"We must have come at a bad time," she says. "But you remember I checked the Chiyavio markets yesterday, your grace. Trust me, home would be worse."

"Fine," grumps the duke. He catches sight of Ayabel and gives her a considering look, then gestures in her direction for his servant's benefit. "That one's not bad."

"My mistress, rest her soul," prattles Aya (no one cares what she actually thinks) "lived alone except for me, but often had visitors."

"Oh well," she says. "And what were your responsibilities with her?"

"I cooked, cleaned, did the laundry, took dictation and read her correspondence aloud for her, ran errands in town, kept the flower garden, prepared rooms for guests and looked after them, minded her budget, nursed her when she was sick, and translated parts of her library from Ancient Sudre."

Berete listens to this recitation, then nods and turns back to the duke. "I think she'll be fine, your grace."

"If only we'd thought to get him a book in Ancient Sudre to go with her," the duke says dryly. "Buy her, then, it's past time we were done with this nonsense."

"Yes, your grace," says Berete.

"Yes ma'am," says Aya, following with careful steps. She doesn't know if the duke is the sort to beat her for falling or not. (She couldn't tell by looking, or she'd have wanted to check before deciding whether to curtsey...)

Aya's not going to try to start a conversation, much as there are things she'd like to know. She notes what there is to note about the carriage, takes discreet looks at what Berete and the Duke are wearing from a shorter distance - mostly their shoes, where it won't look so odd to stare - and derives vague wisps of predictions from that. She looks out the window, makes a note of the route, compares it against her mental map of Eseo.

"Yes, ma'am," says Aya. The reseller she's just passed through could have been worse, but wasn't a generous dispenser of meals.

Berete pronounces dinner to be perfectly adequate, and supervises the as-yet-unnamed assistant in serving it to the family. Aya is instructed to stay in the kitchen, and left with a basket of bread rolls to keep her occupied.

Aya stays put. She eats the bread, two rolls fast and the others slower, and inspects the parts of the kitchen that she hasn't been able to spot from the corner in case she's going to be taking a more active role here later.

"I think we both know what most people would expect a seventeen-year-old boy to do with a pretty girl he got as a birthday present, and I think the chance of Hal going that way is somewhat less than the chance of him running into a magic to see if he sprouts wings. Not that I have the faintest idea what he'll do with you instead."

Aya contemplates a response to this, then settles on: "Thank you for telling me, ma'am."

Aya wakes up as soon as she hears Berete's voice. She stands up - she didn't have anything to change into, and is still in her shapeless beige outfit, perfectly decent - and opens the door. "Yes ma'am, thank you."

Aya doesn't dawdle, but she does appreciate.

And then Berete shows her to the bath, gives her something less beige and shapeless to wear, and leaves her to wash and change by herself.

"What touching gratitude," says the duke, sarcastically. "Keep her in your rooms, I don't want her getting underfoot. Don't forget to feed her."

"Yes, Father," says Hal, still without much tone or expression.

Aya shifts her weight a little, glancing around the room, noting doors, loose objects, trying to look purely curious and not ready to sneak out under cover of night if anything should happen. She waits for someone to tell her where to go next.

"Fine," he dismisses. "Take the girl with you."

"Welcome to the duke's house," he says wryly, running both hands through his hair (which does nothing to improve it). "You met Berete, right? She's as nice as she looks. Nicer. Father's secretary is completely useless. So's my mother. You won't get any trouble from them on their own accounts; he doesn't so much as sneeze without he's told to, and she doesn't care about anything that she can't eat, drink, or wear. I don't know the kitchen help or the cleaning staff so well, but Berete picks friendly people, she won't stand for a troublemaker in the house. The main thing is not to get Father angry with you. Just avoid him if you can manage it. Sometimes he gets angry for reasons, but half the time he just picks the nearest target."

"...Yes, my lord," says Aya agreeably. She designs, in her head, a wing to add to her lizard which could record this information, though she thinks she'll probably remember without.

