Ezra had been bad at approximately everything. Sports. School. Talking to women. Holding down a job. Not dying in crosswalks.
He was, however, extremely good at one specific thing, which was reading a room fast and saying the thing that let him get through it.
Nineteen months of retail nights had drilled it into him. Somebody comes at you angry, you find what they want and you hand it to them before they've finished asking.
So he did that.
"Yeah," he said, and let his shoulders drop, and closed the door behind him. "She did."
The grin on Nessa's face flickered. Just slightly. Just enough that Ezra clocked it and filed it in a non-existent folder.
Soren slowly walked over to his corner.
The other two women at the table didn't look up for long.
One of them, older, thin, with sandy hair scraped back, had already gone back to her cards. Ottilie Vann, said Soren's memory, and it came with a texture Ezra didn't like.
Five years in the house, and somewhere in the middle of the second one, she'd just gone out. Still worked. Still ate. Still answered when spoken to.
But the person had left and only the routine was still standing there doing the job.
The third one hadn't been playing cards at all. She was sitting slightly back from the table with her arms folded, and she was looking straight at Ezra, and she hadn't stopped since he opened the door.
Sera Delacque.
Soren's memory produced her file in one blunt lump.
Twenty-seven. Ordwyn. Knight-lieutenant, taken alive in a border action six years ago, sold south, branded.
Fourth Level Adept Warrior, which meant, if Ezra's new understanding of the world was right, that she could put her fist through a stone wall with the same ease as poking food with a fork.
She was Vesper's personal guard. Vesper, who was 2nd Level Adept.
Her family had assigned a soldier two full levels stronger than Vesper to protect her, and put a leash on her to make sure she did.
Even if Vesper and her family weren't on the best of terms, given she hasn't been disowned, there was still some connection between the two.
Sera didn't say anything. She just watched him cross the room, and her eyes went, once, quickly, to his face. Then to the way he was walking.
Ezra made himself slow down. Soren walked with his shoulders in. Soren didn't take up space, he reminded himself.
He sat on the edge of his bunk, which was the last one in the row, furthest to the door
"Soooooren..."
Nessa had swung around on her stool to face him, one leg hooked over the other, elbow on the table behind her.
Up close she was maybe twenty, and she had the specific brightness of somebody who'd figured out very young that if you get your mouth moving first, people react to the mouth instead of to you.
"Yeah?"
"So here's my problem." She tipped her head, battering her eye lashes coquettishly.
"Marda's got me on the scullery in the morning and then the linens after, and I have been awake since four, and if I have to scrub one more pot I am going to lie down in the yard and let the horses finish me off." She smiled at him. It was a good smile and she knew it.
"So..."
Ezra waited.
"So the usual," Nessa said.
Soren's memory helpfully supplied the usual, and Ezra had to keep his face very still while it did.
The arrangement was old. It predated Ezra by about two years. Nessa or one of the others would need something done.
And like always Soren would do it, because Soren did everything anybody asked, and in exchange they offered him the only currency they had.
You can have a feel, if you want. Go on. Nobody's looking.
And Soren never had.
Not once. Not in two years. He'd done the pots and the linens and the mending and the hauling, every single time, and then he'd said no thank you and gone to his bunk, and nobody had ever asked him why.
They'd decided among themselves he was shy, or that Vesper had broken something in him, or that he simply didn't want women, and they'd stopped thinking about it.
The truth, sitting in Ezra's head in Soren's own voice, was much simpler and much worse.
He hadn't wanted to be like her, he'd already endured too much from Vesper and the minor control he had over his own body was the only thing he could treasure.
Ezra sat on the bunk in a dead boy's body and thought, you were better than every single person in this house.
"Soren?" Nessa leaned in. "Hello? The pots."
He could say no. Keep the shape. Be Soren, be quiet, be invisible for seven weeks, and then have a Bindmaster hold his wrist and find out what happens to a slave with the wrong soul in him.
Or he could stop pretending he was a boy who had died tonight, and start being whatever it was that was going to survive this.
Although it's truly me being selfish, I will live for us to my best capability
"Okay," Ezra said.
Nessa blinked. "Okay?"
"Yeah. I'll do the pots." He stood up. "And the linens."
"...Right." She recovered fast, he'd give her that. The grin came back on. "Well. Look at you. What's got into you?"
"Long night."
"Mm." She reached over and patted his arm as he passed, the way you'd pat a dog that had finally learned to sit. "You're a treasure, Soren."
He got the pots done in a little under an hour.
It turned out that Soren's body knew how to do it, his hands moving through the work while his brain sat behind them in thought and probing his system to no end.
He scrubbed and stacked and did the linens after, and while he worked he thought about seven weeks, and Bindwrights, and a grey mark on his wrist, and a loading bar sitting at thirty-one percent doing absolutely nothing.
When he came back the lamp was down to a coal and most of the room was asleep.
Ottilie was in her bunk with her eyes open, staring at the underside of the one above her. Sera was gone, back to whatever room she was in that kept her in near Vesper's floor.
Nessa was awake, sitting on her bunk with her knees up, and when she saw him she made a face of pure theatrical gratitude and pressed both hands over her heart pushing the swell of her breast up.
"My saviour," she whispered.
Ezra stopped in front of her.
He'd thought about the fact that Soren had said no two hundred times to stay clean, and that saying yes now would be the first thing Ezra did in this world, and that it would mean something either way.
From now on, I will be the you neither of us could be
But even then, he'd decided he'd only do it if she meant it. Actually meant it, not as a joke, not as the thing you offer because it's the only thing you have.
"Did you mean it?" he asked. Quiet, so the room stayed asleep.
Nessa's eyebrows went up. "Mean what?"
"The offer."
She looked at him.
For a second the performance came off her face entirely, and underneath it she was just a twenty-year-old woman sitting in a stone room in the dark, and she was studying him with an expression Soren couldn't read at all.
"Huh," she said softly.
"Because if you didn't, that's completely fine, I did the pots anyway and I'll do them tomorrow too."
"Two years," Nessa said. "Two years I've been saying that to you and you never once even looked." She tipped her head. "And tonight you ask if I meant it."
"Yeah...people change...or break"
Nessa scoffed slightly and shifted a little on the bed. "Same thing over here..."
Soren said nothing except a soft wry smile while he waited for her answer, her heart beating furiously.
"Nobody's ever asked me that." She said it lightly. It didn't come out light. "In my whole life. Nobody has ever once asked me that."
Soren didn't say anything.
Nessa reached out and took his wrist. The one with the mark on it. She didn't look at the mark.
"Yeah," she said. "I meant it."