‘Twenty-five.’
‘I’ll get more at the castle.’
‘No you won’t.’
I felt nausea rock my stomach. They were bargaining over Fen and the others like they were livestock.
‘Forty,’ said Captain Vereski. ‘Or I’m leaving.’
‘Forty,’ replied Badger. ‘If you throw in that one.’
He jerked his head at Kizzy. Fen stiffened, but the soldier was already shaking his head.
‘She’s part of a set, see?’ He pointed at me, and I shrank back. My invisibility had evidentially worn off. ‘Malovski’s always looking for novelties.’
The man sucked in air through his gappy teeth. ‘Boyar Valcar will enjoy that.’
The way they were talking was shameful. So bald, so brutal. I wanted to scream, or cry, but only hung my head. If I could not speak I wanted to make a silence of myself, a void that could feel nothing, be nothing, or else become an Ielă, a spirit of wind and fire that could slip through these bars and flee to the forests. But the more the men stared, the more solid I felt. Lumpen with the impossibility of escape.
‘Thirty,’ said the Badger. ‘Final offer.’
They shook hands, like the Settled do over cattle or crops. Morsh was crying again, and I longed to have the courage to reach out to him, as Kizzy had to Fen, but my arms felt heavy and useless as felled tree trunks. The boys were herded into the dwelling, the soldiers’ hands on their sword hilts. Only Fen turned, and his eyes sought one person.
Captain Vereski glanced from Fen, to Kizzy, tracing their gaze, passed between them like a grasp of the hand. A grim smile cracked his face, causing more blood and fluid to leak from his cheek.
He came up close to the bars, right into Kizzy’s face. ‘Any more of this—’ he pointed at his injury. ‘And there’ll be no more that.’ He pointed to Fen’s retreating back. ‘Understand?’
He didn’t wait for her to reply, moving along the cart, which creaked as he swung himself up beside the driver.
I reached for my sister’s hand, but though she trembled, there was no trace of tears on her plump cheeks. Anger had turned Kizzy’s face smooth and dark as polished stone. She looked like a magnificent statue, finer than any carving topping the walls, far fiercer.
I let my arm brush hers, and felt something move between us, some of her heat, her fury. As the door closed on the boys, and the cart began to move again, I let it coil around my heart, and turn it a little to stone, too.
I was not the only one to cross my fingers as we passed through the gate, beneath the demoni atop the walls. Up close they were no less terrifying: winged wolves, and gurning men with claws long as the soldiers’ swords.
There were eight of us left, including Kizzy and me, all girls. I had known each of them since our birth or theirs, but fear had placed barriers between us. I could not bring myself to look any of them in the eye. Who would be next to be taken?
I kept my arm pressed close to Kizzy’s, drawing on her warmth, her anger. While I had not liked the slaver’s words about ‘sets’, I clung onto the glimmer of hope that it meant we would be together. Together, through whatever awful fate awaited.
The cart hit the incline of the hill and began to climb towards the castle. The grey sky was lightening, and I saw the pointed towers were topped with red tiles, sharp against the black stone. It was poised on a large platform of unhewn rock, so that the walls seemed to sprout from it like a terrible tree.
The road curved around the hill in a spiral, hacked flat from rough rock. The houses were better kempt as we approached, large as the Badger’s but well tended, and the people were more finely dressed too. These were richer Settled, who did not have to work the fields for a living. They likely had their own slaves, to run their households – the women’s cheeks were pale, made paler by their uniformly black garb, as though they never toiled in sunlight, and their hands were encased in fine gloves of different crimson shades.
This must be the dress of this place: crimson on black. The image of blood welling on dark skin rose unbidden, and I lowered my head between my knees to keep the faintness at bay.
Halfway up the road, the castle looming like a storm cloud overhead, we stopped again, outside a house with blood-red shutters. This time we drew together, shrinking as one to the back of the cart. Captain Vereski approached the cage door, keeping a sharp eye on Kizzy. But his threat about Fen seemed to have worked: she did not try to escape as the bolt slipped, though I think he was as unnerved by her furious gaze as if she had run shrieking at him.
‘Out,’ he said. No one moved. He bashed the flat of his sword against the bars, harder than ever before. It set the whole cage ringing, singing a chatter through my teeth. ‘Now!’
Girtie whimpered, but she began to crawl to the steps. We followed, and I stumbled a little as I jumped down, legs tingling from so many hours bent in the cage. The air here was sour after the forest’s sap-sweet smell, and stale without wind to clean it.
Vereski knocked on the red door. The cart was parked right up close to the house so we had to stand with our backs pressed fast against the bars to allow Vereski to pass by. He walked close anyway, brushing his leg against our skirts. I could smell bitter smoke and unwashed skin as he moved across my body.
Up close his injury was worse, and I wondered if some of the dirt from our mushroom picking had transferred from under Kizzy’s fingernails. I imagined crushing the deadcap in my pocket, smearing it into the wound.
‘What are you smirking at?’ His words were carried on a hot tide of rotting meat and acid.
I smoothed my treacherous face, held my breath, only releasing it when he moved on. I was proud to see he did not linger on Kizzy, clearly noting her freed hands, her murderous expression. He continued, deliberately, slowly, walking up the line.
He paused in front of Reeni, the youngest of us, raised a gloved hand and ran it from her chin up to her ear lobe. A collective shudder ran through us. A muscle worked in Reeni’s jaw. I was proud of her for not crying: showing weakness to this man was like blood to a wolf.
‘All right,’ he spoke to us all. ‘Malovski will be out soon.’ His eyes bore into Kizzy. ‘I’ll have no spitting, no scratching, no speaking.’
Shock had caught us in its numbing grasp, but now, lined up as the boys had been, I started to feel the edges of true panic, like standing on a precipice. We waited long enough for my thoughts to chase themselves to exhaustion and fall into a buzzing agitation that meant I could not settle my mind on anything. My body felt wracked with grief, sore and tender, as though I had been beaten like Kizzy.
At long last, the door opened, and a woman stepped out.
‘Mistress Malovski,’ purred Vereski, bowing and holding out his hand to help her down the step. She did not take it.
If the man in the fields had been a badger, Mistress Malovski was a fox. She was wearing a high collared gown of scarlet, nipped in tight at the waist with a black sash, an inverse reflection of Vereski’s uniform. She was thin, like me, and short as Reeni. Around sharp, black eyes rimmed with dark lashes, her pointed face was pale except for two spots of rouge high on her cheeks, and a crimson slash across her lips, all of which conspired to give her a feverish appearance.
Her thin lips pursed as she regarded us, mouth red as a wound. ‘Gypsies?’