"Come up here whenever you want, take things back to your room if you want them, do whatever you want there. I'll leave you alone if you ask, or I'll talk to you if you'd rather. I can show you the back ways to the kitchen so you don't run into Father going through the house - now or when you're hungry, either one. In case you haven't had time to notice, Berete really likes feeding people, and she's in and out of there all the time. If you show up she'll give you something."

He returns a little while later, pokes his head in her door to say "You can read the books if you want," and disappears into his room.

The selection is wide-ranging and disorganized, which seems to be something of a theme in Hal's life. If she wants a treatise on outdated military fortifications, volumes of popular poetry from every province in the country, or a collection of recipes for simple rural food, she's covered. There's even an epic poem in Ancient Sudre, sitting on a bottom shelf looking like it hasn't been touched in several years.

Aya reads each of the titles, then goes for a poetry collection to start with. She takes it into her room to read, but leaves the door open.

He emerges when she's well into the book, and glances into her room to see what she's up to.

Aya looks up from the history book. "My lord?" she inquires.

"You don't actually have to call me that," he says. "Well, other people might care about it when they can hear you, my father would, but I don't. Anyway, I'm going to get something to eat. Do you want me to bring you something back?"

"What would you prefer to be called?" asks Aya. "And..." She really has no idea what to make of the second thing and tilts her head quizzically.

"I don't care," he says. "Whatever you want, or nothing."

"All right. And... I'm not sure why you're offering to bring me food."

He shrugs. "Because you might be hungry and it's a long way to the kitchen and I'm already going?"

"You could also send me to bring you food," she points out gingerly.

"Yeah," he says, "but I'm not."

"...May I ask why?" She almost adds 'my lord', then catches herself and trails off instead.

"No," he says, dropping his hands, "yeah. This is it, this is what you get. So do you want something from the kitchen or not?"

"...Some... of... whatever you're having," says Aya, "if you don't mind?"

"All right," he says, and off he goes.

She accepts the plate. "Thank you." She looks at him, and at the drawing, then picks up the butterfly and offers it for his inspection. "I draw," she says, and she shows him the lizard and the bird too. "You can look if you want."

"Erm -" begins Aya; she's really not sure how to go about getting the attention of someone who seems keen to act as her peer. Maybe this would be easier if the old lady had kept more than one slave.

"...Thanks," he says. "That's - good to know. And, I don't know, it's not that you're inconvenient exactly? I mean it's technically sort of true but it's not the point. It's complicated."

"What is?" asks Aya.

"It's like... it's like being Father's only son," he says, leaning back against the doorframe. "There is no next heir; after me it's a handful of distant cousins in other provinces, none of which even border Viore, and they all have equal claim. So if I fall out of a tree and break my neck or something, and my parents don't manage to cough up another child in time to grow up before Father dies, it means chaos and rioting at least. Worse, if the cousins get to fighting each other and the King takes too long to come clean up the mess. So every time I think about doing something that might risk my life, it's not just 'what if I die', it's 'what if I die and thereby fuck over a whole province'. You could call that inconvenient, I'd for sure climb a lot more trees without it, but the population of Viore isn't really stopping me from taking stupid risks with my life. They couldn't if they tried. It's just," he shrugs, "I'm not keen on riots. I don't know, does that make sense?"

"In this analogy am I the population of Viore?"

"Yeah. Something like that. The details aren't the same, but it's the same general idea."

"I'm unavoidably on your plate because anything you could do to get me off your plate would have bad side effects for me and you don't want that," she concludes. "Well, I can stay out of your way and leave you alone, if you'd rather?"

"I don't know," he says. "Maybe? But I don't want you afraid of bothering me. If you need something you can't get by yourself, that's on my plate too. The part of this situation that bothers me already happened, and it's not something either of us can change, at least not while Father is alive. You're not going to make things worse just by talking to me or whatever."

"All I really need is food, things to draw with, and a place to be; everything else is mostly a perk except for things you can't give me now. I guess a change of clothes would be nice eventually but I'd be surprised if Berete didn't produce one at some point."

"I'll remind her," he says with a shrug. "And even things that are just perks, I can probably get for you without going too far out of my way. If you, I don't know, wake up one morning absolutely craving candied orange slices, I can tell Berete to make some."

