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

[namesthesky]

Which Aya does, briskly, in case they're on a nearer deadline than she expects.

She wears the less shapeless thing, but does nothing else to render herself - "a pretty girl" for the duke's son's birthday present.

[makeyourselfuseful]

She's finished in plenty of time for Berete to collect her again. Off they go, out of the servants' area and into much nicer parts of the house - a meaningful comparison, because the servants' area was already pretty nice.

It's a big house. They take a few minutes to get where they're going.

Then: "Here she is, your grace," she reports as she brings Aya into a small sitting room. There are three people seated inside: the duke, a beautiful woman with long hair who is presumably his wife...

[anotherbreeze]

...and a boy of about Aya's age, presumably their son. And every bit as beautiful as his mother.

He looks blankly at Aya.

"...Thank you, Father?"

[pythbox]

"What touching gratitude," says the duke, sarcastically. "Keep her in your rooms, I don't want her getting underfoot. Don't forget to feed her."

[anotherbreeze]

"Yes, Father," says Hal, still without much tone or expression.

[namesthesky]

Aya shifts her weight a little, glancing around the room, noting doors, loose objects, trying to look purely curious and not ready to sneak out under cover of night if anything should happen. She waits for someone to tell her where to go next.

[anotherbreeze]

The duke's son glances from Aya to his father.

"May I go now, Father?" he says.

[pythbox]

"Fine," he dismisses. "Take the girl with you."

[anotherbreeze]

He hesitates, then nods.

Picking up an ornate jeweled mirror - perhaps another birthday present - he beckons to Aya and sets off through the house at a measured walk.

[namesthesky]

Aya follows him, stepping carefully.

She's going to keep her mouth shut until he says something.

[anotherbreeze]

Hal remains silent all the way to his rooms - in another wing of the house, up a long flight of stairs, at the end of a series of halls. There is a small front room containing a couple of soft couches and several haphazardly organized bookshelves, and two doors beyond that, one open and one closed.

He opens the closed one and says, still evenly but with a hint of tightly controlled emotion, "This can be your room. Do whatever you want with it, I don't care if you move things or break things or - whatever. I'm gonna go have a tantrum and then come back and talk to you."

Then he stalks over to the open door - which presumably leads to his bedroom - and closes it very carefully behind him, very much with the attitude of someone who would really, really like to slam a few doors and is refraining with effort.

[namesthesky]

Okay.

In many respects this is promising for her sake, even if he doesn't seem to be as reassured by the structure of the situation.

Aya doesn't want to break things, but she does move them a little, exploring the contents of the room.

She finds, mercy of mercies, a fully equipped secretary's desk, with ink and pens and paper, and sets about drawing, as fast as she can while leaving the lines "legible" to her and plausibly part of a doodle to Hal if he wants to look at it later. The last thing she needs is to drop a privacy measure that has worked for her only to find out that her new owner will look at a pidgin of Ancient Sudre, modern Esevi, and idiosyncratic symbology and hit her until she translates her inner thoughts. So embroidered animal doodle it is, some unfortunate lizard that fell into a magic and came out with extra legs and horns and spines, patches of feathers with patterns hidden in their barbs and patches of fur with information encoded in the placement of hairs. She has the thing composed to give her a place to draw smaller thoughts in a few minutes, and the basic sketch of those thoughts embedded in the drawing a little later. She adds detail at smaller and smaller levels of granularity while she waits for his attention to swing back to her.

This place will be hard to get out of. She will keep an eye out, just in case, but there are worse trajectories for the next few years than having an opportunity to ingratiate herself with the heir to Viore, so she might not even try.

She's a birthday present for a seventeen-year-old boy. She may have made a mistake, but she might not have, and she might have wound up here regardless of her behavior at the market. So that's not worth dwelling on.

The seventeen-year-old boy in question comes with a vouch from Berete, who seems nice and has no obvious motivation to lie to Aya, but you never know with freeborns. (The old lady seemed like she meant it when she talked about manumission.) Aya tentatively trusts Berete, which means she shouldn't be too jumpy around Hal, though she suspects enough jumpiness to remind him who he's dealing with and what her situation is might not be amiss.

The room is nice enough. It has paper. If he's giving her a room with a secretary's desk she might continue to have access to it. That's just about the most important thing, after avoiding punishments, and she's pretty good at that - although that might only be because the old lady and her relatives were not, actually, sadists.

She draws self-soothing circles of thought into the scales of one of the lizard's tails. Wait and see, wait and see, wait and see.

[anotherbreeze]

There is the occasional faint sound of something breaking from the other room, interspersed with muffled and unintelligible yelling. Well, he did announce his intention to have a tantrum.

Eventually, the noises stop. There is a period of quiet.

