Page 3 of Given to the Fae
I nod and leave without another word, hardly looking at the troll as I skirt around him and flee through the door. The sun is low in the sky as I trudge through the yard to the infirmary, my bare feet only sinking a little in the mostly dry mud of the summer.
I go into the small building, noting the slightly rotten wood of the door that Ogdan hasn’t had replaced yet. Don’t suppose he will until it starts getting cold again. He doesn’t part with coin he doesn’t have to.
‘You’re needed in the stable,’ I say to the back of the healer’s head as he bends over a table, grinding something that smells like powdered fox shit in a pestle and mortar.
‘Human bitch!’ he begins with an angry snarl. ‘Why the fuck are you interrupting me in my— Oh, it’s you.’ He deflates immediately. ‘Very well, girl.’
He waves me away a little uncertainly, and with more than a little fear that he tries valiantly to hide from my eyes.
I nod, leaving again quickly. I could tell him that nothing will happen to him for simply speaking unkindly to me, but the truth is that I benefit from the healer’s fear of me. He splinted my broken arm for me last winter when one of the more feral bulls got hold of me and broke it when I wouldn’t submit, and he gave me an ointment for a rash I caught off one of the new girls a few weeks ago.
I go to the stone house where Ogdan lives, and the guard at the door puts up a hand.
‘Where do you think you’re going, Bryn?’
‘Sio told me to come here and wait for him,’ I explain, not looking up at them mostly out of habit.
I might be Kismet, but I still follow the rules. Though some of the guards don’t care whether I do or don’t, it’s simpler that way. Enough slavers, including Ogdan’s own men, have taken the risk of fate’s anger in order to ‘put me in my place’ over the years and I have the scars to prove it. To Ogdan’s eternal fury, one of them even put me in the main yard with the bulls a few months ago, but they realized their mistake when half wanted to rut me, and the other fifty percent tried to protect me from their fellow males hoping to gain fate’s favor.
I didn’t bother to tell them that it doesn’t work like that. Most of them have barely been taught words outside commands anyway. Human males only have three uses to the masters as far as I’ve seen. Scaring the females, breeding the females, and manual labor.
By the time they got me out of the yard that day, fifteen bulls were injured and the fool who put me in there with malice in hisheart had been accidentally skewered by a spear that glanced off a target nearby while the guards were performing drills.
It would have seemed like a freak accident if they didn’t always happen when someone tried to harm me.
So, I try to keep my head down despite being ‘Fate Touched’, as they call it. I don’t get in anyone’s way, and the guards who know don’t bother with me. Ogdan has other means of punishing me, anyway. He made it his business to find them once he realized he was stuck with me.
I overheard him telling Sio once, when his second couldn’t understand why I was still at The Barrack, that his superiors, masters I’ve never seen, advised him against killing me. They said it would anger the gods and destroy their business.
They can’t kill me and they stopped trying to palm me off on unsuspecting buyers long ago as well. Each and every one was punished as soon as they accepted me.
And, thus, The Barrack is my home. I’ve lived and worked here for longer than I can remember and will for many more years to come, I expect.
‘The new overseer take a liberty, Bryn?’
I glance at the two goblin guards and shrug. ‘He got trampled by Black Night.’
The older one, Fridin, has been here almost as long as I have. He laughs gleefully and holds out his hand. His friend curses and throws him a jingling pouch.
‘Betting on fate?’ I ask quietly, not wanting anyone else to hear me speaking so unlike a slave to my betters.
Ogdan and Sio don’t like it. The girls don’t either because they’re punished in my place when I step out of line. The other females will already have heard about the troll. They’ll keep their distance later when we go to bed, chance the tiny punishment from fate for excluding me. The rest will curl up together andmake me stay on the outside of the pile. It’s summer, but I’ll still be cold and alone.
‘We knew by his swagger that the fat cunt would dosomethingstupid. Curt thought he’d die. But I know you well enough to say what you’d do, so I wagered he’d live.’
I glance at Curt. ‘Might still die. The hooves got him in the squidgy bits.’
Curt chuckles. ‘They all looked like squidgy bits to me.’
I give him a rare, wry smile, but then they both stand to attention and the look melts off my face immediately.
Sio is behind me.
‘Get inside,’ he says in a low voice and the two goblins let me pass.
I open the door and am met with one of the girls. She’s new and I don’t know her name. Ogdan has her on her front over his desk, taking what he wills from her. She glances up at our entrance as he ruts her from behind. She looks bored. I have heard from the other girls that Ogdan’s cock is small. In their words, ‘he’s a much easier fuck than the bulls because he barely touches the sides’.
I’ve never been bent over by Ogdan, thankfully, so I don’t know the truth of their words. His narrow hips snap a few more times and then he groans before fastening the laces up the front of his trousers and straightening.