"I know how to make all the foods I'm likely to wake up craving. Would she not let me without instructions?"

"If it was something that might take a while, or use up something she doesn't have a lot of, she'd want you to ask her first. And she might want to know I was all right with it, but," he waves a hand to indicate the broad scope of this generality, "anything you wanna do with your time short of maybe burning down the house, I'm all right with."

"Maybe burning down the house?" She laughs a little. "Well, I have no arsonist tendencies, don't worry."

He giggles.

"...Mm?"

"If I'll free you when my father dies, you mean? I will," he says. "But you don't have to believe it if you don't want to risk the disappointment."

"Well - if you'd rather keep it to yourself, don't mind me. But yeah, I kind of do."

"If she'd willed me to myself I was going to sleep in the temple attic and I had a job half-lined-up at the post office and I was going to save up and go to school. She left me to her grandson instead and he passed me along to a reseller at the market where Berete found me."

"Oh - I thought Berete might have mentioned it at some point. I'm Ayabel. Aya is fine."

"Okay."

"Anyway. I'll let you know if I want something and can't get it myself, and otherwise stay out of the way, is I think what we've concluded?"

"I guess so," he says. "The staying out of the way part isn't actually mandatory, but if it seems like it'd be easier, then yeah."

"Well - I don't want to annoy you. You might not own me on paper but you can probably get rid of me if you set your mind to it and most of the next options are a good few steps down."

"I do not," he says, "think you could piss me off that badly if you tried."

"Which is very nice of you, which is another reason to want not to annoy you."

"It's also a measure of how hard it is to annoy me."

"You seemed well past annoyed right after you were surprised with a person for your birthday."

"Yeah," he says. "Sure. So the first step in making me that angry is to become Duke of Viore, and then arrange for me to be your only child, and then spend seventeen years treating me like my only purpose in life is to behave exactly how you want me to at all times, and then you'll have no trouble at all pissing me off. People who aren't my father don't annoy me that much because they're just - they work on a completely different scale."

He shrugs.

"...Is he likely to use me in the project of attempting to manage you or did he mean it when he talked about keeping me out from underfoot?"

"He manages me just fine with his favourite method."

"If you say so."

He sighs. "Yeah."

"It's only - I'm a new factor in the situation. Why do you think he gave me to you?"

"...Do you want me to answer that?"

"So the obvious thing, then. And nothing else? I'm literate, he could have gotten twenty-five percent off if that was all he wanted and he'd take a girl who can't read."

"If I had to guess, I'd say he waited until the last minute and you were just the first girl he saw that he liked the look of. He absolutely loathes shopping."

"All right then."

Shrug.

"I barely remember the last time I was sold. I was six and the obvious thing was dramatically less of a concern."

"Not that that never happens, but at least it's not usual."

"Exactly."

"Yeah."

"And instead I got bought by a retired old lady who wanted me to take dictation because she was getting arthritic. I've been about as absurdly lucky as I could get without manumission papers wafting out of a magic into my lap. Or her doing what she let me think she would."

"Guess so," he agrees.

Aya... is out of things to say. It feels weird to be talking about herself this much, and she's pretty sure she's addressed all his expressed curiosities.

Then - yeah. Back to his room he goes.

It is debatable whether he even notices she is there. He certainly doesn't give much sign of it; he just continues to cry.

He shakes his head.

He hisses occasionally, but mostly doesn't react, at least not in a way that's discernible past the crying. The crying is very much still a thing.

Once she's gotten the worst of the blood away and can tell where the injuries are under it, she shreds the aloe in the smaller bowl of water, crushes the shreds until it amounts to a paste, and starts applying it. "Going to need you to sit so I can wrap you up," she murmurs.

Aya wraps him up in enough layers of gauze that she doesn't expect him to ruin the next shirt he changes into, tucks the end in, and sits back on her heels. With the last of the clean water she rinses her hands off.

"Thanks," he mumbles, more or less. It's hard for him to enunciate. Or see. The crying gets in the way.

"You're welcome. Are you hurt anywhere else? Do you need anything else?"

