliant smile I have never seen on her face in our house, not in the entire year she has served us.
The constant hammering emotions of the day have crushed my patience to dust. I stride down toward her. She sees me coming and hurriedly trots to meet me, gourd bouncing on her hip, eyes cast down. There’s an old scar on the top of her shorn head that I have never before noticed, the score of a whip.
“Please give me your pardon for wandering off, Doma.”
A scowling young man with pliers in hand steps into view from out of the stall. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, utterly Commoner, like her. His anger and suspicion strike like a bolt of lightning quivering through me. My hands curl into fists. Who is this nameless youth to judge people he doesn’t even know?
“Keep going,” he says to her in Efean. “There’s no cause for you to beg a pardon from the likes of her.”
She scurries on but I cannot allow such disrespect to go unchallenged. His eyes flare as I approach, but he’s an Efean male and so he waits for the woman to speak first. A jagged scar on his face gives him a menacing look but it is the sneering curl of his lip that really annoys me.
With a false smile pasted on my face I address him in the Patron language. “I am looking for a sturdy, well-constructed mask at a fair price. Might I find that here?” My smile crashes as I unleash my anger. “Or would you just try to cheat the likes of me?”
He replies in the Patron language, his words tinged with the same Commoner accent Mother has. “You’re one of that spoiled litter of half-sour kittens my sister serves.”
It’s like slamming into a wall of scorn.
He adds, “You must be one of the twins. Which are you? The sullen schemer, or the screamer?”
How dare he call us names!
Above, Amaya, Taberta, and Coriander hurry away up the lane, Amaya beckoning imperiously for me to follow. But I already had to lose once today. I want to beat him before I go.
“What a rude and selfish boy you are!”
“Selfish?” He gestures toward the stall he came out of. On his right forearm five parallel scars stand out against his brown skin, like he was clawed. “I labor dawn to dusk to help keep my family’s household fed and sheltered. I’d labor into the night but we haven’t the money to buy oil for lamps. Can you say the same?”
“I mean you are selfish to feel the need to insult me even though you must know that a single word, and I could have your sister whipped and put onto the streets. My father would never tolerate a servant who says such things about his daughters. Not that he will know! Because I don’t think it’s right that your sister be harmed just because you need to prove you can insult me to my face as if that makes you a man.”
He stiffens. “It wasn’t my idea to sell her labor into service. She’s had whippings before from your kind—”
“Not from my father!”
“No, not from him or his household,” he admits grudgingly. “But our uncle has plenty of work she can help him with here. It wouldn’t involve hauling out Patron piss buckets to the sewer—”
A throbbing bell tone rings through the air, followed immediately by a clacking of wood sticks like a signal. Abruptly people start lowering their awnings to show their booths are closed. A burly man emerges from the curtained back room of the stall. He grabs the young man’s arm to pull him off the lane but halts when he sees me.
“Doma! You do not belong here.” The burly man has the accent of someone who has learned the Patrons’ language just well enough for the marketplace. “Go. Please. Go!”
He spits Efean words at the youth, calling him pigheaded and wretched fool and a phrase that refers to the withering of his reproductive organs. For one breath I enjoy the scolding, because the old man is really ripping into the youth. But the discipline I learned from my father kicks in. The last thing I need today is to get caught in whatever commotion is unfolding in the market. Nearby a child starts to cry with screams of helpless fear.
Amaya is already out of sight. As I back away, a rumble of tramping trembles through the ground. Gears and joints tick over. Sunlight flashes on tiny mirrors. A curved metal body looms into view above the market stalls. A slender metal spider, twice my height, pivots into the lane. The child’s hysterical bawling cuts off as the huge spider slams to a stop in the lane.