He replied, “Get out of my way, please. I have to…have to eat something.” He couldn’t even look directly at her, but smoldered, his jaw clenched; yet he didn’t move.
She read his inaction, his fury, and understood, though not how or when he’d found out. “Diverus,” she said, “you can’t be in love with me.”
His whole face burned; his eyes scalded. “I’m not,” he said.
“He owns me. My family sold me to give them enough money to live on. My father was ill; he needed things we couldn’t afford. Medicines.”
“Shut up.”
“They sold me to him. I’m his slave. More so than you or any of these boys you live with.” She twisted at the waist and pulled back one sleeve of her shirt and rolled her arm so he could see the dark crescent near her shoulder. “This isn’t a birthmark. It’s his sigil. It doesn’t come off. I’m property. That’s all I am, all I can ever be.” Then she stepped aside and he pushed past her; he was not ready to hear explanations or excuses, least of all hers.
He shoved through the curtain and through a gathering of boys, then took one of the narrow halls that led to the kitchen level.
The cook was chopping turnips as Diverus entered. Glancing up, the cook said, “Well, well, come for your special treat at last, my little harem boy?” At the same time he set down his knife, placed both hands on the cutting board, and leaned forward. “Is it my turn finally, hmm?” As he reached across the board and tousled Diverus’s hair, he smiled with vulpine connivance.
Diverus snatched the knife and drove it straight through the cook’s other hand and into the board.
The cook shrieked to the ceiling. He clutched the handle but it had been driven hard into the board, and he had to rock it to loosen it, which made him squeal and squeal. His blood began to soak into the pale raw turnips. Diverus grabbed another knife, and this one he held to the cook’s throat. The cook clutched the handle stuck into his hand and whimpered. He quavered, his face pale as dough and glistening with sweat. Diverus said softly, “Never.” Then he laid down the knife and walked away. Behind him, the cook shrieked again as he finally freed his hand from the board. His cries rose and fell in waves of agony behind Diverus.
In the tight passage Bogrevil knocked past him, giving him a cursory but suspicious glance before hurrying to the kitchen. More boys followed; a few glared accusingly at him, others with a look more akin to worship. His own cored-out look challenged them all.
He went back to the dormitorium, to his pallet, and lay down. The others in the room were either asleep or too weak to do more than watch him lurch past. Kotul, asleep on his belly on the largest pallet, was sprawled halfway onto the floor.
By the time Diverus had fallen upon his pad he was shaking and feverish, and he drew his legs up, folding his arms around them, and waited for sleep that wasn’t going to come. Strangest of all was that nobody pursued him for his crime. He expected them to pour into the room, Bogrevil and his legion of boys, to drag him against his will down to the laundry pool, there to drown him in the dark and toss his miserable, weighted corpse into the sea just as he had helped dispose of the dead client. Through the vents high up on the wall, he could hear distant noises from the underspan, from the world where he’d been a captive to his own helplessness. He’d escaped it only to be a captive here, no higher nor closer to the surface of the world. The difference was that he knew it now, but knowing improved nothing. Knowing was worse than being an idiot. He wished almost that the gods had never made him aware; he’d been better off when nothing stayed with him, when the abuses rolled off, one after the other, and he felt nothing more than the immediate pain, the anguish of the moment, forgotten soon enough. This—this thinking, feeling, knowing—hurt too much, demanded too much of him. He didn’t want to die; he just wanted to lose himself once more. His brain whirled around the subject, and he closed his eyes to wring it out, to exorcise thinking, like a demon from his mind.