He shakes his head again. Although it has been established that this signal may not be perfectly trustworthy.

"Are you sure?"

...That is a question he does not feel qualified to answer right now. No response.

Aya sits right where she is, and waits.

And he curls up slightly more comfortably on the couch and cries some more.

"Do you want me to leave you alone?"

He shrugs. Which, in his current condition, is quite a ways to go to express indifference.

Aya crosses her legs, collects the various supplies remaining in the bucket to consolidate them, and doesn't go anywhere.

If she sticks around, she is going to see him spend a while crying. He doesn't seem to be remotely self-conscious about it; he makes no effort to cry more quietly, or hide his tears, or stop.

After a few minutes, Aya finds herself reaching to put a hand on his knee. Her hand makes it all the way there before she looks at it without quite knowing what she's doing; she considers retracting it and fleeing.

It's hard to tell, in context, whether he's shifting slightly closer to her as a reaction to the comforting touch or curling up tighter as a continuation of the general trend of unreserved weeping.

Aya... elects not to move her hand.

"...thanks," he says. He reaches for the pie.

She relinquishes it. "Do you want anything else?"

"I don't know," he says. He looks like he might be about to say something else, and then doesn't.

"Hmm?"

"I," says Aya with a brief smile, "will be up and down the stairs to get food anyway."

...He actually laughs.

Aya shrugs. "I can't do anything farther upstream. I can bring you lunch, though."

"Bringing me lunch is - still nice," he says.

"I know."

Smile? Smile.

"...Do people in general - I guess practically speaking I'm mostly asking about Berete and the kitchen slaves - know about - things? Is there a reason not to mention it, or to make something up if I get asked about the gauze or the missing aloe leaf or anything?"

"Berete can probably guess," he says. "She's been around long enough. I don't think she knows how bad it is, though. And it might be a bad idea to let her find out. She's nice; she might fuss."

"And her fussing would - get her dismissed?" guesses Aya.

"Or something. It definitely wouldn't do anyone any good."

Aya frowns, but nods. "I'll avoid bringing it up."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. There's nothing to be done, is there?"

"Celebrate," he suggests. "No - I don't know. A lot of things are going to be different. It's hard to say what sort of a Duke I'll be."

Aya nods, momentarily - wistful.

Well now he's curious.

Aya decides to... see if he's going to ask.

"I think so." It occurs to her to ask: "Do you need your bandages changed or are they okay for now?"

"...Probably they should be changed," he admits.

"I'll go get more gauze," she says. And she heads down the stairs again.

When she comes back, he is sitting on one of the couches in his little front room, looking slightly despondent.

"I don't know," he says. "I don't know if it would help - I don't know what there is to say."

"Not really."

"That's a pity." She gets the last of the old bandages unpeeled, starts wrapping him up in new ones, making little ch noises at the progress of healing but no comment.

She shrugs. "It's supposed to help, it's supposed to be important. In general."

"Yeah, but that doesn't tell me - how, you know?" How it helps, how to do it, either one.

"Yeah." She shrugs. "Like I said - you're doing a very good job not scaring me - if you do it 'wrong' you get more chances. If you want to try; I'm not clear if you do."

"I don't think I'm clear on that either," he says wryly.

"I'll try it if I think of something to say."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

"Do you need anything else?"

"Maybe?"

"How about: there's something that I want, that would help, but I don't want to ask for it - I'd rather not have it than ask for it, because of... how things are."

"Thanks for everything, anyway. You don't have to help me, and I appreciate it."

"I didn't have any firm plans for what I'd do after getting a less haphazard education," says Aya, "but all of my tentative plans involved some form of being helpful to someone."

He smiles.

"So, you're welcome."

Well, now he's much more cheerful.

Aya smiles at him.

Smiles! Smiles are nice.

And with everything taken care of and the conversation apparently over, Aya excuses herself to her room (door still open). She draws an embroidered cat.

"Sure I will," he says. "Eventually."

"I mean, is there - added risk, the day after it happens."

"Not especially, no."

"Good luck," she says wryly.

"The usual. It's just - harder to take sitting in the same room with him pretending to be the son he wants, right now."

