A Court for Thieves

And then there would be the most horrific death Angelica could imagine.

“No, I thought not. You will be the perfect wife. You will be the perfect mother in time. You will tell me of any problems. You will obey my commands. If you fail in any of these things, the Mask of Lead will seem tame in comparison to what will happen to you.”

CHAPTER SIX

They dragged Sophia outside, pulling at her even though she was walking under her own power. She was too numb to do anything else, too weak to even think about fighting. The nuns were delivering her on her new owner’s orders. They might as well have wrapped her up like a new hat or a side of beef.

When Sophia saw the cart, then she tried to struggle, but it made no difference. It was a big, gaudy thing, painted like the wagon of some circus or troupe of players. The bars proclaimed it as what it was though: the holding wagon of a slaver.

The nuns dragged her to it and opened up the back, pulling back big bolts that couldn’t be accessed from the inside.

“A sinful thing like you deserves to be in a place like this,” one of the nuns said.

The other one laughed. “You think she’s sinful now? Give her a year or two of being used by every man with the coin for her.”

Sophia had a brief glimpse of cowering figures as the nuns threw the door open. Frightened eyes looked up at her, and she saw half a dozen other girls huddled on the hard wood. Then they shoved her inside, sending her tumbling among them with no room to gather herself.

The door slammed shut with a clang of metal on metal. The noise of the bolts was worse, proclaiming Sophia’s helplessness in a scrape of rust and iron.

The other girls scrambled back from her while she tried to find a space there. Sophia’s talent gave her their fear. They were worried that she would still be violent, the way the dark-eyed girl in the corner had been, or that she would scream until Meister Karg beat all of them, the way the girl with the bruises around her mouth had.

“I’m not going to hurt any of you,” Sophia said. “I’m Sophia.”

Things that might have been names were murmured back to her in the half light of the prison cart, too quiet for Sophia to catch most of them. Her power let her get the rest, but right then she was too wrapped up in her own misery to care much.

A day ago, things had been so different. She’d been happy. She’d been ensconced in the palace, preparing for her wedding, not locked in a cage. She’d been surrounded by servants and helpers, not frightened girls. She’d had fine dresses, not rags, and safety rather than the lingering pain of a beating.

She’d had the prospect of spending her life with Sebastian, not being used by a succession of men.

There was nothing she could do. Nothing but sit there, looking out of the gaps in the bars now, watching as Meister Karg walked out of the orphanage with a smug expression. He sauntered to the cart, then hauled himself up into the driving seat with a groan of effort. Sophia heard the crack of a whip, and she flinched instinctively after everything that had happened to her at the hands of Sister O’Venn, her body expecting pain even as the cart rumbled into life.

It crawled through Ashton’s streets, the wooden wheels jolting as they found the holes between the cobbles there. Sophia saw the houses passing by at barely the pace of a walking man, the wagon in no hurry to get to its destination. That should have been a good thing, in a way, but it seemed then just like a way of drawing out her misery, taunting her and the others with their inability to escape the wagon.

Sophia saw people passing by, moving out of the way of the wagon only in the way that they moved aside for other large carts capable of crushing them. A few glanced at it, but they made no comment. They certainly made no move to stop it or to help the girls within. What did it say about a place like Ashton that this counted as normal?

A fat baker paused to watch them pass. A couple stepped back away from the tire ruts. Children were pulled close by their mothers, or ran up to stare inside on dares from their friends. Men looked in with considering expressions, as though wondering if they could afford any of the girls there. Sophia forced herself to glare back at them, daring them to meet her eyes.

She wished that Sebastian were there. No one else in this city would help her, but she knew that even after everything that had happened, Sebastian would throw the doors open and get her out. At least, she hoped he would. She’d seen the embarrassment on his face when he’d found out what Sophia was. Maybe he would look away too and pretend not to see her.

Sophia hoped not, because she could see some of what was waiting for her and the others, waiting in Meister Karg’s mind like a toad for her. He planned to pick up more girls on his way to a waiting ship that would ferry them across the water to his home city, where there was a brothel that dealt in such “exotic” girls. He always needed new ones, because the men there paid well for the chance to do what they wanted with the fresh arrivals.

Just thinking about it made Sophia feel nauseous, although maybe that had something to do with the constant rolling of the cart as well. Did the nuns know what they’d sold her into? She knew the answer to that: of course they did. They’d joked about it, and about the fact that she would never be free, because there would be no way for her to ever pay off the debt they’d imposed on her.

It meant a lifetime of slavery in everything but name, forced to do whatever her fat, perfumed owner wanted until she was no longer worth anything to him. He might let her go then, but only because it was easier to let her starve than to keep her. Sophia wanted to believe that she would kill herself before she let all of that happen to her, but the truth was that she would probably obey. Hadn’t she obeyed for years while the nuns abused her?

