Rapid footsteps echoed from the corridor outside the room. The Sachakan rose from among the broken mess in the corner. He looked at her, scowling, then down at himself. His clothes were as scorched as the walls, the stitchwork and beading blackened. After brushing at the marks with no effect, his face twisted into a snarl.
The door to the room flew open. Tessia jumped as Lord Dakon stepped inside. He stopped, looking from her to the Sachakan, then at the damage.
“What happened?” he demanded.
The Sachakan said nothing. He smiled, stepped over a broken chair, and strode from the room.
Lord Dakon turned to her. His eyes slid from her face to her chest. Looking down, she realised the front of her dress was unbuttoned to the waist, exposing her undershift. Hastily, she sat up and turned away so he could not see her buttoning it up again.
“What happened?” he asked again, this time more gently.
Tessia drew in a breath to answer, but the words would not come out. Your guest tried to force himself on me, she silently told him. But she found the Sachakan had been right. She didn’t want anyone to know. Not if there were the slightest chance her mother might hear of it. As her father had always said, there was no such thing as a secret in this tiny community.
And nothing had happened. Well, nothing like what the Sachakan appeared to intend, she thought. She stood up and glanced at the scorched walls. I have no idea why he did that.
Turning back to Dakon, she did not meet his eyes. “I ...I was rude. He took offence. I’m sorry... about the mess, Lord Dakon.” She picked up her father’s bag and began to turn away, then stopped to add: “The slave is healing well.”
He watched her as she walked past him into the corridor, and said nothing. Though she did not risk looking too closely at him for fear of meeting his eyes, there was something odd in the way he stared at her. She hurried to the servants’ stairs, and down them. Cannia was in the doorway to the kitchen. The woman said something as Tessia left, but Tessia did not hear properly and did not want to stop.
The late afternoon sunlight was too bright now. Suddenly all Tessia felt was an immense weariness. She hurried along the road to her home, paused to gather her courage before she entered, then opened the door.
Her parents were in the kitchen. They looked up as she entered. Her mother frowned, and her father appeared to suppress a smile as she dropped the bag at his feet.
“The slave is doing well. I’m going to take a nap,” she told them, and before they could say anything in reply she strode out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Nobody pursued her. She heard low voices from the kitchen but didn’t pause to try to make them out. Entering her room, she threw herself on her bed and, to her surprise, a sob escaped her.
What am I doing? Am I going to cry like a child? She rolled over and took a deep breath, forcing tears away. Nothing happened.
But something could have. Her mind veered away from that possibility to a memory of blackened walls. Something else had happened. Not what the Sachakan had intended. Something powerful and destructive. But what?
Magic?
Suddenly it all made sense. Lord Dakon. He must have heard something and come to rescue her.
But he didn’t arrive until after it happened.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t have reached out from wherever he had been. It would explain the destruction. The magician would not have made such a mess of the room if he’d been able to see where he directed his power. He’d been working blindly.
I owe him gratitude for doing so, she thought. He broke a lot of expensive things to save me. No wonder he stared at me so strangely. He was expecting thanks, and all I did was rush off home.
After drawing in a deep breath, she let it out slowly. At least she had managed to treat the slave first. Next time she would not be going to the Residence alone. She would stay by her father’s side, every moment she was there. Closing her eyes, she surrendered to exhaustion and slept.
Now that the pain had receded a little, Hanara was able to think, though his thoughts were slow and sluggish from the drug the healer woman had given him. He was not sure being able to think was to his advantage, though. There was no direction in which he could set his mind without finding fear and pain.
He never liked to look backwards. The past was stuffed with bad memories, and the good ones left him full of bitterness. His current situation was hardly one he could find pleasant distractions from. Even if moving didn’t send agonising pain through his body he couldn’t have got out of bed. He was so trussed up with bandages, he might as well have been tied up and gagged.
Considering the future was even more unpleasant. The servant woman who fed him had told him during her last visit that his master had left. Takado was gone, she’d said, declaring he was headed for Sachaka and home.
She had told Hanara he was safe now.
She has no idea, he thought. None of these Kyralians do, except perhaps the magician, Lord Dakon. Takado will come back. He has to.
Sachakan magicians never freed ordinary slaves, let alone source slaves. They never left them behind in enemy territory. Not alive, at least.
When he comes back, he’ll either take me with him, or kill me.
If Hanara hadn’t healed enough by then to be useful to Takado, then the latter was more likely. No Sachakan magician was going to waste time tending to the wounds of a slave, or wait while that slave struggled to keep up, or put up with a slave too weak or crippled to serve their master properly.
Would the healers have worked so hard, if they knew there was a chance their efforts would be wasted?
Remembering the young woman, Hanara felt a strange constriction inside. Her touch had been gentle, her words kind. A person like her could not exist in his homeland. Only in this country was it possible for a woman her age to be so lacking in guile and bitterness.
She was like all the other good things he had seen in this land, which filled him with longing even as he despised them. He wished Takado had never visited Kyralia. The healer woman and Kyralia were the same: young, free, blissfully unaware of how lucky they were. It was hard to imagine she could ever defend herself against the cruel power of Sachakan magic, yet even his master had admitted that Kyralians could be “annoyingly feisty” when faced with a threat.
Takado. He will be back.
While slaves of Hanara’s value weren’t common, they were not impossible to replace either. Takado would test all his slaves when he returned home, and would probably find one with enough latent ability to be his new main source of magic. After all, once the man had discovered Hanara’s latent ability, he’d made sure his source slave had sired plenty of offspring.
Hanara felt only a faint pity for whichever of his progeny would be chosen. He’d never had the chance to know any of them. He was not even sure which of the child slaves were his. A working slave’s life had as many disadvantages as that of a source slave. All slaves’ lives were equally likely to end abruptly, whether by accident, overwork, the cruelty of a slave controller or the whim or violent mood swing of their master.
Why should I care who replaces me, anyway? When you’re dead, you’re dead, he thought. And if Takado finds another source slave, he’ll be more likely to kill me when he returns, if I haven’t healed fast or well enough.