beat the life from his body . . . but Maura wouldn’t want that either. Tend to your own business, she had told him, and he had listened, and now look where they were.
You don’t own her, Christian reminded himself, breathing deeply. Any more than Mrs. Evans does, or anyone else. What happens next is her decision.
But this was the Alley; no one had choices. Looked at broadly, even the decision to take the first hit of morphia had been determined long before Maura had picked up the syringe . . . determined by statistics, if nothing else. After another moment spent mastering himself, he moved toward the doorway.
“Are you going?” Gwyn asked, confused. “Don’t you want to stay until she wakes up?”
“No. I have to go. Do me a favor and don’t tell her I was here.”
“All right,” Gwyn replied guilelessly, but Christian didn’t know whether she could be trusted; she was, after all, only nine.
And what of that? his mind demanded nastily. When you were nine, you crushed Alja Mueller’s windpipe and ate a good dinner afterward.
He ducked through Maura’s hangings, heading back up the hallway, ignoring greetings from Benia, who had clearly just finished with a john and was heading toward the bathroom. He barely saw the common room, the enforcers who glimpsed his face and automatically drew back. He was thinking of the auction block again, of the way that Maura had shivered in the dankly cavernous room as they took off her clothes. Christian had wanted to stop them, but he had been even smaller than she, and seeing her naked had hurt his heart. Somehow he understood, even then, the power of that forced disrobing, the debasement that came with it. Wigan had bought the two of them as a package, but Christian had gone into the ring right away, while Maura had been a buy-and-hold; Wigan had spotted her long white-blonde hair and seen the potential for a good investment. He held her until she was eight, when he brokered her sale to Mrs. Evans and made a tidy profit.
I begged him to keep her, Christian remembered now. I begged him. Maura begged him. But he only laughed and said the thing that made me furious, about the bubbles in the ale. What was it?
Christian couldn’t remember. All he remembered were Maura’s giant eyes, staring into his, when Mrs. Evans’s enforcers came to take her away. He supposed it could have been worse; she could have been sold to the Deep Patch, and at least when she was in the Alley he could keep an eye on her.
And what a fabulous job you’ve done.
Christian winced. Maura had been in no state to hear about Arliss’s offer, but the very instant she was better he would tell her about it, about topside. Perhaps he could convince her. Perhaps she would even come of her own free will. Perhaps he should have broached the subject, despite her weakened state. One way or another, he would have to get her off the poppy, and from what Christian knew of most addicts, that was probably going to mean locking her up.
Are you sure even that will work? his mind whispered. That girl who made the bracelet, who held your hand until they put you on the block, how much of her is left?
Christian wished he knew the answer.
Chapter 8
MEN OF GOODWILL
In hindsight, it seems clear that Queen’s Guards were no better than other men. They drank; they gambled and whored. From time to time they murdered civilians, or even each other. But this is not the popular image of the Guard, which was supposed to embody an almost courtly ideal: men who were not only the best with a sword but the purest of heart. This pretty fiction took a curious hold, persisting long after it had become patently obvious that the average Queen’s Guard was neither. A man whose heart was as fine as his sword would be an extraordinary find indeed, but if such a Queen’s Guard ever existed, then history has forgotten him.
—The Tearling as a Military Nation, Callow the Martyr
Carroll had thought that it would be a simple matter to track the seer. Her appearance, after all, made it almost impossible for her to blend into a crowd, and she did not hurry on her way, merely sailed serenely down the streets of the Hollow. Following her should have been an easy business, but it had gone wrong right from the start.
The albino