"How long does that usually take to wear off?" she wonders.

"Depends. A few days, most of the time."

"Thanks, I guess."

"You guess?"

"I guess that's something it makes sense to say? I'm not really..." He rubs his face with both hands. "I'm gonna go to sleep," he says, and heads for his room.

Berete is doing the very last of the post-dinner kitchen-tidying. There is a platter of steamed buns, decorated according to her usual convention to indicate their various fillings, in one of the spots where she usually leaves things for people to grab as they're passing through.

Aya collects three. "Hello, Berete," she says.

"Hello, Aya. How are you doing?"

"I'm all right. Settled in, pretty much."

"Good. So what did Hal decide to do with you?"

"He pretty much leaves me be. He lets me read his books," Aya adds.

"That does sound like Hal."

"I'm probably going to organize his attic at some point. He didn't ask me to, but it seems worth doing."

"It is a bit of a disaster up there, isn't it? I've had three different girls refuse to clean it. Two of them said they heard strange noises when they opened the door; the third one just said she didn't want to trip over something expensive."

"Strange noises? Like - what, something's nesting in it?"

"One said ghosts, the other said singing. Eventually they agreed it was singing ghosts."

"Singing ghosts. Well, I'll keep an ear out, I suppose, for any surprises hiding in the attic."

"If you hear any ghosts, let me know."

"I take it you've not heard them yourself."

"I haven't!"

"Huh." Aya shrugs, bites one of her steamed buns thoughtfully, then remarks, "Your - unwarning - about him has proven good so far, but I find myself wondering how you knew to make it." Maybe he's confided to Berete that he prefers men? Maybe there have been others like her, spirited away to this or that other destination for this or that reason? Maybe he just demonstrates enough general concern for the welfare of slaves; Aya would buy that.

"...Hal is... a strange one," she says contemplatively. "Maybe because Duke Halzane asks so much of him, I don't know. But whenever he doesn't have to act the ducal heir, he does the oddest things in the oddest ways. He'll come down and cook with me, or get one of the girls to teach him how to sew or braid cord or weave baskets or wipe floors. He cleans his own rooms - not on much of a schedule, mind you, but often enough. When the Duke wanted to get him a personal servant, Hal told me he didn't want some poor soul to get beaten when he ruins his clothes, and I managed to persuade the Duke it would be a waste of money since he doesn't write letters and he looks after himself."

"Yes, I imagine it would be - difficult if my official job description amounted to anything more than 'exist thereabouts'. I have no idea how I'd have rescued that shirt."

"That boy is hard on his clothes. And his pillows. And occasionally his furniture. I don't think he's raised a hand to a servant since he got out of his biting phase when he was three, but he does destroy things."

"Well, I know which I prefer him to be."

"Be thankful you didn't know him as a little one, then. He learned how to walk and spent the next few weeks rocketing around the house biting anything he could catch - people, curtains, tables, doors."

"From a distance of several years," confesses Aya, "that is very cute."

"It is, isn't it? Much less so at the time."

"Yeah. I grew up in the city; my parents were the cooks in neighbouring households, which is all the cute childhood story I've got because I was a very boring child. I grew up helping my mother in the kitchen, and then I came here when I was - oh, about your age, I suppose. Just in time to meet little Hal before he discovered the joy of biting things. And how about you? What's your story?"

"Second-generation slaveborn," says Aya, "on a farm; I taught myself to read when I was five, got noticed at it when I was six, and I was sold for enough to buy someone older and better suited to farm work in particular. My prior owner had me taking dictation and doing household chores - everything I listed for you the other day, pretty much. She wasn't bad, as these things go, usually let me make a given mistake once without hitting me, left me some time to myself - some of her relatives and friends were worse, but they always left eventually. It's nicer here, though, I'm not sleeping in front of the hearth and you're a better cook than I am and I have so much time now."

"I'm a better cook than most people," says Berete.

"I am more than willing to believe it." Steamed bun steamed bun om nom nom.

"If you ever run out of better things to do with all that time, you're welcome to come down and learn. With or without Hal."

"I'll keep that in mind."

She smiles.