Flesh and Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

happened around him. Vineart Malech looked down at him, then flicked his fingers at the overseer, indicating that the rest of the slaves were to be sent on their way. He could hear most of them scurry off, trying to become invisible so that whatever was about to happen would pass them by. A few tried to linger, but a crack of the overseer’s stick made them rethink their curiosity.
    “You.”
    “Master.” The boy’s voice had just broken a few weeks before, and he was embarrassed at the way it wavered on the first syllable, and then steadied in a firm tenor. “Yours is the hand and the will.” The ritual words came to him, as the slavers had taught him the first night, reinforcing the lesson with beatings. Once his voice was back under control, the words were flat, neither terrified nor toadying, but merely expressing a response to a query. He had perfected that tone in the years since the slavers had sold him to the House of Malech, but until now he had used it only in response to the overseer, so he did not know if he had it right.
    The Vineart apparently found nothing objectionable in the tone or the words, only his action—or lack thereof. “You did nothing to aid the spill.”
    “No, Master.” He saw no reason to lie; the Master had seen him do nothing. He could hear the overseer lifting his stick again, prepared to beat him for his answer, but the Master stayed the blow.
    “Why?”
    The boy was silent, his body stiffening as though preparing for the inevitable blows to fall. Where a certain death had not shaken him, the question did. What could he answer? How did you speak excuses when you were dead?
    “Why, boy?”
    The boy bowed his head even lower, but had no answer.
    The first blow that landed hit his backside, hard enough to shake his slender body, but still he did not speak.
    The second blow moved up to the ribs, hitting under the thin top, and the stick came away bloody. He felt the blood dripping, but did not believe it. Could you still bleed when you were dead? The urge to laugh bubbled up again, and he wondered if he had gone mad.
    “Boy?” The Vineart’s voice had changed, from cool to curious, as though the slave’s resistance had truly piqued his interest. “Why?”
    “Master. I do not know why.”
    The third blow was directly between his shoulder blades and sent the slave sprawling flat on the ground. His body shook, but he did not move from the position, not even to lift his face out of the dirt.
    They posed there, the three of them, in a motionless tableau, even as the slaves worked around them, casting frightened yet curious glances over their shoulders. He could practically hear their thoughts: The slave should have been dead by now, and yet wasn’t. The Master was not one to hesitate to punish any infraction, any insolence or challenge. Why was the boy slave yet breathing?
    Any change in routine was terrifying, even if it involved less violence rather than more. They wanted him dead, to make things right again. He understood. He felt the same.
    “You do not know why,” the Master said. It was a statement of fact, and so the boy did not respond.
    “Do you have a name, boy?”
    The question made no sense. Slaves did not have names, not ones the Master would know. Even the overseer was known only by his position, not the name he had arrived with. Nicknames, like Singer, Old Tree, or Fishtail, those were common. A name implied value. A name indicated worth.
    It was a question, one asked of him directly. He had to answer it, somehow. The boy lifted his head from the dirt, expecting at any moment to feel another blow, this time on his neck, breaking it.
    “Boy?” The Master’s patience was clearly wearing thin.
    The words seemed to come as though not from his own mouth but from a long distance away, lost and unexpectedly reclaimed. There had been a name once, back when he had a mother and father, and a home that did not smell of sea breeze and grapes, but horse and cold, snow and