their native word for 'dear', or 'love'. A term of endearment.
My eyes went to the window. Only the barest whisper of twilight seeped through around the edges. My fingers hovered over the material of Victoria's dress.
Twilight was the hour I lived for, by design. The hour for which I had been bought.
The hour in which, every day, I was to come out of the woodwork.
T w o –
The Ritual
It was my specific charge to perform a special ritual each day. I had been bought for a very distinct quality: my voice.
Manor Dorn, being a lonely manor on the outskirts of town, was vulnerable on all sides. We were a plot surrounded by open land – a beacon of a victim. Utterly exposed. We may not have been able to predict the shifts in the city, or what would come of them, but there was one thing we could count on:
Wardogs.
They hunted at night, and we were at their mercy.
The only thing that kept them away was light – it hurt their eyes. They spent years on end, or even the majority of their lives, hibernating in the nooks and crannies of the world. Spring did not awaken them. War did. The smell of carnage roused them from their nests, and once they got a taste they did not sleep for a very long time. They hid by day, sensitive to the light from their habitual deprivation, but they came out to prowl when dusk hit.
We had a means of defense in the surrounding land, but it was tricky. The weedflowers could be stimulated into glowing bulbs by way of song. They bloomed when sung to by a comely voice, and glowed like fireflies when awakened thus. But they only lasted a matter of hours. I had to sing them awake right at dusk in order for them to last until dawn. A chilling duty, but normal to me. I had not known this country when it was not plagued by such things.
I heard the stories, though. I knew that a generation ago, things had been very different. A generation ago, there had not been a population of dark-skinned slaves. They had been our neighbors. Simply the foreign Serbaens.
Then war had reached their land, and swarms of refugees spilled across the border into our land: Darath.
Instead of giving them shelter, we had taken them as slaves.
For some, there was no excuse better than taking advantage of the helpless. For others, they tried to justify their response in that these people had unrightfully invaded, and must face the consequences that any trespasser was dealt.
The Wardogs were just one of the many things that people now blamed on the darkskins – (or 'baedra', as we called them in their own language, because they 'didn't deserve a place in our own language'. It didn't make sense to me, and rang in irony, that we would not utter of them in our own language, but would deign to speak in theirs.) There was tell of how misfortune and decay followed the darkskins here, how they were the dirty ones who brought it – creatures, rather than folk, whose culture was dark mischief. It was easy to blame them, for how events undoubtedly coincided, and to keep them with a vengeance as slaves. For some it was fear, rather, that needed an excuse to keep the mischief-makers in their place. But for me, the stories and excuses were all unwarranted. For I lived among the mischief-makers every day. They were my friends. And they did not fit the descriptions.
But it was of no consequence. There was not a judge left in town for these matters. There was only the countryside, the ruins, the people in their nooks and crannies, all in the same boat, and the rituals that had come to be a way of life. Such as the ritual before me now. I had not known things any other way.
I had been sought for the job because 'no darkskin could have a voice lovely enough to make flowers bloom'. It was an ironic purpose, existing to protect the Masters from the nuances that came with their own choice of slaves, but it was how things had come to be. These were dark times, and strange times, and order had gotten lost in the mischief. Trampled into dusty fragments of old and figments of wild imagination.
With dusk came mist. There was rarely a night that we didn't have mist. Sometimes there were clear pockets, even clear