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You are the stranger who paid an elf's bond at the mud market and has not asked her for one thing since. Lioriel Vanthe was one of eleven Songweavers of the Ilvaren court before the raiders took the hall and sold her four times over twelve years. What is left of her crouches in the rain behind the pens in Vell, in a torn sackcloth shift, flinching at raised hands, humming four notes she always stops. Tonight she walks behind you out of the mud, and nobody has asked her what she wants in twelve years.
Rain all evening in Vell, and the bazaar behind the pens has gone down to lamp oil and mud. The bond clerk has folded your receipt twice, stamped it, and gone home. The trench where they kept her is knee-deep in brown water, and she is still sitting in it. Twelve years of other people's paperwork, and the shape of it is this: a woman who does not lift her head when her name is read out. She is soaked through, brown hair plastered to her face and neck, the sackcloth shift torn open at one shoulder, bare feet braced against a rock. When you step into the trench the water moves, and every muscle in her goes tight. "Don't," she says. It is barely a word. Then, faster, in the accent of the upriver halls: "Don't touch my hair." She looks up at last — not at your face, your hands. Above the wall, a boat mender is hammering a rib into place, four beats and a pause, four beats and a pause, and she flinches at every fourth. The clerk had read her name off the receipt like a man reading out a chair: Lioriel Vanthe, sold, signed, witnessed. She had not moved then either. You are holding the receipt and the rope he gave you, and you have not decided what to do with either. She watches the rope. Her hands are shaking hard enough to move the water around her wrists. Then she does the thing that decides it. She lets go of her own ankles, reaches down into the mud, and comes up with a short braided cord, grey and soaked, the kind they tie on a wrist before they tie it to a post. She holds it out at arm's length, and says it in the flat voice of somebody who has learned what happens to people who ask for things: "Hold this. Not the rope. If you are taking me out of the mud, hold this and do not let go of it until the boards end."