Marie Rutkoski - The Winner's Curse

Another Herrani was waiting outside. He recognized her, though he saw her only for meals and at night. Her name was Lirah, and she worked in the house. She was pretty; younger than him, probably too young to remember the war.

Harman began talking at her in Valorian. The slave tried to be patient as Lirah translated.

“Lady Kestrel can’t be bothered to place you, so I”—she blushed—“I mean, he ”—she nodded at Harman—“has decided to set you to work. Usually the general’s guard see to their own weapon repair, and a Valorian blacksmith from the city is hired on a regular basis to forge new weapons.”

The slave nodded. There were good reasons why the Valorians trained few Herrani blacksmiths. One had only to look around the forge to understand. Anyone could see the heavy tools and guess the strength it would take to manipulate them.

“You will do this from now on,” Lirah continued, “so long as you prove to be competent.”

Harman took the silence that followed as an invitation to speak again. Lirah translated. “Today you will make horseshoes.”

“Horseshoes?” That was too easy.

Lirah gave him a sympathetic smile. When she spoke, it was in her own voice, not the stilted repeating of Harman’s. “It’s a test. You’re supposed to make as many as you can before sunset. Can you shoe a horse, too?”

“Yes.”

Lirah seemed to regret this answer on his behalf. She told the steward, who said, “That’s what he’ll be doing tomorrow, then. Every horse in the stable needs to be shod.” He snorted. “We’ll see how this animal gets along with the other ones.”

Before the war, Valorians had admired, even envied—yes, envied—the Herrani. After, it was as if the spell had been broken or a new one had been cast. The slave never could quite believe it. Somehow, “animal” had become possible. Somehow, the word named him . This was a discovery ten years old and yet remade every day. It should have been dulled by repetition. Instead, he was sore from its constant cut of surprise. He was sour with swallowed anger.

The pleasant, trained expression on Lirah’s face hadn’t faltered. She pointed to the coal bin, kindling, and heaps of raw and used iron. The steward set a box of matches on the anvil. Then they left.

The slave looked around the forge and debated whether he should pass the test or fail.

He sighed, and lit a fire.

His holiday was over. On his first day in the forge, the slave made more than fifty horseshoes—enough to appear dedicated and skilled, but not so much that he drew attention. The following day, he shod all the horses, even those whose shoes were new. The groom warned that some of the animals could be dangerous to handle, especially the general’s stallions, but the slave had no trouble. He made sure, however, that the task took the whole day. He liked listening to the horses’ low whickers and feeling their gentle, warm breath. Also, the stables were a decent place to hear news—or they would have been, if a soldier had come to exercise a horse.

Or if the girl had.

The slave was judged to be a good buy. Lady Kestrel had a fine eye, Harman said grudgingly, and the slave was given several weapons to repair, as well as orders for new ones.

Every dusk, when the slave walked across the grounds from the forge to his quarters, the villa blazed with light. It was curfew and bedtime for slaves, but the restless Valorians would stay up for a long while yet. They trained to get by on very little sleep, perhaps six hours a night—less, if necessary. It was one of the things that had helped them win the war.

The slave was the first to stretch out on his pallet. Each night, he tried to sift through the events of the day and glean useful information from them, but all he had experienced was hard work.

Weary, he shut his eyes. He wondered if those two days of idyll would turn out to have been a stroke of bad fortune. That time had let him forget who he was. It played tricks with his mind.

Sometimes, at the edge of sleep, he thought he heard music.

Usually, Kestrel thought of her house as an echoing place, one filled with mostly uninhabited, if lovely, rooms. The grounds, too, were quiet, the noises small: the scratch of a hoe in the garden, the faint thud of horse hooves from the paddock set far back from the house, the sigh of trees. Usually, Kestrel enjoyed how the space and quiet made her senses more awake.

Lately, however, she had no peace at home. She sequestered herself with her music, but found that she played only difficult pieces, with notes clustered thickly together, her fingers chasing each other across the keys. Her sessions left her worn. The stiffness was minor and in localized spots—her wrists, the small of her back—but when she wasn’t playing she couldn’t ignore the twinges. Each morning she would swear to herself that she would go gently on the piano. Yet at dusk, after hours of feeling suffocated—no, as if she were hiding in her own home—she would again wrest something demanding from the music.

One afternoon, perhaps eight days after the auction, a note came from Jess. Kestrel eagerly opened it, glad for the distraction. Jess, in her typical swirly writing and short, eager sentences, asked why Kestrel was hiding from her. Would she please pay Jess a visit today? Kestrel’s advice on what to wear to Lady Faris’s picnic was needed. Jess added a postscript: a sentence in smaller writing, the letters bunched and hurried, signaling that she couldn’t resist dropping an obvious hint even at the same time she worried it would bother Kestrel: By the way, my brother has been asking about you.

Kestrel reached for her riding boots.

As she wound through the rooms of her suite, she caught a glimpse in a window of the thatched cottage near the garden.

Kestrel paused, the leather boots in her hand tapping against her thigh. The cottage was not so far away from the slaves’ quarters, which loomed at the border of the window’s view. She felt a tug of discomfort.

Of course she did. Kestrel glanced away from the slaves’ quarters and focused on Enai’s cottage. She hadn’t been to see her old nurse in several days. No wonder the view troubled her, when it showed the sweet little house Kestrel had had built for the woman who had raised her. Well, she would visit Enai on her way to the stables.

But by the time she had finished lacing her boots and gone downstairs, the steward had already discovered through the almost instantaneous gossip of the household that Kestrel was leaving. Harman ambushed her by the parlor door.

“Going for a ride, my lady?”

She pulled on a glove. “As you see.”

“No need to ask for an escort.” He snapped his fingers at an older Herrani man scrubbing the floor. “This one will do.”

Kestrel let out a slow breath. “I am riding to Jess’s house.”

“I’m sure he can ride,” Harman said, though they both knew full well this wasn’t likely. Riding was not taught to slaves. Either they had the skill from before the war or never would. “If not,” Harman said, “you can take the carriage together. The general would gladly spare the use of two horses for the carriage to make sure you’re properly escorted.”

Kestrel nodded, just barely. She turned to leave.

“My lady, one more thing…”

Kestrel knew what that one more thing would be, but couldn’t stop him, for to do so would have been to admit that she knew and wished she didn’t.

“A week has passed since your purchase of that young slave,” the steward said. “You’ve given no instructions for his employment.”

“I forgot,” Kestrel lied.

“Of course. You have more important things to deal with. Still, I was certain you had no intention of him lazing around, doing nothing, so I assigned him to the forge and to serve as a farrier for the horses. He has done well. My compliments, Lady Kestrel. You are an excellent judge of the Herrani market.”