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“When I’m around, it always comes up,” Hayk joked in return.
The others laughed, but he glanced to me in particular, as if seeing what I thought of his crude joke.
The trouble was, I got hotter. And it really wanted to come up. Hayk oozed sex, and he didn’t seem at all ashamed of it. In fact, he reveled in it. I’d known him less than fifteen minutes, and it was already obvious.
And I already liked him.
But I wasn’t going to admit it.
“I don’t see how you can fuck for money,” I said, shaking my head and hunching my shoulders as we walked on. “And your father sold you into it…for a boat?”
“Boats are everything in Good Port, as you might imagine,” Hayk said. “It says a lot that Da thought Billie and I were worth an entire boat.”
Again, I stared at him. Just stared at him as we walked.
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” I said.
“Itisa good thing,” Hayk laughed. “It means I’m valuable. Don’t you feel valuable?”
My throat closed up and I wanted the bits of boardwalk we crossed over to crack and separate so that I’d be dumped into the sea.
No, I didn’t feel valuable. Dane was the valued one. I was the one forever on the outside. I wasn’t special enough to earn Father’s love, and I never would be.
“Hmm.” Hayk seemed to think my lack of answer was more than enough answer to draw conclusions that probably made me look horrible.
“I am valuable,” I snapped, guessing what he was thinking and what he might be on the verge of saying. “Of course I know that.”
“And does this Dmitri person who has enslaved you think so too?” Hayk asked, one eyebrow raised.
No. Dmitri didn’t value me at all. He saw me as a hole to fuck and a stick so he could keep dangling his carrot in front of Magnus until he got what he wanted. I didn’t even know what that was, other than to stay alive another day. And for what purpose? It wasn’t as if Dmitri had any sort of life to speak of.
I didn’t have any sort of life either.
“I see,” Hayk said.
I frowned. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, you did,” he laughed.
He was confident enough that I second-guessed whether or not I’d spoken my thoughts aloud, but I didn’t have a chance to argue the point.
“To answer your question,” he said as we followed the others over a small bridge to an octagonal bit of stone marked off by posts of every color, “I can ‘fuck for money’, as you say, because I enjoy sex, a lot, and the standards Master Daron keeps at the whorehouse are some of the highest in all of Good Port. I have my own room separate from the customer rooms that is kept clean, I am given clothing and abundant food, which is more than the street whores can say. It’s more than my father could have promised me and Billie too. And my health and body are cared for by some of the most experienced and expensive healers in all of Good Port. Can you say the same?”
I scowled at him, but I didn’t have a quick or clever comeback.
“I can see you and I are going to have to get much better acquainted,” Hayk went on as we joined the rest of my friends as they clustered around a plaque set in the stones at the center of the octagon. He draped his arm over my shoulder again. “You definitely need someone to make you smile more.”
My scowl deepened, and I tried not to tense hard enough for him to notice and make a comment. I didn’t want someone to make me smile. I didn’t want someone to patronize me and imply that I was closed up and unsophisticated.
Although, he hadn’t really done any of those things. He hadn’t actually accused me of anything. He was just so…so irritatingly comfortable with himself.Allof himself. How could anyone do that and still…and still drape their arm around my shoulder and grin at me like I was…like I was…interesting.
“Hold on,” Neil said as we all circled around the plaque staring down at it. “Good Port is five hundred years old?”
“Give or take a bit,” Billie said. “Someone once told me that there’s been a city on this spot for much longer than that, but that it was nowhere near the ocean before the world broke. Can you believe that?”
“I didn’t think the frontier was five hundred years old,” Sebald said, his neck craned so he could read the plaque more easily.
“Oh, yeah, there have been settlements across the frontier for hundreds of years,” Peter said. “Nothing like the cities as they are now, and nothing half as grand as the cities of the Old Realm, but they have been here.”
