an estate sale

[namesthesky]

Damn the old lady. Damn her into whatever creative torments have ever been invented for priests to wish on their theological opponents, all simultaneously, for ever and always, let it be done.

Aya is quite aware that she'd revise this opinion if her opinions had any power over the fate of the old lady. Since they do not, she will stand here and silently call down curses.

She was supposed to be willed to herself. She had plans. She was going to sleep in the temple attic and work for the post office and save up enough to go to Carthapane. She was pretty sure she could be enrolled in a college by twenty-five, doing something useful by thirty - she was undecided pending her more formal education between illegal human export and working within the system for debt relief or purchase-to-manumit programs -

And now she'll just count herself lucky if she gets bought by someone with loose enough security that she can flee over the border without falling into a magic, attempt to teach herself Tsopixi, and do - she doesn't have a plan after that, now. Her plan went up in smoke when the old lady's will was read and she was left to the idiot grandson and the idiot grandson traded her to a reseller for enough to cover his bad investments. She can't go work for the post office with marked heel and no papers.

And she is keenly aware that she is sixteen going on seventeen, which is a much different situation than she faced when she was on the block a decade ago being advertised for her literacy, assessed for her ability to take dictation.

She shifts position. The chain between her collar and the wall jangles. She watches people going by, browsing, reading the sign posted in front of her.

"Ayabel" - 125 seo
16 yrs, healthy
Reads & writes (Esevi, some Ancient Sudre)
10 yrs housegirl experience, previously farming
No history of rebelliousness

Yeah. No history of rebelliousness, because the old lady was old and coming up on the end of her life, the old lady let her read books and left her enough free time to think and draw, the old lady was going to will her to herself and then she could get started on her life.

This history won't last long, Aya doesn't think.

Most especially if anyone looks at the second line and brings her home for the obvious thing.

Comments

[anotherbreeze]

"Yeah," he says. "Sure. So the first step in making me that angry is to become Duke of Viore, and then arrange for me to be your only child, and then spend seventeen years treating me like my only purpose in life is to behave exactly how you want me to at all times, and then you'll have no trouble at all pissing me off. People who aren't my father don't annoy me that much because they're just - they work on a completely different scale."

[namesthesky]

"Ah."

[anotherbreeze]

He shrugs.

[namesthesky]

"...Is he likely to use me in the project of attempting to manage you or did he mean it when he talked about keeping me out from underfoot?"

[anotherbreeze]

"He manages me just fine with his favourite method."

[namesthesky]

"If you say so."

[anotherbreeze]

He sighs. "Yeah."

[namesthesky]

"It's only - I'm a new factor in the situation. Why do you think he gave me to you?"

[anotherbreeze]

"...Do you want me to answer that?"

[namesthesky]

"So the obvious thing, then. And nothing else? I'm literate, he could have gotten twenty-five percent off if that was all he wanted and he'd take a girl who can't read."

[anotherbreeze]

"If I had to guess, I'd say he waited until the last minute and you were just the first girl he saw that he liked the look of. He absolutely loathes shopping."

[namesthesky]

"All right then."

[anotherbreeze]

Shrug.

[namesthesky]

"I barely remember the last time I was sold. I was six and the obvious thing was dramatically less of a concern."

[anotherbreeze]

"Not that that never happens, but at least it's not usual."

[namesthesky]

"Exactly."

[anotherbreeze]

"Yeah."

[namesthesky]

"And instead I got bought by a retired old lady who wanted me to take dictation because she was getting arthritic. I've been about as absurdly lucky as I could get without manumission papers wafting out of a magic into my lap. Or her doing what she let me think she would."

[anotherbreeze]

"Guess so," he agrees.

[namesthesky]

Aya... is out of things to say. It feels weird to be talking about herself this much, and she's pretty sure she's addressed all his expressed curiosities.

[anotherbreeze]

He is out of things to say too.

He waits another moment, though, to see if she comes up with anything.

[namesthesky]

Nope.

She picks up a pastry and bites it, breaking eye contact.

[anotherbreeze]

Then - yeah. Back to his room he goes.

[namesthesky]

Aya eats pastries. She adds a border of further detail to her butterfly's wings. She picks up the book she's in the middle of and reads on.

She undergoes a sort of emotional unfurling over the next several days, when everything continues to be exactly as it was presented to her. She takes the colored inks and experiments with using them in coded drawings; preliminary results are promising. She finishes the history book, its companion volume, several plays, a novel, and a catalog of case studies of people who've wandered into magics and successfully come out with this or that deformity, drawback, arguable enhancement, or crippling condition - instead of dying instantly, vanishing, or becoming permanently stuck to something inside the magic until dying less than instantly. She eats the excellent household food, three meals a day. She gets her change of clothes, finds out where laundry gets done, and thereafter has a suitable schedule of personal and fabric-related cleanliness. She finds a little box of decorative tacks in the attic, puts up her lizard on the wall, confirms that Hal isn't going to make a face at there being a tack hole in the wall, and then puts up the other drawings and the new ones she's drawn since the first day. She thinks she'll take a stab at actually organizing the attic - pretty much entirely for her own convenience - one of these days.

[anotherbreeze]

And then...

Dinner with the family is a thing in this household. Hal can freely avoid his parents at other meals, and invariably does, but his presence at dinner is required. So dressing up and going downstairs in the evenings is an unremarkable event.

Usually, though, he's back in less than an hour. Today it's more like three. And while he's been known to head straight for his room after dinner and not come out for a while, today he doesn't even make it that far. He comes into the little front room and shuts the hall door behind him and then can't manage the minimal coordination necessary to detour around the couch that is in his way. Instead he collapses across it, sobbing into his hands and bleeding through the back of his shirt.