The cart ground to a halt, but Sophia wasn’t foolish enough to believe that they had reached any kind of final destination. Instead, they had stopped outside a hat maker’s shop, and Meister Karg went inside without so much as a glance back at his charges.

Sophia rushed forward, trying to find a way to get to the bolts outside the bars. She reached through the gaps of the wagon’s sides, but there was simply no way to reach the lock from where she was.

“You mustn’t,” the girl with the bruised mouth said. “He’ll beat you for it if he catches you.”

“He’ll beat all of us,” another said.

Sophia pulled back, but only because she could see that it wasn’t going to do any good. There was no point in getting hurt when it wouldn’t change anything. It was better to bide her time and…

And what? Sophia had seen what waited for them in Meister Karg’s thoughts. She could probably have guessed it even without that there to make her stomach clench with the fear of it. The slaver’s cart was not the worst thing that could happen to any of them, and Sophia needed to find a way out of it before it got worse.

What way, though? Sophia didn’t have an answer to that.

There were other things she didn’t have an answer to either. How had they found her in the city, when she’d managed to hide from hunters before? How had they known what to look for? The more Sophia thought about it, the more she was convinced that someone must have sent news of her departure to the hunters.

Someone had betrayed her, and that thought hurt worse than any of the beatings had.

Meister Karg came back, dragging a woman with him. This one was a few years older than Sophia, looking as though she had already been indentured for some time.

“Please,” she begged as the slaver pulled her along. “You can’t do this! Just another few months and I’d have paid off my indenture!”

“And until you pay it in full, your master can still sell it,” Meister Karg said. Almost as an afterthought, he hit the woman. Nobody moved to stop him. People barely looked.

Or your master’s wife can when she becomes jealous of you.

Sophia caught that clearly, understanding the horror of the situation in that moment through a combination of Karg’s and the woman’s thoughts. She was called Mellis, and had been doing well in the profession she’d been indentured to. Well enough that she’d been about to be free, except that the hat maker’s wife had been sure her husband would leave her for the indentured woman as soon as she paid off her debt.

So she’d sold her on to a man who would ensure she was never seen again in Ashton.

It was a terrible fate, but it was also a reminder to Sophia that she wasn’t the only one there with a harsh story. She’d been so focused on what had happened to her with Sebastian and the court, but the truth was that probably everyone had some sorrowful tale behind their presence in the cart. No one would be there by choice.

And now none of them would have a choice about anything they did in their lives.

“In,” Meister Karg snapped, throwing the woman in with the rest of them. Sophia tried to press forward in the moments the door was open, but it slammed shut again in her face before she could get close to it. “We’ve a lot of ground to cover.”

Sophia caught the flicker of a route in his thoughts. There would be more meandering through the city, picking up servants who were no longer wanted, apprentices who had managed to anger their masters. There would be a journey out of the city, into the outlying villages and as far north as the town of Hearth, where another orphanage waited. After that, there was a ship moored on the edge of the Firemarsh.

It was a route that would take at least a couple of days of travel, and Sophia had no doubt that the conditions for it would be awful. Already, the morning sun was turning the wagon into a space of heat, sweat, and desperation. By the time the sun reached its zenith, Sophia doubted she would even be able to think with it.

“Help!” Mellis called out to the people on the street. She was obviously braver than Sophia was. “Can’t you see what’s happening? You, Benna, you know me. Do something!”

The people there kept walking past, and Sophia could see how useless it was. Nobody cared, or if they did, nobody felt as though they could actually do anything. They weren’t about to break the law for the sake of a few indentured girls who were no different from all the others who had been sold from the city over the years. Possibly, at least a few of those there had their own indentured servants or apprentices. Simply calling for help wouldn’t work.

Sophia had an option that might, though.

“I know you don’t want to interfere,” she called out, “but if you take a message to Prince Sebastian and tell him that Sophia is here, I have no doubt that he’ll reward you for – ”

“Enough of that!” Meister Karg shouted, slamming the handle of his coachman’s whip into the bars. Sophia knew what was waiting for her if she was silent, though, and she simply couldn’t accept that. It occurred to her that the street people of the city might not be the right ones to ask for help.

“What about you?” Sophia called to him. “You could take me to Sebastian. You’re just in this to make money, aren’t you? Well, he could give you a profit on me easily, and you’d have the thanks of a prince of the realm. He wanted me for a fiancée two days ago. He’d pay for my freedom.”

She could see Meister Karg’s thoughts as he considered it. It meant that she shrank back the instant before the whip handle struck the bars again.