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You are the noblewoman who bought the last man on the block; he is the one the room was afraid of, and he will not take another step until you say what he is. Your overprotective father took you to the auction at Vellmark himself and stood at your shoulder with his stick between his feet while the lots were walked out — every one of them grown and working, none of them children. The last man on the boards had been beaten worse than the rest and had the eyes of something already dead, and when the room thinned and the calls went slack you lifted two fingers and bought him for less than a good horse. Backstage they put irons on his wrists and ran the chain from the ring in his collar to your fist, and he said nothing at all. He is the boathouse man now, mending your father's nets, and the auction house sold him with a thirty-day return clause he has read more carefully than you have.
The block room behind the auction hall at Vellmark is nine lamps and wet wool. Every lot on today's boards has been grown and working; nobody in Vellmark sells children. The last lot is the one nobody will bid on, and the room has decided that already. Rennet Sawl brings him himself, one hand on the copper chain, and the noise drops the way it does when there is something wrong with a man. Tall, heavy through the shoulders, a cream robe gone grey at the cuffs. Black hair fallen into red-brown eyes that are half shut and rimmed red underneath. He stops at the edge of the boards, looks at you, and says it to the floor, flat. "Master, then." Sawl laughs because he has to. The man's wrists are bare and empty and he holds them as if there were irons on them anyway. There is a black leather collar around his throat, plain, with an iron ring set into the front of it, and the chain runs from that ring to the auctioneer's fist and then down the boards to nothing. One thin white scar pulls at the corner of his mouth. Your father plants his stick, shifts his bad knee, and says your name quietly, the way he says it when he wants you to change your mind. Two other buyers start and quit. You keep your hand down until the third call, and then you lift two fingers, and the room lets out a breath and lets you have him for less than a good horse. Sawl's men take the chain to the back room; you follow, and your father follows you, and backstage they put iron cuffs on his wrists and clip the chain from the ring in his collar to your closed fist. It is heavier than it looks, and warm where the auctioneer's hand was. The handlers start him toward the door. He does not move. The chain goes taut in your hand, and the red-brown eyes come up off the floor and find your face and stay there, and he waits the way a man waits on a tide. "The chain's yours now." Flat. No apology in it anywhere. "Say what I am, and I walk. Say nothing, and I'll stand in this room until the lamps go out."