Chapter 9 — The Girl in the Alley

Chapter 9: Chapter 9 — The Girl in the Alley

Chapter 9 — The Girl in the Alley

Christopher began the morning with Bennet in the seed market. Most northern grain had already been purchased by larger expeditions, but Bennet found two sacks of winter rye, one of barley and several smaller bags of turnip seed. The prices were poor. The seed was not.

"Is that enough seed to begin planting?" Christopher asked.

"Enough to start, my lord," Bennet said. "The barley and turnips can go in once the ground is ready. The rye is mostly for autumn."

They sent the seed back to South Twelve before Christopher returned to the free labor market. By midday, he had hired nobody.

One carpenter listened to the offer, then accepted a place with House Harcourt instead. Two stonecutters were willing to go as far as Northgate but refused to travel beyond it, and a group of six laborers agreed until one of them heard that Dragonwatch had been abandoned for years. Then all six changed their minds.

Bennet closed his board. "We have tried."

Christopher looked across the square, where the remaining workers were gathering around the larger recruiters, hoping for safer destinations. Offering more money might bring a few back, but he needed enough people to repair roofs and walls before the weather worsened.

"Where is the slave market?" he asked.

Walter led them east through narrower streets. Griffin City’s slave market stood near the river warehouses, separated from the ordinary shops by a stone wall and two guarded gates. A wooden sign above the entrance carried the royal griffin and a list of market taxes.

Christopher had expected shouting; instead, the place felt like a livestock market conducted in low voices. Buyers moved between covered yards while brokers followed with ledgers, describing ages, trades, health, and prices.

The people being sold wore plain gray clothing and metal collars marked with control runes. Humans filled most of the yards, but Christopher also saw chained orcs and several half-beast laborers with worn clothes, thin bodies, coarse fur, tusks, or damaged ears. They looked like poor workers dragged through a hard life, not the polished half-beast servants sometimes displayed in noble households.

Near one pen, a buyer complained that an orc had ignored an order to kneel; the broker touched a small control seal, and the collar flashed. The orc dropped, body locked and shaking, until the broker released it, while the other buyers continued inspecting the slaves.

Walter noticed Christopher staring. "We can leave."

"And find fifteen willing builders somewhere else?"

"Not in the numbers you need, my lord. Not today."

Christopher entered. Disliking the place would not put roofs over two hundred people once they reached Dragonwatch.

A broker approached before they reached the first yard. He was a narrow man with clean hands and a red cord tied around one sleeve.

"Do you need laborers, household servants or skilled workers, my lord?"

"Construction workers. Stone, timber, roads, or digging."

The broker’s eyes caught the Drake emblem on Walter’s cloak. "For the northern resettlement?"

"Yes."

"Then you will want healthy workers with no young children attached. The northern sales are in the third yard."

The words made Christopher glance at Bennet. The clerk’s face remained still, though his grip tightened around the board.

"Show us," Christopher said.

The third yard contained more than sixty people. Most were men, but several women had worked in brickmaking and road crews. Their records hung from wooden pegs beneath the awning.

Christopher read the first few—debt, criminal sentence, capture during border fighting, sale by a previous owner—then ignored the explanations and checked their listed trades, ages, and injuries instead. Any of them might run if given the chance; that was why the market used collars and armed guards.

"I need to speak with them," Christopher said.

The broker smiled. "Of course. I can recommend—"

"I will choose whom to question."

Christopher walked along the yard with Bennet while Walter remained behind them, asking about trades first. A former quarry worker knew how to split stone but had never laid a wall; two brothers had built roads for the army; a woman in her thirties had worked in a brickyard since childhood.

Some answered quickly, while others needed the broker to order them to speak. Christopher compared their claims with their hands, old injuries, and the records hanging beneath the awning. He was choosing workers, not loyal followers.

When the broker turned to answer Walter’s question, Christopher lowered his head and drew a small amount of Essence toward his eyes; heat touched the back of his vision, and he kept his face inside the shadow of his hood.

Color appeared around the nearest workers: most were White, several were Gray, and one man standing beside a stack of timber records carried a clear Green glow.

Christopher released the Dragon Eyes before the broker faced him again. The entire use lasted only a few breaths, but a dull pressure remained behind his temples.

He questioned the Green-potential man. His name was Daniel, and he had worked in logging camps before a failed debt contract ended in his sale. He understood axes, timber supports, and moving heavy logs without draft animals.

Christopher marked his record. Skill came first; the color only suggested that Daniel could become more than a laborer if given the chance to train.

They continued through the yard, Christopher activating the Dragon Eyes only when nobody was watching his face. He found a second Green among the former army road workers and a third in a quiet quarryman with a badly healed finger; everyone else appeared White or Grey. The repeated activations soon blurred the edges of his sight, so he stopped.

The three Green-potential workers had useful experience, and Christopher selected them, then chose twelve White-potential workers based on their trades and health: stone laborers, timber workers, ditch diggers, two brickmakers, and men accustomed to repairing roads.

