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Introductions to the other bondservants are made and, before too long, they do not seem as frightening anymore. They are people, like me, who have been taken from other lives and cast into a new one, and who wish to survive.
We are all survivors.
I wonder if they still dream of rescue.
Then I wonder when they stopped.
“You are yet new in the ways of a bondservant,” Penny says.
My head snaps up.
She smiles. “You seem innocent.”
“I lived at the outpost at Delwood, tending the children who came through. They never stayed long, and it was hard to watch them go. I have not been treated cruelly, although I have seen the evidence.” I shudder. “My home and village were in northern Hydornia and isolated. No one in living memory had ever seen an orc. Many believed the bard’s tales to be nothing more than stories, woven to entertain.”
The bread turns to dust, but I eat anyway. To waste it is disrespectful to Penny, who, in giving me food, has less for herself.
“You were one of the lucky ones, to have lived apart from the war so long,” one man offers. He is young, his naked upper body tanned from long exposure to the sun, and he is not quite as old or rough-looking as the other men.
I blush, unused to male attention, even in brief conversation. Maybe he is secretly a prince. Maybe he has infiltrated this camp to set all the prisoners free.
My mama always said I had my head stuck in the clouds.
He is no prince in hiding. He is a bondservant like me.
“I know,” I reply. “That time has passed.”
“That time has passed for all of us,” Penny says.
A quiet conversation follows. They ask me more about the outpost where I lived and tell me a little about the orc master here, Tulwin, and the bondservants under his command. There are low servants, like the people I am amongst—grunt workers responsible for supporting the camp and cooking food for the orc soldiers—and then there are higher human bondservants.
I am coached to stay close to my new companions while we travel to Krug in order to avoid the other, higher status bondservants who are known to wield their power cruelly.
My mind is overwhelmed by their well-intended advice.
As I lay down to rest, I dream of my mother. I miss her laughter: a great booming sound whenever she experienced joy. I often cling to the memory of my parents doing ordinary things, chatting over dinner, discussing the pickling onion crop or the unseasonable amount of rain, of my father patting my mother’s ass and kissing her cheek on returning from a hunt, of him gathering me close for a hug and asking me about my day.
Only there is another memory that intrudes tonight, one I have pushed to the back and tried to ignore.
The memory from the night the orcs came, before they took a sword and opened my mother up.
“Survive for me, Jasmine. That is all I ask of you. There is danger, but you are clever and strong inside. There will come a time when your body turns to that of a woman and when a different danger will present. You have so many dreams, my sweet girl, and I wish you could have hung onto them for longer. Trust your heart and instincts. Find the biggest, most fearsome male and throw yourself at his mercy. There is no shame before the Goddess in doing whatever you must to survive.”
Her words have lingered on the periphery of my mind for so long. With the chaos of the attack, the horror of my parents’ murder, and then the confusion of capture and the blanket of depression that followed, I did not fully grasp their meaning.
Tonight, as I huddle under a rough blanket, feeling the cold ground seep into my bones, I do.
The prospect of finding a man, any man, terrifies me.
But I also want to survive.
Tears well up in my eyes. There were many good young men in my village. Most of them died fighting, trying to protect the women, children, and elders. Any one of those young men might have become my husband. That life is gone, though. It is far behind me; a sweet dream and nothing more.
I need to find a mate, to give him my body, to choose wisely if I can, and hope my instincts are true and he has a good heart. There is no escaping the Blighten. They would hunt me down and flog me as an example.
And there are worse things than being a companion to a fairy child.
As I toss and turn, restless, I grieve for my lost family anew. I also grieve for myself, for my situation, and for the hopelessness of my task.
