Read Trickster's Choice for Free Online Page B

custom.

    To Aly’s surprise, Ulasim and Chenaol kept her. It seemed they needed a slave-of-all-work, someone to obey the orders of everyone in the house. She stayed busy, but Mequen and his wife, Duchess Winnamine, believed that a well-fed slave was a harder worker. Their policy of kindness extended to clothes and even to healers. Aly could now breathe through her nose, although it would show the sign of the break all her days. The scar in her eyebrow was also hers for life.

    Aly almost regretted the need to leave this interesting household. Its sheer size had not impressed her, despite the fact that the Balitangs hired or owned over a hundred servants and slaves in this great residence alone, not counting the family men-at-arms. Her adoptive aunts and uncles in the Naxen and Goldenlake households boasted as many servants, and the Tortallan palace had four times that many people to keep it in order. It was the makeup of the Balitang household and the family that intrigued Aly. If she hadn’t known her parents would be worrying, she might have stayed on for a while to see what kind of people the Balitangs were. After years of lessons in the Isles’ history, detailing the thorough job of conquest done by the luarin, or white, ruling class, she had expected to find all luarin in service and all the brown, or raka, folk as slaves. She had also expected that, as a luarin and a slave, she would need to prove over and over her ability to find tender spots on a raka tormentor’s body before he or she decided to leave her alone.

    Instead the pure-raka cook, Chenaol, had taken Aly under her wing and introduced her to a household that contained a majority of part- and full-raka servants and slaves, in addition to pure-luarin slaves like Aly, purchased as they came into the Isles’ markets. As head cook, the wickedly humorous raka woman ran the kitchens with a firm brown hand and a sharp brown eye, supervising luarin, part-raka, and full-raka servants and slaves. She made it clear to all who came through her door that Aly was to be left alone.

    “They gave her away, poor lass,” Chenaol had told the household. “She’s got enough on her plate without you lot tormenting her.” It seemed Chenaol’s word was law, regardless of her ancestry. Aly admired the woman. Chenaol was in her mid-fifties, a tart-tongued woman with sharp eyes. There were a few gray streaks in the coarse black hair she wore in a braid down her plump back. Her skin was the coppery brown shade of a full-blood raka, creased with light wrinkles about the eyes and mouth. Busy as she was, she still found time to show Aly the ropes in the rambling mansion.

    The strangeness of this household didn’t end with Chenaol. Ulasim, the brawny head footman, was also a full-blood raka. Of the Balitang’s chief servants, the housekeeper, the steward, the coachman, and the healer were pure luarin and free, as was Veron, the commander of the men-at-arms. The chief hostler, the elderly Lokeij, was a full-blood raka slave who didn’t seem to notice the collar around his neck, and half the hostlers who served under his eye were free and of mixed parentage. If the raka of the Isles were oppressed by their luarin masters, it was a thin, watery oppression in the Balitang household.

    Already Aly had learned that the duke, the master of this house, had taken one of the raka nobility as his first wife and married her best luarin friend for his second. His choices might not have been worthy of note in another man, but Mequen was a descendant of the luarin ruling house, the Rittevons. Did this mean the luarin attitude was softening toward the enslaved raka, or did it simply mean that Mequen Balitang was far enough from the throne that no one cared whom he married? Sadly, Aly wouldn’t get the chance to find out. Her parents would be fretting. She was going home, even if she had to manage all the arrangements herself.

    Her escape would have been easier if she could just visit one