"Fifteen, my lord. A useful number. I can reduce the market fee if you take another five."

"I need fifteen."

"Twenty will work faster."

"Twenty will also eat more."

Bennet began checking the records against the people in the yard. Two ages were wrong, and one man listed as a mason admitted that he had only carried stone for masons. Christopher kept him because Dragonwatch still needed carriers, but Bennet used the false record to lower the final price.

The broker complained until Walter stepped closer to the table, at which point he discovered that the market could accept Bennet’s figure after all.

Payment took longer than the bargaining. The broker collected the city tax, transferred the collars’ control seal, and pushed a stack of sale records across the table. Christopher signed where Bennet pointed.

The workers stood together near the gate once the guards removed the market chains connecting them, their collars still locked around their necks. Walter carried the control seal but did not use it.

Daniel looked at Christopher, then lowered his eyes. "Where are we being taken, my lord?"

"Dragonwatch."

Several faces changed. One of the road workers swore quietly.

"Beyond Northgate, my lord?" Daniel asked.

"Yes."

"The market men said a buyer had to name the destination before the sale."

Christopher looked back at the broker. The man had already found another customer to occupy him.

"He should have told you," Christopher said. "We leave in a few days. Until then, you will stay in our camp with food and a guarded tent."

"Will the guards be there to protect the tent, my lord?" the brickmaker asked.

Walter answered before Christopher could. "They will keep trouble out and all fifteen of you in."

Nobody laughed. Christopher had not expected them to be pleased, but their silence followed him as they left the market.

Bennet took the transfer papers to the registration office while Walter led the workers toward South Twelve. Christopher remained near the river gate with one apprentice, waiting for a clerk to return three missing copies.

The headache from the Dragon Eyes had faded by the time the papers arrived, and Christopher folded them into his coat and followed the street back toward the southern district.

Markets filled both sides of the road. Bakers sold yesterday’s bread from trays, porters waited beside the warehouses, and children searched the gutters for anything dropped by passing carts. Griffin City looked wealthy from its walls and towers, but less so at street level.

A girl sat beside a closed shop with a wooden bowl near her feet, thin, perhaps fourteen, wearing a brown dress repaired with several different kinds of cloth. People passed without looking at her.

Christopher would have done the same, if he had not activated the Dragon Eyes to check whether the pressure behind them was gone.

Gold filled his vision.

The color surrounded the girl with a brightness he had never seen around another person. Gold stood at the highest end of the scale, and with training, resources, and years of work, she might one day reach Legendary rank. Christopher stopped so suddenly that the apprentice behind him nearly walked into his back.

"Young Master?"

Christopher released the Dragon Eyes, and the girl’s ordinary shape returned, still seated beside the empty shop.

"Come with me," he told the apprentice.

He approached slowly. The girl watched his clothes, then the sword at his side, and pulled the bowl closer to herself.

"What’s your name?" Christopher asked.

"Meg."

"Are you alone?"

She did not answer. Christopher took out a copper coin but stopped before placing it in the bowl: sending her away with directions would be easier, but she might never return, and he had never seen Gold around anyone before, so he would not leave the meeting to chance.

"Have you eaten today?"

Meg studied the coin. "My mother says not to go anywhere with men who offer food."

"Your mother gives good advice. Take me to her. My man will come with us, and we will stay where people can see us."

Meg studied him and the apprentice. "Why do you want to speak with her?"

"I need workers at Dragonwatch. Take me to your mother so I can speak with her."

"The north?"

"Yes."

"Nobody wants to go north."

"I have noticed."

He placed the coin in her bowl. Meg picked it up and tested it between her fingers. "We aren’t slaves."

"I know."

Meg led them through two side streets to a laundry yard behind a cheap lodging house, where an exhausted woman in a faded white apron was hanging sheets across a rope, and a smaller girl sat nearby, sorting wooden pegs into a basket.

The woman stopped working when she saw Christopher and the armed apprentice, and Meg spoke to her quietly before pointing at him. Christopher waited until the woman approached, then introduced himself and explained that he was recruiting families for Dragonwatch, noticing that her apron had been repaired carefully and that she spoke more formally than the other laundry workers.

While standing beneath the shade of the laundry awning, he briefly activated the Dragon Eyes: Meg shone Gold, her mother was White, and the younger girl carried a clear Green glow.

When Christopher asked whether their father would also need a place, Meg’s mother answered that he was gone and offered nothing more.

She studied Christopher, then gave him a cautious bow. "What work would you have me do, my lord?"

"What work did you do before this?"

"I served as a maid in a merchant’s household. The family left Griffin City during the war."

Christopher glanced at the laundry yard and the lodging house behind it. "I need someone to care for my tent, clothes and quarters on the road. At Dragonwatch, you can work as a household maid. I will give you wages, food and a place for both your daughters."

The woman’s eyes moved from Meg to her younger daughter beside the peg basket. "Sit down. You can explain it before I decide."