Still, she’d say, it was dehumanizing. The beatings, the fathering of bastards, the jealousies and insecurities of the slaveholders themselves. Felia had never liked it. This manumission was generous, to say the least. But not uncommon to those owners who feared their dear slaves would be passed on to cruel mistresses or depraved masters, or to enemy families who might force them to reveal shameful secrets about their previous owners, or even to good families that might fall on hard times and have to rent their slaves out to work the mines or the brothels.
Gavin tucked away the letter. He looked around the room, wondering if there was anything else he should steal. Money? Gems? Should he try to read his father’s correspondence? He opened the desk and found a box. He examined it briefly, then gave up trying to open that. Andross Guile lived and died by his correspondence. The box would yield to nothing less than a chisel and a smith’s hammer. If that.
With a sigh, Gavin set it back into its place. It had felt heavy, too. In fact, some of the former contents of the box had been emptied out to make more room. Several jewels the size of songbird’s eggs sat carelessly in the drawer among the feather pens and the cunning Ilytian ink-reservoir pen his father liked so much.
Gavin felt a perverse urge to steal something. He was going to get disowned anyway, so he probably ought to do something to earn it.
His eyes fell on the side table with its piles of Nine Kings cards. Apparently his father had been playing recently. It was one of the few things that gave the old man joy. Gavin had played him countless times in the past. The old man almost always won. He was a better player than Gavin, and he wasn’t above cheating either, if he thought he could get away with it, though he’d been mortified the one time Gavin had caught him doing it, and had never cheated again so far as Gavin knew.
Instead of grabbing one of the decks on the table, though, Gavin headed for a cabinet. His father had once pulled an amazing deck out of the cabinet after Gavin had won three games in a row. There was a lock on the cabinet, but it was nothing serious. Gavin rummaged through old papers and his father’s favorite books, and found an old jeweled deck box. He pulled it out, cracked it open. The cards were exquisite, but they didn’t have the blind man’s marks on them. Must have been his father’s favorites from before he went into seclusion.
Gavin dropped the deck box into a pocket and headed back to his mother’s room. The slave girl was standing there, wringing her hands. He handed her the letter and went to his mother’s safe, a chunky Parian design that was hard to tell was arranged into numbers at all. He tried his own birth date. It didn’t open.
Ah. He’d tried Gavin’s birth date. Good: he was sinking back into the disguise.
Dazen’s birth date worked. Thank you, mother. He grabbed some purses of gold, and her wedding ring, and some coin sticks. He gave the slave girl one of them, then a second. Her eyes went wide.
“Take this note to the west docks, the Bakers’ Street, you know it? Blue dome building, houses the mercenary company the Cloven Shield. You ask to speak with One-Eye or Taya Vin. I’d advise One-Eye, he’s kinder to young girls. You tell them Lady Felia Guile sent you. You can pay them up to three hundred danars to get you home, including all their expenses—any less that you can negotiate with them, you get to keep. Then book passage home—where are you from?”
“Wiwurgh, my lord.”
“Paria? You don’t look Parian.”
“First generation, my lord. Parents fled the Blood War. It’s not so bad. Lots of us in Wiwurgh.”
“Very well. It’s a long trip, you should pay forty danars for a stateroom. Cheaper to bunk below, but don’t. Make your guard bunk with you. Man or woman doesn’t matter, the Cloven Shield is safe. You can ask for a woman if you prefer, though. Also, take this note to a tailor. By nightfall tonight, you shouldn’t be wearing a slave’s garb. Understood?” Gavin scribbled a note. “You need to get on a ship tonight, though. This is my mother’s wish, but my father isn’t rational right now. You don’t want to be around when he’s angry, and I’m giving him good cause to be angry. He’ll forget you within a week, but for now…”
He scribbled a second note and signed his own name on it. He dripped red luxin on it, pressed it with his will to make it stand in the shape of his seal, and then sealed it with luxin, barely even looking at it. “This tells anyone who might accost you that the Prism is going to check in on you, and if anything ill has happened to you, I will wreak vengeance on them. It may not be true. I don’t know that I’ll ever get to Wiwurgh, but if I live long enough, I’ll try. You understand?”
The girl’s wide eyes hadn’t contracted in the least, but now she also looked on the verge of tears. “My lord… I don’t know how to thank…” She swallowed.
“Go,” he said. “It’s very dangerous for you here.” And me.
She left, and he followed. Then he went down the tower and hid his father’s deck and Kip’s deck in a spot he was certain his father would never check. He came back up to his own room.
Karris was asleep. Gavin slipped his mother’s huge ruby ring on Karris’s finger. She still didn’t wake. Strangely, the ring fit perfectly. Gavin could have sworn his mother’s fingers were wider than Karris’s delicate digits. He looked at the ring.
His mother had resized it to Karris’s ring size. Gavin smiled. Thank you, mother. He could just imagine her mischievous grin, knowing he would figure it out. He hadn’t gotten all of his smarts from his father, she’d say. Still smiling as tears gathered in his eyes, he kissed Karris’s forehead. He held his wife’s hand and sat with her. His wife’s hand. His wife.
After all they’d been through together. The fights with each other, against wights. The darkness and despair. He tucked a wisp of her hair behind her ear. Touched her face gently. Memorized her. He took a breath, and it was pure.
In a world where every danger was growing and his own strength was failing, Karris had his back. She’d always had his back. And somehow, dying though he was, power fractured, doom looming, he felt more whole than ever.
The yoke of responsibility lay hanging off the bedpost. Gavin kissed his sleeping wife’s forehead, cracked his neck, rolled his shoulders, and picked the damn thing back up. Slipped it on. It felt good. It felt like it was made for him.
Marissia was waiting at the door. Her face was carefully composed, hands folded, ready to serve. Gavin handed her the note for the tower register to record his mother freeing her slave. Marissia took it silently, but there was a touch of hesitancy in her stance.
“Marissia,” Gavin said quietly. “I… if you’re gone when I get back, I understand, but you will always have a place here.”
She bowed jerkily, and he could tell she was doing it to cover her sudden tears. She practically fled the room. Gavin rubbed the bridge of his nose and stepped into the hallway, doing his best not to look after her. Commander Ironfist was there, waiting silently.
“Commander,” Gavin said. “How do you feel about doing a little skimming? Flirt-with-death dangerous.”
Ironfist said nothing, but his mouth quirked up in a little grin.
Chapter 97
Though much is taken, much abides, Gevison had once said.