“Are they going to ask us to…” The girl’s voice trails off nervously, and I don’t blame her. Are they really going to make us strip for the crowd?
But Ghayur simply asks us to uncover our faces and hair and to stand straight while facing the crowd.
“Show them you are strong, and perhaps you’ll find a good owner,” he tells us.
Then, Ghayur marches out on stage, pressing his fingers to his throat. His voice reaches us in the back, magically amplified.
“From the edge of the desert, the desert,” he chants.
“The desert, the desert!” The crowd—obviously no stranger to this—repeats the final refrain, their sounds vibrating down the wood, into my body.
“From the humblest village, oh, village!”
“Village! Oh, village!” the crowd shouts.
“From cities brighter than the sun and the moons!”
The crowd’s chants turn into hooting and clapping.
“You’d think we were at a celebration, not an auction,” the girl in the red ghagra comments, and I can’t help but agree.
“Some bring magic with them, some skills beyond your imagination!” Ghayur shouts. “First: a farmer from Sur, a woman who magicks everything out of nothing, and a peri with a voice that can put even the rowdiest children to sleep—in a single lot!”
I stare at the gold-skinned man, who is the last to walk out. Not a man, but a Pashu. A peri, without the wings always depicted on their backs in paintings and scrolls. Now, with his back turned, I finally see them—or what’s left of them—a mass of thick scars and bony ridges protruding from his shoulder blades and the sides of his spine, ending a handspan above his plain white dhoti.
“Clipping a peri’s wings is the worst thing you can do to them,” my father told me. “It affects their magic, their music. It’s an unforgivable crime.”
It was a crime that the king committed without conscience after the Battle of the Desert, a crime that magi continue to commit to this day. I cannot tell if the clipping affects the peri’s music. Because when he’s asked to sing, the low, haunting notes of the morning raag fill the air, quieting even the rowdiest among the audience.
The male auctioneer starts the opening bid: Four thousand swarnas per person.
The howls that go through the crowd cover the gasp that leaves my mouth on hearing the number. Four thousand swarnas is more coin than what I ever imagine seeing in my lifetime—an amount that could have supported not only me but also my parents for several decades. My head begins to pound as Ghayur shouts out the bids that go up:
“Four five! Five! Five five! Six! Oh, come now! Only six thousand swarnas for such fine flesh? Friends, can we not have a ten?”
The price goes higher and higher, finally stopping at eight thousand swarnas apiece. The winning bid goes to an unnamed person, who the old man next to me says will likely be from the palace.
“How do you know for sure?” I ask.
“No one else has that much coin to spend at once.”
It’s the last thing he says before he is called out to the stage, leaving me alone with the girl in the red ghagra.
“Whatever is he capable of?” she mutters.
The female auctioneer takes over now, binding the crowd with lavish praise for the old man’s skill: seeing, a form of magic that allows him to see living specters. I hear the crowd’s curious murmurs—“a half magus”—and feel a little fascinated myself. Only the half magi are capable of seeing living specters. Like whisperers, these days, seers are rare—with next to no magi and non-magi bindings taking place. Any half magi who do remain are probably as old as the man now being auctioned off.
“Must be awful to see dead people everywhere,” the girl in red mutters. “More of a curse than a gift, I’d say.”
I continue to listen to the rapidly escalating bids until the old man is sold for two thousand swarnas.
The girl looks at me. “Well, then. Just you and me. Wonder if they’ll call us together. Serving girls go in pairs sometimes.”
But they don’t. Perhaps they think they can make more if they bring us out one at a time, because the girl is called out next by name, leaving me alone in the back.
The minute she goes out, though, I hear a few whistles and leering voices call out: “Look at us, too, girl! Show us your pretty face!”
I close my eyes, bracing myself for my false name to be called, when someone grabs hold of my arm and claps a hand over my mouth to muffle the scream that emerges. I am about to use my teeth and elbows to do maximum damage when a voice hisses in my ear: “It’s me, Cavas! Don’t scream!”
I don’t. I realize, with a shock, that I would have recognized his voice by its deepness, by the anger in it—even if he did not tell me his name. When I grow calm and he’s certain I will make no sound, he releases me, frown lines marring his broad forehead under his palace-issue turban.
“Come with me! Quick!”
Heart thumping against my rib cage, I follow him out of the backstage area, toward a part of the market that is deserted. There, he leans behind a now-shut-up sweets and ghee shop to catch his breath.
“Have you lost your mind?” His voice is low, hard. “You’re going to sell yourself?”
I am so shocked by his sudden appearance that for a long while I don’t answer, the female auctioneer’s voice and the crowd’s cheers a distant echo in the background.
“So what if I am?” I finally say. “It’s not against the law!”
“Do you even know what it means to be indentured?” The look he gives me makes me want to shrink.
