I do what I can, tearing off a strip from my skirt and pressing it against my wound. I’m shaking continuously now, but what does that matter? Hold it up, I tell myself, as if I didn’t mean a part of my own body. Breathe slowly, make sure it clots over. There’s no way to know if the wound is clean or if I’m rubbing dirt into it, so I try not to think about it. Try not to think about the fact that I’ve lost a finger now. That I could lose my hand, my arm, my life to infection. Or to the slavers who own me now.
Try not to think.
A pair of men come for me some hours later. They shove a sack over my head and tell me if I make a sound, they will kill me. They hold my arms, and I am grateful beyond words that they do not bind my hands together again. My left hand throbs, the pain of my severed finger the only thing I can focus on, far greater than the old, familiar pain of my knife cut.
I go numbly where the men take me, down a hall and then through a door to the outside, where I can hear the faint splash of water. I stumble down a set of stairs with them, and then I’m shoved roughly into what must be a boat. It rocks crazily and I give a little gasping cry and then clamp down on my lips, pressing my hands to my breast as if I could protect myself from the men.
“Shut up,” one of the men says tiredly.
I sit silently, waiting as they row us across the river and on to our destination: a ship, I would guess, judging from the slap of water against its sides and the rope ladder shoved into my hands to climb aboard. They send me up, calling once to the men at the top who answer them. I go slowly, feeling for each rung with my good hand, hooking my wounded hand around the ropes, terrified that I will start bleeding again, that I will fall. With the sack over my head, each step is an exercise of trust in a fractured world.
Then a hand closes on my arm, yanking me up and over a railing. I huddle there, listening as one of my escorts finishes climbing up behind me. My wounded hand is wet again.
“She’s bleeding,” a man says, his voice just above my head. “He cut her up. You might need to stitch it or the like.”
“We don’t keep healers on board for this sort,” a second voice answers, a few feet away. “What do you think we are? Agents of mercy?”
“Well, cauterize it then. Orders are she’s to be sold alive and unharmed.”
“Unharmed, and you all cut off her finger?”
“I don’t give the orders,” the first man snaps. “Just keep her alive.”
“We’ll get her below for now. The captain can decide what he wants to do about it later.”
My teeth are chattering again, and I want desperately to see where I am, but I don’t dare pull off the sack. The second man grabs my left wrist, jarring my wounded hand and sending shafts of pain up my arm. He swears as I choke on a scream, trying desperately to swallow it down. Don’t let them hurt me more. Please. He transfers his grip to my right arm, his hand wet and slick against my skin, no doubt with my own blood.
Somehow, I make it down to the hold, stumbling forward to be shoved against a wall.
“Head down,” the man says, his hand pushing on the top of my head. I thump to my knees, shuffle forward as he half shoves, half guides me through a low doorway.
“This one’s special, you hear that, brats?” he says from behind me, his voice no higher than my own head. He must be bending down, speaking through the doorway. “Touch her, and the captain will have your skins.”
A faint rustle from straight ahead, and that is all.
“Good,” the sailor says, and the door creaks shut.
I reach up and take off the sack, but with the door closed, the darkness is absolute. I sway where I crouch, then sit down hard. “Who’s there?” My voice comes out rough and low, hoarse from screaming.
No one answers.
I wait until it’s clear no one will. Then I pull myself to the side, moving slowly, until I reach a wall. There’s no one here, though the faint rustles suggest someone shifted out of my way. I can’t find the energy to think about it through the pain. Instead, I lean against the wall and let the darkness take me.
Sometimes, when you think things are finished, they are only just beginning.
I sit with my hands cradled in my lap: one still relatively whole, the other with a half-healed cut curved around my arm and my little finger shorn away.
I can hear a child whimpering, somewhere near me in the darkness, but I do not know how to reach for them without crying out in pain. I do not know that they want to be held. So I sit, listening to the rhythmic splash of oars cutting through the water, propelling the boat downriver, and feel all that I have done wrong bear down on me.
I am well and truly caught. And Red Hawk will be delivered my ring, and Bren will see it, and believe it from the Scholar, and I cannot tell him otherwise. Will there be more deaths because of me? A street war? I can’t imagine it, can’t see a thief lord I’ve never met deciding to launch a killing spree because of a bloodied ring. Even if I had met him, there’s no reason. Red Hawk is strategic, that much I know. But he likely also has his honor, and if the pendant I bear means that much . . .
I shudder
