his body was making demands on him. He needed to pee and his stomach was queasy, like he’d eaten too many sweets.
He blinked open his eyes. They were in a shack, large enough for two good-sized rooms with a door between them, but river-trash poor in quality. The walls lacked plaster and whitewash, and were made of roughhewn lumber nailed to framing timbers. Sod covered the roof, pale fingers of grass roots prying at the cracks between the overhead boards. One paneless window, its outside shutters latched tight, a shipping crate standing in as bedside table, a lit oil lamp, and the bed he lay on made up the furnishings of the room he was in. The voices spilled through the open door from the next room; shadows cast by a second lamp moved menacingly across the rough walls. A girl, filthy-faced and feral-eyed, stood in the doorway, a finger digging into her nose.
“He’s awake,” the girl intoned with the same disinterest a kettle of boiling water might raise.
“Get away from him, Dossy,” Miss High-and-mighty said.
“Ya ain’t my sister.” Dossy stared on at him.
“If I was, I would wallop you good for not listening.” Miss High-and-mighty walked closer. “I told you to stay away from him.”
“I ain’t ever seen a man before,” Dossy said.
A hand reached into the room, caught the girl by the scruff, and jerked her back into the other room, out of sight. Miss High-and-mighty muttered softly, “With any luck, you’ll never see another one.” She stepped into the room, a chair in hand. With a hollow thunk, the chair was set beside the bed he lay on, and a black-haired woman sat down on it. She gazed at him with infinite sadness on her face.
Jerin blinked at Miss High-and-mighty a few moments, recognizing the woman but not knowing from where. Then he remembered. She had been at the landing when they arrived at the summer palace. She had stolen a kiss from him. Did this time she steal more than a kiss? “What have you done to me?”
“You haven’t been touched.” Miss High-and-mighty reached out a hand and he flinched away. “Easy. easy, it’s just a towel.” When he held still, she dabbed at his forehead with the damp rag. “Nobody is going to touch you. I promise you.”
“Don’t go giving promises ya can’t keep!” Bert called from the next room, and there was snickering.
Anger flared in Miss High-and-mighty’s eyes, the muscles in her jaw jumping as she gritted her teeth.
She didn’t speak, only continued to carefully clean his face with the gentleness of a mother.
His left hand was caught somehow above his head, the back of his wrist pressed against the cold bars of the brass bed. Twisting his head up, he saw that iron manacles shackled him to the bed. He stared at them with sick dread.
“Easy,” High-and-mighty murmured again. When he glanced at her. she was glaring at the manacles, the anger in her green eyes at odds with her soft murmur of, “Everything will be fine.”
“Who are you?” Jerin asked, shifting slightly until he felt the comforting lump of his emergency stash.
She looked troubled and busied herself at refolding the rag to a clean corner. “Cira.”
“If you take me back to the palace, my wives will pay twice what the Hats offered you.” Jerin struggled to keep his voice firm and authoritative.
“Fen?” Cira raised her voice without turning, ‘it’s a good offer.“
“The Hats are paying us in hard cash and land.” Fen called from the next room. “Them bitches in Mayfair will just string us up to dance by our necks.”
Jerin scrambled for a better offer. “Then to Anna-boro, I have kin there. They can get you three times what the Hats offer without my wives in the deal. You can buy your own land with it.”
The sister or mother of the girl came to lean against the doorframe. She worked a wad of chewing tobacco between her back teeth. “Boy.” By her voice, he knew her to be Fen. “I’m no fool. No one has that kind of money just sitting around except the nobles, and yer just poor gentry. Everyone says so.”
“They can borrow the money from the bank when it opens. They’ve got a mercantile that they can take a loan against. My wives will pay them back.”
Fen spat on the floor. “Mercantiles? Nah, they won’t beggar themselves on the hopes yer royal bitches will have you back. Everyone knows that those sluts nearly turned ya out once ‘cause they thought one of them caught something riding the wrong horse.”
The truth of her words hit him like a hard slap. Much as Ren might love him, she wouldn’t dare take him back without being sure he was clean. He had to get away from these women, quickly.
“Cira. I have to wee-wee.” He used the baby word and tried to look helpless.
“Who has the key to these manacles?” Cira said.
“He’s a man!” Fen shrugged. “He doesn’t have to get up to piss.”
“What if he has to void?” Cira said.
Fen spit on the floor. “If he has to shit, he’s got room to move around some. I saw to it myself.”
Jerin noted that the loop of steel latched to the bed could indeed ride the bar from straight over his head down to the bed rails. He could get out of the bed, stand, and reach the length of his outstretched arms.
He kept himself from experimenting-no need to let them know how mobile he was.
“This isn’t decent,” Cira growled. “You don’t treat menfolk like this.”
“I really need to wee-wee and poo.” Jerin added the second to buy himself more time. He had to get free before one of them decided to rape him.
“There’s the piss pot.” Fen spit into it to point it out.
“For gods’ sake, give him privacy.” Cira brushed past Fen and went into the next room.
“Fine with me.” Fen caught the loop of rope serving as a doorknob on the crude door. “We were told not to touch him. That’s what they’re paying well for. and I’m not going to nick this deal by not giving them what they want.”
As the door shut, Cira said, “If we take him now. straight from the palace to his aunts’ store, then everyone can count on their fingers and know that there wasn’t time for rides on the side.”
Jerin held still, waiting for the answer.
“We?” Fen’s voice was muffled now, but he could tell that she had brushed off the suggestion without giving it any serious thought. “There’s no ‘we’ here. There’s us and you. Don’t come crowding in here, after the work is done, with yer hand outstretched.”
Jerin lifted the loop of metal, ran it down the headboard to its farthest reach, and slipped out of the bed.
He relieved himself in the chamber pot.
“Who got you out of that mess in Sarahs Bend?” Cira countered. “You would have been hung if I hadn’t bribed the Queens Justice.”
“That’s the only reason,” Bert said, “that I didn’t plug ya dead when ya waltzed in here unannounced like.”
“I’ve seen you shoot,” Cira drawled. “I wasn’t in any danger.”
As the women laughed like baying dogs, Jerin slipped his lockpick out of his stash pack, stabbed the stiff wires into the keyhole, and fished about carefully, while his heart hammered in his chest. All the winter days he and his sisters spent playing thieves, hiding in the shadows, seeing who could pick locks the fastest, and he never dreamed he’d have need for the skill.
“Iffen we’re doing this sister thing,” a new speaker said, making the count of women to be eight, “maybe we should count Cira in too. We could use someone with book learning and smarts like her.”
There was a moment of silence from the other room.
The click of the lock springing open seemed loud as thunder. Jerin paused, listening, poised to fall back into the bed and pretend helpless innocence.
“Sister thing?” Cira asked.
“When we git this land,” Dossy said, “we’re going ta tell folks that we’re sisters.”
“You seven?” Cira’s voice was full of disbelief.
“Mothers did it by tens.” Fen meant that they would claim that their “mothers” had visited cribs to explain how they were all sisters. “Been done before. You interested?”
Jerin stepped quietly to the bedroom window. The shack stood on pier footings, a stone’s throw from the river. A barn loomed against the night sky, some fifty feet away; the soft noises of restless horses came from it.
Cira said, without any real excitement, “Perhaps.”