Then Hal emerges from his room. There are small fluffy feathers clinging to his extremely tidy and fashionable clothes, which are much less tidy than they were half an hour ago. His hair has escaped any semblance of order and turned into a nest of tangled curls. His eyes are a little red, as though he was crying.

[namesthesky]

Aya puts her pen down as soon as the door opens, and turns to look at him.

"My lord?" she asks softly.

[anotherbreeze]

"Welcome to the duke's house," he says wryly, running both hands through his hair (which does nothing to improve it). "You met Berete, right? She's as nice as she looks. Nicer. Father's secretary is completely useless. So's my mother. You won't get any trouble from them on their own accounts; he doesn't so much as sneeze without he's told to, and she doesn't care about anything that she can't eat, drink, or wear. I don't know the kitchen help or the cleaning staff so well, but Berete picks friendly people, she won't stand for a troublemaker in the house. The main thing is not to get Father angry with you. Just avoid him if you can manage it. Sometimes he gets angry for reasons, but half the time he just picks the nearest target."

[namesthesky]

"...Yes, my lord," says Aya agreeably. She designs, in her head, a wing to add to her lizard which could record this information, though she thinks she'll probably remember without.

[anotherbreeze]

He runs his hands through his hair again, again to no effect.

"He doesn't hardly come up here, anyway, so you should be all right if you stay here. But you'll get bored, I bet, I know I do - hmm, do you want to see my attic? I have an attic full of things I don't want. You can have things from it, it's all mine and I don't care about any of it."

[namesthesky]

"If you like, my lord."

She's really not quite sure what he's going for here, but it's not like following him to his attic makes any of the unpleasant possibilities more likely.

[anotherbreeze]

"It's this way. Father beats me," he adds as he leads her out of his little suite and across the hall to a ladder behind a little door. "And the servants when he's angry - he'll make his secretary do it if he doesn't care, but he always complains Teio doesn't hit hard enough. So when I tell you it's a bad idea to get in the way of his moods, I'm speaking from experience."

There's a lantern at the bottom of the ladder; he lights it and brings it with him.

The attic is, indeed, full of things. Many of the things are packed away in chests or trunks, but some are just sitting loose on the floor, or piled on shelves. Little to no organization can be observed in the mess. Clothes, musical instruments, what seems to be a set of watercolour paints next to a case of brushes and a large roll of paper, a dusty stack of wooden decorative masks, small ornate boxes of various materials, piles of appropriately masculine jewelry, fancy pens and coloured inks... things.

[namesthesky]

Aya takes in this assertion. If she were a duke's child trying to get a new slave to trust her, that would probably be a go-to statement true or not, but that doesn't make it false, necessarily. Certainly she takes the warning about the treatment of servants seriously. And Hal hasn't done anything to scare her yet, but she's reluctant to put much weight on the conclusions of five minutes' acquaintance where all she's said amounts to repetitions of:

"Yes, my lord."

She looks through the things. She doesn't touch any of it yet. She can't get attached to material possessions. Even the drawings, even when the old lady kept them and tacked them to the walls, were not suited for diarying because they weren't hers, nothing is hers. But there might be something she could get value out of borrowing for an unpredictable amount of time. She could probably add a lot to the information density of a doodle with ink color; maybe there are books, hiding somewhere, for her to read.

[anotherbreeze]

"Come up here whenever you want, take things back to your room if you want them, do whatever you want there. I'll leave you alone if you ask, or I'll talk to you if you'd rather. I can show you the back ways to the kitchen so you don't run into Father going through the house - now or when you're hungry, either one. In case you haven't had time to notice, Berete really likes feeding people, and she's in and out of there all the time. If you show up she'll give you something."

[namesthesky]

"I'd like to know the way, my lord," confesses Aya.

Is he going to really leave her completely to her own devices? She supposes if she's a surprise it's not that ridiculous, although she still supposes it somewhat likely that he'll come up with some need or other and she'll be the most convenient way to address it, even if the need isn't the obvious thing.

[anotherbreeze]

"All right."

He extinguishes the lantern, which doesn't substantially affect the light levels where they're standing - the attic has a large glass window just behind them, which is letting in enough morning light to illuminate all but the most crowded corners. And he goes back down the ladder, and leaves the lantern there, and leads Aya along the back ways to the kitchen.

'Back ways' prove to be a series of bare, narrow hallways leading to a set of bare, narrow stairs from which they emerge into the hallway that runs between kitchen and servants' quarters. The door to the kitchen is open, and emitting pleasing smells. Hal smiles.

[namesthesky]

Aya memorizes the route. "Thank you, my lord."

Is he ever going to tell her to drop the "my lord"? The old lady only wanted to be called "mistress" in front of company. She supposes it doesn't matter that much.

[anotherbreeze]

He turns his grin in her direction.

"I'm gonna see what's cooking and get a snack. If you don't want anything you can go back to my rooms, if you think you can find the way back all right."