Gavin shook his head. The girl was young. His mother had always trained her help exquisitely, and had chosen only intelligent slaves, preferring that over physical beauty, unlike other leading families. But there are some situations you don’t get around to training a fourteen-year-old girl for.
“Did my mother leave no instructions for you?” Gavin asked. Usually, like himself, his mother had kept at least half a dozen slaves in her household. She’d trimmed back in recent years, mostly manumitting those who’d provided long years of good service. Now Gavin knew why.
“She told me…” The girl blanched, then bulled forward. “She told me she was giving orders for my manumission to Grinwoody, seeing as how a slave can’t deliver her own manumission to the records keepers. I hain’t—your pardon, my lord—I haven’t heard anything since then.”
“You old bastard,” Gavin whispered to himself. His father was still denying that his wife was dead, so he’d simply ignored the girl. The girl had been stuck here for four months, with nothing to do but dust the room and get fresh flowers and hope. “Did she leave you a letter?” Gavin asked.
“Yes, my lord,” the girl said, her voice was barely a whisper, obviously picking up on Gavin’s pique. “Believe Grinwoody put it in the lord’s chamber.”
“Of course he did.” And they wouldn’t appreciate Gavin breaking into his room.
But you know what? To the everlasting night with them. Gavin was more than half convinced that his father had orchestrated Karris’s beating. The attempted murder of Kip seemed too heavy-handed, but at this point he wasn’t going to excuse his father preemptively for anything.
Look to what you love indeed.
Gavin headed across the hall, drafted red luxin into the lock, jimmied it until he felt tumblers loosen, and then injected yellow luxin, steeled his will, and twisted. The lock clicked open.
He might be half dead, but he wasn’t neutered yet, thanks. He set a light to burning, casting a pale yellow glare through the Red’s rooms. He went to the desk, rifled through the papers. Andross Guile was upstairs, and a council of war would surely take hours, even for a man as ignorant of war as his own father. Andross seemed to think that being brilliant meant being good at everything, and his generals would have to fill in the gaps in his knowledge carefully and slowly, lest they infuriate the old man. Considering how ignorant they themselves were, it ought to take a while.
It was almost comical how much excellent intelligence his father had left in the open. Gavin wished he’d come in merely to poke around. Andross was simply here so often that he clearly never thought about the danger of someone coming into his rooms while he was gone. He was never gone.
Gavin found the note about the slave girl quickly. His mother’s handwriting was on the outside, a beautiful looping script that she hadn’t lost even as age advanced on her.
We drafters are robbed of life before age can rob us of our faculties. Gavin didn’t know if it was the greatest cruelty of all, or a small kindness. He glanced at the letter. It was as the girl had said, a simple, straightforward manumission, and a grant of four hundred danars. The girl would leave slavery with more in her hand than she would have earned at a servant’s wages in two years. It was a fortune for a young girl. Enough for a dowry in those rural areas of the few satrapies where such things were still customary. The only unusual bit was the instruction that the girl be given an armed guard from the Cloven Shield mercenary company to take her home—Felia Guile had doubtless thought through the fact that sending a very young and attractive girl home with a fortune in hand would put her in grave peril. Of course, sending a guard from the Cloven Shield would cost more than two hundred danars, but they had a sterling reputation.
Like many socially conscious women, Felia Guile had always had deep reservations about slavery. Are we all not brothers and sisters under the light? she would ask. He could almost hear her voice as she talked through it: From Orholam’s perch, what difference is a man’s garment? And like so many others, she’d still had slaves. Impossible to think of a world without them. Men wouldn’t volunteer for the galleys, or the silver mines, or the sewers, would they? And what does one do with the widows and orphans when a country is conquered? Simply let them die at the first winter? Leave them as prey for slavers with less scruples than the civilized satrapies had?
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.