And no dead boys.
After the bath, she put on a clean flannel nightdress and followed the attendant to a small cell with ice walls a foot thick. The floor was covered in the same heat-producing carpet she'd seen in the rest of the building. Against one wall was a small cot and in the opposite corner, a waste stool. No windows and just the one door.
The attendant left, locking the door behind her, and leaving her in pitch darkness.
Repentance curled up on the cot and pulled the thin, warm blanket around her.
Maybe she wouldn't have to run away. Maybe, by the will of Providence, a kind master would purchase her and she could forget that she was owned and living under the threat of the swing frame. She might get a job on the mountain tending horses or goats. So far she'd met three slaves. Two took care of horses, and one gave baths to other slaves. Those jobs didn't seem so horrid.
She'd made the right decision when she'd chosen not to button with Sober.
She would miss her parents and Comfort and the little boys—she missed them already. Missing them made a gaping hole inside her. She crossed her arms over her chest and pressed as hard as she could, trying to squeeze out the emptiness, but it didn't help.
All alone in her dark cell she found no distractions from the fears and no strength to hold her tears back. She broke down—rocking herself and sobbing and wishing for her mother. But she had no mother to hum and to hush and to promise that Providence would make it all turn out right in the end.
Later, after the sobbing had slowed into heavy, lip-trembling sighs, she dried her face on her blanket. She felt better. No, she felt empty, not better. But now that she had the cry out of her system, she would get better.
In the pocket of her nightdress she found her three gray buttons and worked them around in her fingers so they clicked against each other. They almost sounded like water dripping from trees. Click, click, click.
She had done the right thing. Click. She would get a good master. Click. She'd had no choice. She'd done the right thing. Click, click, click. She'd get a good master.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard a little voice say, "No, Repentance, repeating a thing over and over does not make it so."
Her windowless cell was as dark as ever when a rattle at the door woke her. A slave boy entered with a bowl of thin soup. Warm water, really, with half a potato in it. It tasted like muddy creek water, but she was too hungry to care. The boy left a lamp with her, so she could see to eat. The strange lamp had a clay base that looked like a bowl, and in the bowl was a cloth that shone with yellow light. She poked at the cloth with her spoon, expecting flames to shoot up from underneath. No, the cloth itself shone with light, and the base of the lamp was an ordinary bowl.
She had seen something like this long ago. In the swamp. The day the overlords took Tribulation. She was still examining the lighted cloth when an old slave woman, her brown face as wrinkled as a dried pear, came for her.
"Come. Time to dress."
She was given another bath, scrubbed with sweet soap, and after that lathered with buttery balm that smelled of mangoes and melons. For a moment, as the old attendant massaged the balm into her arms and legs, Repentance relaxed and dreamed that the woman was her old-mother—her mother's mother who was always gentle, not her father's mother who was prone to crankiness and impatience. She dreamed that her old-mother was washing and dressing her, preparing her to be guest of honor at a grand feast.
The slave dried and brushed her thick hair until it shown then piled it up on her head with ringlets dripping down. "Interesting color," she said. "When it's clean and brushed it's almost more like overlord hair than lowborn."
The old woman stripped her of the towel she was wrapped in and draped a robe of heavy, maroon velvet around her. Repentance ran her hands down the cloth. She'd never felt anything so soft. Instead of buttons, the robe had strings set at regular intervals. The old woman moved from top to bottom, tying the robe, but leaving gaps so skin could peek through and the smell of body lotion could escape.
"Beautiful," she declared when she was done. "You'll go for the refreshment of royalty I'll wager. I wouldn't be surprised if Lord Fawlin himself took you ... If he were able, I mean."
Repentance shivered. "Lord Fawlin is still alive?"
"You heard that he was ill? He rarely makes it to market anymore. Mayhap his nephew will buy you."
"Lord Fawlin, the king? He's not dead?" Repentance couldn't believe it. She knew her history, and Lord Fawlin was the king who had enslaved her people two hundred and fifty years earlier. Surely he wasn't still alive.
"No, he's not dead. Nearly died many years ago. Went down to the hot springs for a cure and came back in a deep sleep. Doctors could not wake him. But he come out of that dreamland of his own strength and by the grace of Providence, and he's lived all these years. Not much of a man, though, if you get my meaning. Not able to keep a button mate or a concubine. So say those what whisper about such things."
"He's lived for two hundred and fifty years?" That must be why the overlords were able to keep the lowborns
