The Winner's Curse

4

She had forgotten him.

Three days passed, and the lady of the house seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that she had purchased a slave to add to the general’s collection of forty-eight.

The slave wasn’t sure he felt relieved.

The first two days had been blissful. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been allowed to be lazy. The bath had been amazingly hot, and the soap made him stare through the steam. The lather was richer than he’d had in years. It smelled like memories.

It left his skin feeling new, and though he’d held his head rigid while another Herrani slave cut his hair, and though he kept lifting his hand to sweep aside locks that were gone, on the second day he found that he didn’t mind so much. It gave him a clear view of his world.

On the third day, the steward came for him.

The slave, having no orders, had been wandering the grounds. The house was off-limits, but he was content to consider it from the outside. He counted its many windows and doors. He lay on the grass, letting its warm green static tickle his palms, glad that his hands weren’t too calloused to feel it. The yellow ocher of the villa walls glowed in the light, then faded. He listed in his mind which rooms of the house grew dark at which time of the day. He gazed up at orange trees. Sometimes, he slept.

The other slaves did their best to ignore him. At first, they shot him looks that varied from resentment to confusion to longing. He couldn’t bring himself to care. As soon as he’d been directed to the slaves’ quarters, housed in a building that looked almost exactly like the stables, he caught on to the pecking order of the general’s Herrani. He was last.

He ate his bread like the rest of them, and shrugged whenever asked why he hadn’t been assigned to a task. He answered direct questions. Mostly, though, he listened.

On the third day, he was making a mental map of the outbuildings: the slaves’ quarters, the stables, the barracks for the general’s private guard, the forge, small sheds for storage, a little cottage near the garden. The estate, particularly for being still part of the city, was large. The slave felt lucky that he had so many free hours to study it.

He was sitting on a gentle hill near the orchard, at a height that let him see the steward striding toward him from the villa long before the Valorian arrived. This pleased the slave. It confirmed what he had come to suspect: that General Trajan’s home would not be easy to defend if attacked in the right way. The estate had probably been given to the general because it was the largest and finest in the city, and ideal for maintaining a personal guard and horses, but the tree-covered slopes surrounding the house would have advantages for an unfriendly force. The slave wondered if the general truly didn’t see this. Then again, Valorians didn’t know what it was like to be attacked at home.

The slave stopped his thoughts. They threatened to plow up his past. He willed his mind to be frosted earth: hard and barren.

He focused on the sight of the steward huffing up the hill. The steward was one of the few Valorian servants, like the housekeeper, whose positions were too important to be assigned to Herrani. The slave assumed that the steward was well paid. He was certainly well dressed, in the gold-shot fabrics Valorians favored. The man’s thin yellow hair flew in the breeze. As he came closer, the slave heard him muttering in Valorian, and knew himself to be the target of the man’s irritation.

“You,” the steward said in heavily accented Herrani. “There you be, lazy good-for-nothing.”

The slave remembered the man’s name—Harman—but didn’t use it. He didn’t say anything, just let Harman vent his anger. It amused him to hear the man butcher his language. The steward’s accent was laughable, his grammar worse. His only skill was a rich vocabulary of insults.

“You come.” Harman jerked a hand to indicate that he should be followed.

The slave quickly realized he was being led to the forge.

Another Herrani was waiting outside. He recognized her, though he saw her only for meals and at night. Her name was Lirah, and she worked in the house. She was pretty; younger than him, probably too young to remember the war.

Harman began talking at her in Valorian. The slave tried to be patient as Lirah translated.

“Lady Kestrel can’t be bothered to place you, so I”—she blushed—“I mean, he”—she nodded at Harman—“has decided to set you to work. Usually the general’s guard see to their own weapon repair, and a Valorian blacksmith from the city is hired on a regular basis to forge new weapons.”

The slave nodded. There were good reasons why the Valorians trained few Herrani blacksmiths. One had only to look around the forge to understand. Anyone could see the heavy tools and guess the strength it would take to manipulate them.

“You will do this from now on,” Lirah continued, “so long as you prove to be competent.”

Harman took the silence that followed as an invitation to speak again. Lirah translated. “Today you will make horseshoes.”

“Horseshoes?” That was too easy.

Lirah gave him a sympathetic smile. When she spoke, it was in her own voice, not the stilted repeating of Harman’s. “It’s a test. You’re supposed to make as many as you can before sunset. Can you shoe a horse, too?”

“Yes.”

Lirah seemed to regret this answer on his behalf. She told the steward, who said, “That’s what he’ll be doing tomorrow, then. Every horse in the stable needs to be shod.” He snorted. “We’ll see how this animal gets along with the other ones.”

Before the war, Valorians had admired, even envied—yes, envied—the Herrani. After, it was as if the spell had been broken or a new one had been cast. The slave never could quite believe it. Somehow, “animal” had become possible. Somehow, the word named him. This was a discovery ten years old and yet remade every day. It should have been dulled by repetition. Instead, he was sore from its constant cut of surprise. He was sour with swallowed anger.

The pleasant, trained expression on Lirah’s face hadn’t faltered. She pointed to the coal bin, kindling, and heaps of raw and used iron. The steward set a box of matches on the anvil. Then they left.

The slave looked around the forge and debated whether he should pass the test or fail.

He sighed, and lit a fire.

His holiday was over. On his first day in the forge, the slave made more than fifty horseshoes—enough to appear dedicated and skilled, but not so much that he drew attention. The following day, he shod all the horses, even those whose shoes were new. The groom warned that some of the animals could be dangerous to handle, especially the general’s stallions, but the slave had no trouble. He made sure, however, that the task took the whole day. He liked listening to the horses’ low whickers and feeling their gentle, warm breath. Also, the stables were a decent place to hear news—or they would have been, if a soldier had come to exercise a horse.

Or if the girl had.

The slave was judged to be a good buy. Lady Kestrel had a fine eye, Harman said grudgingly, and the slave was given several weapons to repair, as well as orders for new ones.

Every dusk, when the slave walked across the grounds from the forge to his quarters, the villa blazed with light. It was curfew and bedtime for slaves, but the restless Valorians would stay up for a long while yet. They trained to get by on very little sleep, perhaps six hours a night—less, if necessary. It was one of the things that had helped them win the war.

The slave was the first to stretch out on his pallet. Each night, he tried to sift through the events of the day and glean useful information from them, but all he had experienced was hard work.

Weary, he shut his eyes. He wondered if those two days of idyll would turn out to have been a stroke of bad fortune. That time had let him forget who he was. It played tricks with his mind.

Sometimes, at the edge of sleep, he thought he heard music.