33 | Straight Answers

Vesper Callowmere had not slept properly in nine days and had told nobody, because there was nobody to tell.

She sat in her study at half past 11 with the lamp turned up too high and a piece of paper in front of her, and Sera Delacque stood by the door, because Sera Delacque always stood by the door.

"Sit."

"My lady?"

"Sit down. I am not saying it twice and I am not saying it to somebody standing like I am about to hit them."

Sera sat.

Vesper pushed the paper across. It was a list in her own hand, written and crossed out and rewritten three times.

> He talks back.

> He reads.

> He found the ledger in a day.

> He argued with me about sending you.

> He broke a man's leg.

> He is not frightened of me.

Sera read it twice and set it down.

"Well?"

"Six things, my lady, and only the last is unusual."

"Everyone is frightened of me."

"Yes, my lady."

"He was. For three years. I know precisely what that looks like, I have looked at it every day since I was 19." Vesper pulled the paper back.

"And then in about a week he stopped. He is very good at pretending he has not. I only caught it because the eyes-down comes about half a second late."

She reached up without thinking and closed her hand around her own left wrist.

Sera saw her do it and said nothing.

"And the mark is fine," Vesper said.

There was nothing on her wrist to see. The holder's end of a slave mark left no trace on the skin. It sat behind the ribs somewhere and hummed, and every slaveholder in the Ascendancy learned to stop noticing it by the second year.

"I have read it every night for nine nights. Alive. Close. Calm. Not frightened, not sick, not running, not lying awake at three in the morning planning anything." Her voice climbed and came back down.

"Every reading is exactly what it should be. The Bind Guild will tell you a slave mark cannot be fooled, because it reads the soul and does not care what the man is thinking. So the mark says he is mine and behaving, and my eyes say something walked into my house wearing his face."

"That is what a working mark does, my lady."

"That is my entire point." Vesper looked up. "One of those two is wrong and it is not supposed to be the mark."

Then she said, in a completely different voice, "Sera. Look at me."

Sera looked at her.

"I am going to use it," Vesper said.

"I want you to know I am doing it, because you have been in this house six years and I have never once done it to you, and I would rather you were angry about it than surprised."

Sera Delacque felt the mark take hold.

It was not pain. People who had never worn one always assumed pain. It was worse than pain, and considerably quieter.

It was the sudden and total certainty that whatever came out of her mouth next was going to be true, and that her opinion on the subject had been noted and set aside.

"My lady," she said.

"Answer straight. Has anybody approached him?"

No.

"No, my lady."

Which was true. Nobody had. Sera had followed him twice and watched a good deal, and not one part of it had been a stranger with an offer.

"Has he taken money from anyone?"

"Sixteen crowns, my lady. From me. On your instruction."

Vesper waved that away. "Anything else? Anything given to him. Coin, tokens, letters, anything he should not have."

The stolen Bind Guild token in his boot. Ost's purse under the flagstone behind the feed store.

Sera did not know about either of those things and could only answer honestly as compelled.

"Not that I have seen, my lady."

"Is he planning to run?"

And here it came, and Sera felt her own mouth open with the answer already in it and no possibility whatsoever of stopping it.

"No, my lady."

Because he was not. She was completely certain of it, and the certainty was the thing that had kept her awake since the Friday she had stood in the reeds.

She had watched from over two hundred yards down the river road and watched a house slave in grey linen kill two Sallow Hand collectors with his hands.

A man who intended to run did not build. A man who intended to run took the sixteen crowns and the road to the Reach and did not come back for a ledger.

Whatever Soren was doing, he was doing it here, and he meant to still be here afterward.

Vesper sat back and the pressure let go, and Sera's hands were entirely steady, which she was quietly proud of.

"Then nobody has got to him," Vesper said, half to herself. "So it is not that."

"No, my lady."

"Then what is it?"

And Sera Delacque, who had just answered four questions truthfully under compulsion, gave her mistress the only thing she had left to give, which was an interpretation.

"Some of them break inward," she said. "You have seen that. They go quiet and small and they get thinner and eventually they stop eating."

"Yes."

"Some of them break the other way." Sera kept her voice absolutely level.

"They stop being frightened because being frightened stopped being useful. It is not defiance, my lady. It is not a plan. That's a man who has worked out that nothing he does changes what happens to him, and has stopped spending anything on hoping."

Vesper stared at her.

"He has stopped hoping?" she said slowly.

"That is what I would call it."

"That would explain—" Vesper stopped. Counted something on her fingers.

"That would explain the talking back. There is no risk in talking back if you have already decided nothing matters."

"Yes, my lady."

"And the leg. A man who has stopped caring what happens to him breaks a leg in an alley because there is nothing to weigh it against."

"Yes, my lady."

It was, Sera reflected, the most useful lie she had ever told, and she had not said one false word in the whole of it.

Vesper sat with it.

"That is worse," she said at last.

"My lady?"

"If somebody had got to him I could outbid them." Vesper turned the lamp down. "You cannot outbid nothing."

She stood.

"He goes on the Friday." She stated simply like it was a done deal.

"The buyer is a proxy, three of them stacked, which means somebody with real money is going to real trouble not to be seen buying a house slave off a disgraced Callowmere. Honestly, it was pretty funny when it was arranged."

She was looking at the black window. "It is significantly less funny this week."

"You could withdraw."

"I have spent the deposit."

"My lady—"

"And I want him out of my house before I find out what he actually is," Vesper said, her tone cold as she looked briefly at Sera.

"And because I have a horrible feeling that whatever the answer turns out to be, it is going to be my fault."

She did not turn around.

"I will do the inspection myself. Friday, before the handover. All of it. Condition, teeth, marks, everything. And you will be in the room."

"My lady."

"Because if I am wrong, and there is something on him, I will find it." Vesper's reflection looked back out of the glass at her.

"I have had that boy's clothes off more times than I can count. There is not one inch of him I do not know."

Sera Delacque, who had spent nineteen years in a service where you did not react to anything, kept her face entirely still despite the internal disgust she felt.

Vesper rubbed the bridge of her nose before cursing out and taking a high proof liquor bottle she kept under her desk.

"Leave"

"My lady," she said with a nod, bowing her head.

She got to the bottom of the servants' stair and stood in the dark of the yard rather longer than she needed to.

Then she looked up at the grain loft, where a ladder had been pulled up and no light showed at all.

"Four days," she said, to nobody.