Tears prickle in my eyes. My back muscles flinch so hard that my spine stiffens.
Zakir digs into the pocket of his vest and pulls out his wooden pipe. Once he puts it in his mouth and lights up, he levels me with a look. “So? What’s it going to be, Auren?”
For a split second, my eyes move past him to look over his shoulder, to the ships at the harbor again. To those billowing sail clouds tied to the sea.
I was my parents’ little sun.
I used to dance beneath a sky that sang.
Now, here I am, a painted whore in the slums of a sodden harbor, with filth in the air and a silent cry in my throat, and no amount of rain will ever wash the curse of my goldenness away.
Zakir sucks on his pipe, blue smoke wringing out through his teeth with a grunt. He’s getting impatient now. “For fuck’s sake. All you have to do is lie there.”
My body shudders, tears threatening to spill. That’s what the first man told me. “Just lie down on the pallet, girl. This will be quick.” He dropped a coin on the mattress when he was done with me. I left it there, metal worn and tainted with the passing of too many hands, though it wasn’t nearly as tarnished as I was.
Just lie there. Just lie there and chip away, little by little. Just lie there and feel yourself die from the inside out.
“Please, Zakir.”
My plea makes his teeth grind on the tip of his pipe. “It’s going to be Barden, then? You’d rather live on Eastside?”
I shake my head emphatically. “No.”
Not even the people on Eastside want to live on Eastside, but most of them have no way of leaving. With trash at my back, puddles at my feet, and my owner blocking my way, I know the feeling. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
He jerks his chin. “Then get to work. Now.”
Hanging my head, I squeeze past him and start to walk down the street while my heart pounds in my throat and thrums down my spine. Two of Zakir’s cronies step in front of me to lead the way, while he follows behind like an ominous shadow, steering me to my decrepit fate.
My shoes stick to the washed out gravel, but I barely notice when pebbles lodge inside, gritty pieces stabbing the soles of my feet. I barely notice the busy market either, full of shouting and haggling and arguing. I don’t look at the ships again, because that taunt of freedom is just too much to bear. So, I search for that platitude of numbness inside of me and try to pretend that I’m anywhere but here.
I drag my feet, but it doesn’t matter how slowly I walk to The Solitude. I still end up at its white-washed door, still see my bubbled reflection in the crude arrangement of bottom-cut bottles cemented in place like a window. The poor person’s stained glass.
My heart hammers so hard that my feet waver, as if I were standing on one of those ships instead of solid ground.
Zakir steps up to my side, and I feel a breath of his blue smoke blown against my ear. It’s the same color as those bottles. “Remember what I said. Earn your keep, or I’ll let Barden East have you.”
With a stern look, he walks off, a hand in his pocket jangling the coins I’ve made him, while two more of his men materialize and follow like guard dogs. The others stay behind with me and take up stances by the door, herding Zakir’s sheep. I already know without looking that there will be another man stationed at the back.
The spindly man on my left looks me up and down, the gray pallor of his face mismatched with his sallow eyes. “Hear Barden East likes to try out his whores first. Makes ’em go through tests before he lets ’em work,” he says, causing the other man to trudge out a snort.
I stare at the door, stare at the blue glass bottoms that remind me of the circular eyes of a spider, knowing I’m going straight into its mouth, already trapped in the web Zakir threw me into.
I try to remember.
I try to remember the lyrical pitch of my mother’s voice. The breeze through the wind chimes that hung outside my window. I try to remember the sound of my father’s laugh. The way the horses nickered in their stalls.
But a blink goes by, and it’s all drowned out with the sound of the men taunting me. With the market banging in my skull, pitched in shouts and clacking, just as the clouds crack and start to pour again, drenching us all with fetid water.
No, the sky doesn’t sing here.
And every year that passes, the song of home gets drowned out from my memory just a little bit more, washed away to a polluted seashore rife with cragged cruelty.
Just lie down on the pallet, girl.
I shun the ships sailing away at my back, shun the choice that is no choice at all, between the East and the West, between Barden and Zakir. Between life and death. Then, with a raindrop on my cheek that might have spilled from my eye, I open the door and walk into the inn.