Sera took him to the armoury, which was a stone room off the stable yard with three racks in it and about nine weapons, most of them bad.
Sera shut the door.
Soren stood in the middle of the floor and waited, because he had absolutely no idea what was about to happen and had decided, on the walk over, that the safest posture was the one he had been using for three years.
Loraine, Lilith, can I afford anything that can save my life in case she attacks?
<<Both: Not the ones that matter>>
Soren let out a sigh internally while waiting for Sera, debating with himself if e should draw the tickets remaining.
Sera looked at him for a while.
"Don't do that," she said.
"My lady?"
"Don't call me that either. I've got the same thing on my wrist you have." She leaned against the wall beside the rack.
"And don't stand like that. You've stopped doing it properly anyway. You only do it when somebody's watching, and about half a second late."
Ah...
<<Both: Ah...>>
Soren straightened up like a soldier under scrutiny of their Sargent.
"Better," Sera said.
"How long have you known?"
"Since the night you came in from her room and walked across the quarters like a man who'd never been there before." She said it without any particular weight.
"Your feet are different. You put your heel down. The Soren I remember never did, he came in on the ball of the foot to make no sound to look smaller."
"That's...very specific," Soren said with a wry smile, part of the reason he even wanted to get the chastity cage fixed was so that his walking would seem like usual.
"I was a knight-lieutenant for eleven years. Watching how people walk was most of the job." She shrugged.
"You get a lot of time to look at people when you're not allowed to speak most of the time."
Soren said nothing.
"I'm not going to ask," Sera said.
"You're not?"
"No." She reached into her coat and took out a small cloth pouch and held it out.
"Whatever happened to you in that room, it happened before I could have stopped it, and afterward there were eleven women in a grain loft on Wednesday instead of in a yard with four drunk Adepts abusing them. That is the entire extent of my interest."
Soren took the purse.
It was heavier than he expected.
"Sixteen crowns," Sera said. "That's what she'd have spent on a bottle and not finished. Take it now, because by Wednesday she'll have forgotten she told me to and if you ask her then she'll say she never did."
"Sixteen?...Thank you"
"You can't spend it here, don't try to pay the girls for services like the labour brutes. Don't try. Marda would have to report it and she'd hate that."
Sera pushed off the rack. "Spend it in Greyfen. Slaves buy things in Greyfen all the time on their master's errands and nobody asks, because half the yards on the river road survive on it."
She got to the door.
"Sera."
She stopped.
"Why did you tell her the truth in there? About not being able to get her out."
Sera did not turn around.
"Because if she goes into that town and it goes badly, I will die in the street forced to help a woman I do not like," she said.
"And the mark on my arm will make me do it well. So I would rather she did not go and I die a preventable death."
Then she left.
...
Soren sat on an upturned bucket behind the feed store and opened the purse and tipped sixteen crowns into his palm.
It was, he realised, the first money he had legally held since he died.
Sixteen coins. Dull silver, a bit worn, some noble's face on one side and a sun on the other.
Enough for a or two week of proper food, or a good blade, or two nights in a decent room.
Or a hundred other things a free person would think about for about four seconds before deciding.
Loraine.
<<Loraine: Yes.>>
How much is a lottery ticket in Greyfen?
<<Loraine: ...There is no lottery in Greyfen.>>
Yeah, I know. Just checking whether you'd answer.
<<Loraine: ...>>
He closed his hand around the coins.
The thing about Ezra Vance was that he had not started buying lottery tickets in his old world because he thought he was going to win.
He had been twenty.
He had been living at home, which was fine, and failing his second semester, which was less fine, and his brother had just been promoted to something with a title in it and his sister had just bought a car.
And himself?
He had been lying on his bedroom floor for most of a month doing a kind of arithmetic where every column came out the same on if his life was worth living going no-where.
He had got fairly far along in that arithmetic. Further than he ever said out loud, and much further than anyone in his family ever knew.
The only reason he had not finished it was that he kept getting stuck on his mother, and specifically on a very stupid, very specific image of his mother crying, which he could not make himself stop seeing.
He had thought he deserved to go. He had just also thought she didn't deserve that.
So he had stayed on the floor and scrolled.
And somewhere in the middle of the night he had read a post by somebody he never learned the name of in a self help subreddit.
They said they had bought a lottery ticket for the next draw and lost, and then bought one for the draw after that, and then the one after that, and that at some point they had noticed that they had given themselves nine straight weeks of having a reason to still be there on a Saturday.
It was the stupidest thing Ezra had ever read.
He had bought one the next morning.
He lost. He bought another one. He lost. He bought another one, and then it was March, and then it was May.
By then he was seeing a woman at the clinic on Ridgeway once a fortnight who was very good and slightly sarcastic and who never once told him the tickets were unhealthy, and by the autumn he was mostly fine.
The tickets stayed, sometimes he wouldn't even think to check the result...though he would a day after buying the next and he still lost.
That was the part nobody warned you about.
The scaffolding stays up long after the building stops needing it, and by twenty-three he had a job that paid fourteen an hour and nine hundred dollars in savings and a habit that ate about sixty of every paycheque.
He had told himself it was fine, because it had been the reason he was still alive, and how exactly do you quit that?
Four minutes.
That was how long it had taken, on a rug in a dead boy's body, for something to say the word lottery and have him completely.
<<Lilith: You have been holding those coins for six minutes.>>
Yeah.
<<Loraine: I want to say something and I am aware that I will do it badly.>>
Go on.
<<Loraine: A system finds a host by looking for the shape of what they want. That is the whole of the mechanism. It is not a judgement. It is a fit.>>
She paused.
<<Loraine: When I found you in that capillary, the shape I read was not greed. I want you to know that I have run the reading eleven times since, because I did not believe it either.>>
What was it?
<<Loraine: A man who wanted a reason to see next week. A man who used lottery tickets as an excuse to talk to someone and feel like they mattered...>>
Soren sat behind the feed store for a while.
<<Lilith: ...Loraine.>>
<<Loraine: Do not.>>
<<Lilith: Loraine, that was lovely...>>
<<Loraine: I am aware of what it was and I would like the subject closed.>>
Soren laughed, wiped his face with the back of his wrist to wipe the stray tears that reached the corner of his eyes, and put the coins in his shirt.
I've been quite emotional today. Soren chuckled faintly to himself.
<<Lilith: Emotions are good, that's how you make babies>>
Soren: ...
<<Loraine: ...>>
<<Lilith: Cough. Too soon?>>
Not soon enough, thanks, he said with a warmer laugh. Lilith. Show me the shop.