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The day after Marin was taken away, I wore my plainest clothes. I wished I could behave the way free women do when they lose someone they love: keening and wailing, rending my garments, and spoiling my hair with ashes from the hearth. I was a slave, so I couldn’t do any of that. But I would be damned if I lifted a finger to make myself beautiful.
I pulled on a dark dress and covered my hair with a plain, unembroidered scarf.
There was a box under my bed where I kept my few possessions. I didn’t have much jewelry of my own. The jewel-encrusted dresses, silver anklets, and elaborate hairpieces the dancing girls wear when we perform do not belong to us; they are as much our master’s property as we are, and I knew I had no right to touch them. Besides, they were kept in the rehearsal room, locked securely in a trunk to which only the matron had the key.
The box under my bed was much smaller, and it held my few treasures. Some jewelry, none of it very expensive, that had been given to me outright by men who saw me dance. Hairpins and ribbons. A jar of ink powder, unsharpened feather quills, and a very sharp penknife that I instinctively kept out of sight, even though no one had ever told me I couldn’t have it. A faded letter, from my mother—the only letter I had ever received.
I passed over all of that, reaching for the single scroll I owned: a half-blank roll of parchment that Marin and I had used to record our favorite poems. She had scrounged the blank parchment from somewhere, and the two of us had made a game of sitting up late after dances and parties, reciting new poems we had heard to each other and recording only the ones we liked best.
I could picture Marin now, sitting on the floor in her nightdress, her face illuminated by the light of a stolen candle—laughing, or sometimes tearing up, depending on the quality of the poetry and her mood.
For a moment, overwhelmed by the memory, I clutched at the scroll, holding it to my chest as my eyes blurred with tears. I didn’t bother tugging open the fastener to unroll the scroll. I hadn’t been searching for reading material.
I blinked hard, wiped my face, and tucked the little scroll into my skirts.
When dancing girls pray, we do so informally, or by visiting one of the small shrines within the bounds of the palace complex. Very few palace slaves are allowed to leave the palace unattended, and no dancing girl has that privilege. When I was younger, and more naïve, I used to wonder if that was why I saw so many slaves’ prayers go unanswered; we cannot visit the city temples, or petition the gods in their most sacred places, as free men do.
When I grew older, of course, I realized it wouldn’t make a difference.
Quietly, with my head down, I left the slaves’ dormitory and headed for the northernmost wing of the palace, where the emperor’s hall of justice is located. In his younger days, before he became so ill, the emperor used to hear petitions there; that duty, like so many, was quietly delegated to his heir some time ago.
Prokip, the god of justice, has a shrine there, just down the corridor from the emperor’s hall.
That is where I was headed. Perhaps that seems like an odd choice. The god of justice doesn’t have much to do with slaves, let alone dancing girls. Marin herself would probably have called on Tenep, or Shesmegah. But I wasn’t Marin, and I wasn’t looking for mercy.
When I reached the shrine, it was deserted. I knelt, and looked up. The god’s image is built just a little larger than life. His body is carved stone—but his blindfold is real, the cloth-of-gold tied securely across his marble face. His set of golden scales is real, too; as I gazed up, some breeze, perhaps from a nearby ventilation shaft, disturbed the two halves of his perfectly balanced scale, making them shift back and forth as I approached, cautiously, to make my offering to the god.
With a fresh wave of grief, I placed Marin’s scroll on Prokip’s altar.
It was all I had left of her—and perhaps, quite literally, all that would ever be left of her.
I was under no illusions about the limits of my master’s mercy. I was shocked Nahuseresh had not killed Marin outright when he discovered her infidelity, and I was certain he had spared my friend’s life only to sell her into misery and an early death. Marin would die in some cheap brothel, I thought, raped every day for the rest of her life. That, or she would die stifling in some dark tunnel under the earth, her life wasted in the emperor’s mines.
There was no point trying to change her fate. That wasn’t why I was here.
“May he get what he deserves,” I prayed. “Every man who brought her to this, who will ever hurt her—punish him as he deserves. Don’t let him escape what he did.”
The slight breeze died down, and the scales were still again.
I prayed a little longer. For a few moments, I wept openly. I touched the edge of Marin’s scroll to one of the candles on the god’s altar, burning it to ash.
Then I rose, and returned to my duties.