The Long Road Back: A Jarthen-centric Interquel (pt. 12)

With both me and Muladah looking, it didn’t take more than two or three months to find someone as mundayne as me. I found her, actually. Her name was Shalija and she was a barkeep in a tiny, no-name tavern in a tiny no-name port in the isles. I first noticed her, I have to admit, ‘cause she was worth looking at. Felin woman, they tend to be a good-looking bunch – fierce without looking too tough, round in all the right places, all that dark, shining hair – and Shalija was a fine example. And that day, I weren’t the only one noticing her. There was a fella perched there at the bar, some strange mix of silver and gold and felintark from what I could see, chatting with her in low tones. Or trying to, anyway, though she wasn’t paying much attention to him aside from casting an annoyed look his way now and again. And as she passed by, a stack of bottles in her arms, he reached out and caught her and she stumbled forward. The bottles went flying out of her hands, crashing to the floor and shattering, ale and wine rushing out in all directions. She let out a string of curses and dropped to her knees, gingerly herding the shards into a messy pile. But the floor was slick and slippery, and she lost her balance and landed on a jagged piece of glass.

Shalija let out a yelp of surprise and pain, her hand hovering over where the glass had lodged itself in her arm. The fella at the bar knelt beside her, told her he was a healer, and gently plucked it out again. “Someone give me a rag or a scarf or something,” he called out.

I was down there on her other side, half my sleeve torn off, wrapping it around the wound in a heartbeat. “Is she a’right?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, it’s just – ah!”

The fella shooed at me but I didn’t go anywhere. He frowned at me, cleaned the wound, and pressed his hand to it, watching me with a slight smirk. “You’ll be fine in a second, I promise,” he said, focused and intent. But a few seconds later, when the blood was still oozing out, he frowned and pulled his hand away, murmuring under his breath and looking the wound over.

Shalija started to pull her arm back. “It’s not going to work. I need stitches, go get Doc Rahmed from the next street over, he’s Felin, he can fix it.”

“No, no, I’ve just…give me more of your shirt,” he said, poking me. I handed him another strip of cloth and watched as he cleaned the wound again, stared at it, and shook his head. “I don’t – it’s not even deep! Something’s not right here, I’m a good healer, ask anyone.”

“Magickal healer?” I asked. When he nodded, I remembered the way Rofi never quite seemed able to patch me up back on the Sinn and I broke into a wide grin that wasn’t really appropriate given the situation. “It might not be you.”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t get nowhere with me either. Here, lass, I’ll take you to the doctor,” I said, helping her to her feet. The healer made to stand himself, getting halfway through a handful of questions he never really finished and watched me lead her out of the bar. “A’right, which way?”

“Down this street and to the left,” she said. “This is just my luck. He’s going to make me pay for all of it, I know he is. Shit.”

“Let’s get you stitched up, you can worry ‘bout that later.”

“I’m going to have to work it off.”

“Look, what’s your name?”

“Shalija.”

“I’m Shakhar. Can I ask you summat?”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You’re Shakhar? From the Tarnib?”

“Yeah. Does that happen a lot? With the magick, I mean, not getting hurt like this.”

She shrugged and fiddled with the blood-soaked bit of my shirt wrapped around her arm. “I don’t know. Magickal folk, they talk a big game, but the only ones that ever seem impressed to me are the ones who’ve had one glass or pipe too much, you know? I don’t really think there’s as much difference between us and them and they’d have us believe.”

I let out a loud, triumphant sort of laugh and got an odd look from her in return. “Let’s get you patched up, then I’ll take you to the Sinn. My captain’ll pay fer all those broken bottles and then some. That a’right with you?”

She shot me a wary look. “Will he cover the doctor’s fee, too?”

“Oh, aye.”

“Alright.”

Within two days, she was on the ship as Muladah’s tether, which did the simultaneous duty of boosting his reputation and having someone as mundayne as me sit in on the negotiations without having to pay them a mate’s wage. He was thrilled, I was thrilled, she was willing. As soon as she accepted his offer and he marked her as his, he pulled me aside and told me that the next time we ported, I’d be stepping off the Sinn fer good. I made him swear on the ship it was true, and when he did it, so help me, I believed him. I laughed and hugged him – literally threw my arms around him right there in front of the rest of the crew so relieved I felt that I was in a real danger of making the spectacle worse by bursting into tears on top of it. And I stayed like that – hopeful and cheerful and revitalized – even when Nossi pulled me aside a few days later and told me that we were heading east, to Essala, looking a bit dark and worried.

“He swore on the ship,” said I.

“He swears on the ship a lot. It makes me nervous when he swears on the ship, things never fall out the way they should when he does that.”

But I just shrugged and stared out at the sea, savoring my last views of the pirate isles. “Him and me, we had a deal. If he says we got to go east to send me west, then I guess we got to go east to send me west. I mean, Essala’s a big port, right?”

“Yeah. Big Felin port. Big Felin trading city.”

“Big Felin port full of ships headed by captains that haven’t burned their bridges with the T’Langans?” He sighed and nodded. I laughed and patted his shoulder. “Ah, don’t worry, I’ll miss you, too.”

“Yeah,” he said, pulling himself off the railing and casting one last look at me over his shoulder, “I bet you will.”

And, good lord, was he ever right. Because the night we put into Essala, Muladah had Salir blindfold me, tie my hands behind my back, and then dragged me to the closest slave trader he could find. “Do you move the goods westbound?”

I went cold all over. “Mul, what the hell’s going on?”

He pulled down my blindfold and shot me this wicked, cold smile. “I’m sending you west, just like I promised. Now smile, Shakhar, show him you’ve got decent teeth so I can get a good price.”

“What?”

Muladah laughed and shoved me forward towards the slave trader. Ropes wound themselves around me from either side, pinning me in place, while the man peered at me and poked at me. “Pirates are hard to sell,” he said.

“Yeah, I know, but he’s strong and already knows Felin. 50 marks.”

I tried to turn to look at him, but the ropes dug in and I couldn’t do anything but stare at the wall. “You bastard! I found you another one! You lying bastard!”

The slave trader smirked and looked past my shoulder. “Strong and mouthy. Cheap combination. 15 marks.”

As soon as the haggling started, I might as well have been a sack of grain. It didn’t matter how I carried on, what I threatened to do to him, the pair of them acted like I wasn’t there. Like I wasn’t anything worth paying attention to, no different than a yapping dog. In the end, I was sold for 23 marks, the bastard branded my cheek with a hot iron, and I was lashed to a line with thirty other hollow-eyed scarred-up souls and sent marching by foot through the desert westbound to the slave markets in Shalakesh.