But the closer she gets to the figures by the wagon, the less confident she feels about what’s happening. One of the slavers is smiling at the princeling unctuously. By the subtle twist of his lips, the princeling seems repulsed by the man, yet they are nodding at each other. They shake hands, and the slaver walks away, leaving the princeling with the other three strangers.
She swallows her rising apprehension, walks past the wagons, tries not to look inside. The princeling notices her only when she’s close enough to touch him—or strike.
His face brightens. “Ilapara! I’m glad you found me. I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it back to the store.”
She quickly assesses the three strangers around him and decides they’re not immediate threats. Then she slits her eyes at Salo. “What’s happening here?” she demands, and when he tells her, it takes every ounce of self-control just to keep her eyes from bulging in shock and horror.
Because apparently the princeling is the buyer. He’s purchased every slave in the meat market—that’s thirty-two Faraswa in total. And he’s also purchased two of the wagons they came in, along with the mules drawing them.
I am calm, she tells herself. I am not my emotions. Even so, she fails to douse the fire in her words. “Why? Why the devil would you do such a thing?”
“To be honest?” he says. “I’m not sure I know myself, but I have all this money I don’t need and can help these people with it, so.”
She almost sighs in relief, almost, but common sense stifles it in her chest. “Where are you taking them?”
“Oh, I’m not going with them. He is.” Salo points at the olive-skinned man next to him, the one wearing orange robes and a reptilian smile on his face. A few of his teeth are golden, one ear looks like it was partially bitten off, and his beard is a perfect tapering goatee. A mercenary. Probably Dulama. “I’m told he carries a recognized transporter’s license,” Salo says. “Whatever that means. Anyway, I hired him to take these people home. Most of them don’t even know where they are or what’s happening to them. If I freed them here, they’d just get enslaved again. They need help, rehabilitation. I don’t know.”
Ilapara keeps her expression level. “When you say home, you mean home as in the Yerezi Plains.”
“Yes.” Salo bites his lips like he knows how crazy that sounds.
“They’ll never be allowed to cross the borderlands,” she tells him.
“I’ll give them these.” He opens his right palm to reveal two moongold coins. “I’ve inscribed a message for AmaSikhozi in each of them,” the princeling continues. “If she won’t help them herself, she can have them escorted to Khaya-Siningwe. My aba will not turn them away.”
He’s probably insane. I am not my emotions. “How much did all this cost, Musalodi?”
“In total? About twenty mountains.”
I am not my emotions. I am not my emotions. “Twenty mountains. Do you have any idea how much that is? Do you even know how much you’re holding in your hands right now?”
“These coins are meaningless to me, Ilapara. I feel nothing giving them away. But it makes all the difference in the world to these poor people. It’s the right thing to do.”
“There’ll be more Faraswa here tomorrow when the next caravan comes in. What then? Are you going to buy them all too?”
“I don’t intend to be here tomorrow,” Salo says. “I’m here today, so I can help these people today. All for twenty measly coins.”
“Measly, he says.” Ilapara shakes her head, at a loss. “You’ve never had to work for a living, have you. Never mind that: What about the fact that you’re supporting the trade? Your money will only encourage these slavers to keep doing what they’re doing.”
“Maybe, but there’ll always be a buyer, and whether that buyer is me or someone else is of no consequence to these men. What’s better for the victims at the end of the day?”
Ilapara holds his gaze, trying to think of a way to dissuade him from this madness. But this is such a gutsy thing to do she can’t help but approve a little. By Ama, he makes her miss home so much it’s nauseating.
She takes another look at the men around him. A short light-skinned man stares back at her with curious blue eyes and a slight smile, the kind that’s probably a permanent facial feature, as if he finds the fabric of existence amusing. He’s a little too handsome to be trustworthy. She decides she doesn’t like him. “And who’s this? Another slaver, I presume?”
Salo shakes his head. “Not at all. This is Tuksaad; he’s coming with me to Yonte Saire.”
“Uh-huh.” At this point she’s just going along with whatever he says. “And you?” She turns her scrutiny on the skinny, ragged boy next to Salo, whose ruby eyes quickly fall to the ground when they meet hers. An old woolen hat is drawn over his head, covering what must be tensor appendages. She tilts her head and addresses him in Izumadi. “Wait a second—haven’t I seen you around before?”
“He’s a friend,” Salo answers for him. “He’ll be driving one of the wagons to the Plains.”
All right. Time to leave this craziness. “Musalodi—Salo, look. It’s possible a hostile warlord is making a move on the town, so there might not be a caravan leaving tonight. You should find lodging as soon as possible and stay indoors until the storm passes. Even now you’re putting yourself at risk by being here.”
“She doesn’t know,” remarks the pale-skinned one, and Ilapara almost does a double take because he’s just spoken in Sirezi, and his eyes are a bright shade of green, when they were blue not a moment ago.
She almost shows alarm, but Ilapara is good at controlling herself. “Know what?” she says, and Salo stares blankly at her with those reflective lenses of his like he’s trying to figure out how much to tell her.
“Let’s see these wagons off, and I’ll explain everything,” he says at length. “Can you wait that long?”
The wise thing to do would be to leave, but she can’t bring herself to do it. If anything happened to him afterward, she’d never forgive herself. “All right,” she says with a sigh of resignation. “I’ll wait.”
It’ll be a slow trek southeast for the wagons along the narrow, bumpy road to Khaya-Sikhozi. Ilapara hasn’t made the trip in three years, but she remembers erratic skies and endless stretches of flat savanna bristling with wildlife.
She watches with mild envy as Salo sees off the Faraswa boy and the Dulama mercenary, handing each of them a moongold coin. The boy seems to struggle with the reins at first, but he gets it right fairly quickly. As he rolls away, following the mercenary’s wagon, Ilapara glimpses a familiar crimson-eyed face inside the cage behind him. Those eyes are still dead to the world, but seeing them now floods her with a fragile hope that maybe the world isn’t as bleak as she thought it was. Maybe.
Once the wagons have set off, she leads both Salo and Tuksaad to a relatively sheltered blind alley not too far away and folds her arms.
“Well?” she says to the two young men. “What don’t I know?”