Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 20: The Rebellion
(Kara)
I lay under the goose’s arm, waiting, tight as a drawn bow. He had gone to sleep at last, after using me thoroughly. The sleep was a good thing, that, and I think it only came because it was I who had given him the herbs that brought the sleep, ground fine into the second jug of wine. I counted, the way you count to be sure, and then the little jerk ran through him, the one that means the goose is properly under and not just resting his eyes, and I slid out from beneath his arm and stood and looked down at him. The body. The soft prick. I do not have to see that again.
Well, Mum. Here we go.
The goose had put the device in his trunk — the locked trunk, the one he believed I had no key to, the one he thought was the single private corner of a house I cleaned to the boards every day of my recent life. As if there would be such a corner. I had hung the spare key behind the shelf in the spare room the week the lady Vinda died, when the house was full of weeping strangers and no one watches what a slave does with her hands; I had kept it there, the way you keep a thing you might want, and tonight was the day, though I also knew where he kept his own key while he slept. I fetched it down. I had oiled the lock and the hinges of that trunk twice yesterday — there is always a reason to oil a thing in a house, and no one ever asks the girl why — so it opened under my hands without a sound. I lifted the pack out. It is heavier than it looks, about a brick, just as he said, and even closed and buckled there came off it the faintest breath of the thing inside, a cold wrong feeling on the skin, like standing too near the edge of something high. I did up the buckle that was already done up, to be sure, and closed the trunk, and turned the key, and took the key from the lock. I had no more use for hiding it.
If he roused and found the bed empty he’d not stir; I had seen to that, the slow way I’d seen to everything. I taught him, over the weeks, that I slept badly and crept to my own bed and fretted over his locks — and that I was always, always back, the creature in its place by morning, the morning his, exactly as he liked, without fail, till he forgot to wonder if it would be. You buy a man’s sleep with a hundred faithful dawns, and I had paid them. So this morning he would sleep on the credit of all the rest, certain the creature would be there to wake him just as he liked — and the creature would be gone, and the bed stayed empty, and he slept.
Down the stairs in the dark, which held no terror for me; I knew every tread that spoke and put my weight where they were silent. Into my own room, the one under the stairs with the two beds, the slept-in one and the empty one above it that was meant for my mother and never held her. Up the mean little stairs to the second bed, and my arm in behind the loose board at the head of it, the gap above it that only a small hand reaches — and there it was, the book. My book. The real one, not the one of pretty lies I left in the lower bed for him to find and be comforted by, which he did, which he had. I took the real one. And then down again to my own bed, the slept-in one, and from among my few things there the twist of cloth, and inside it the little tuft of coarse dun hair that Sair sent me through the long slow hands of the slave’s message-road, all that is left in the world of a dog that loved me when I was a person — I took that too. Two things. In case I lived, which was very far from sure. A girl going where I was going does not pack for a future she has no reason to expect, but a book and a knot of hair weigh nothing, and I found I could not go without them.
I looked around the little room once. Goodbye, I said to it, though I do not know to what — not to the room, which was a place I was kept, not a place I had. To the beds, maybe. To the empty one.
At the door I put on the dress — my one good dress, the outside-self I had been let to keep, which I had left folded by the door earlier in the day among the rags for the step, where a folded dress meant nothing, so that it would be waiting for me here and now when I needed to go out clothed into the dark by my own choosing with a thing on my back that would destroy a city. I opened the back door, which I had oiled along with the trunk and the hinges and all the rest of it — and here I let myself smile, alone in the cold, because for weeks I had kept myself oiled so that he would slide in and out of me easy and quick and be done with it, and now I had gone over his whole house with the same oil so that I could slide out of it the very same way, easy and quick and done — and I went out through the gate I had once sworn I would never open again, and did not look back, and said goodbye to nothing, because there was nothing there that was mine to say goodbye to, except maybe the pots growing in the kitchen window and the yard.
In the lane there were the beggars, two of them bedded down against the cold in the lee of the wall the way they did, because I had never stopped feeding them, only now I did it with his food, not mine — they were there in the lee of my wall precisely because I fed them, whipping or no whipping, when I could and how I could; and I stepped over them now, going the other way, with a city’s death on my back, and that was a harder thing to do than stepping over strangers would have been. I did not feel shame about it — I have done with shame, which is a thing I will come to — but I felt the wrongness of it, the going-past of people who were mine to feed, and I will not pretend I didn’t. I was sorry. That is a different thing from shame and I am allowed it.
But the others I could not step over so easily. Up the lane and down it there had been love of two kinds, and both of them real. There were the free people, the masters of the houses to either side, who came to the door when my mistress died with a word and a kindness. They did not come deep and they did not come long, but they came, and I had not thought they would, and I did not forget it. And then there were the others, the ones like me, the slaves of those same houses, who came after and in the dark, the way we come — the kitchen doors, the back lanes, a face at the step when the master slept — who saw me when no one was meant to see me, who said my name, who dressed the cuts on my back that I could not reach, and asked for nothing, and were owed nothing, and gave it anyway. The domestic two doors up who pressed into my hand a poem she had written out fair for me when my lady died and went away without a word. I loved them, and returned their care as I could. I will say that plainly because it is the truest thing I have to say about my whole time in that house: that the love in it, what there was, came to me from people who had almost nothing to give and gave it through the cracks, by day a little and by dark a great deal. I stood in the lane a moment and said goodbye to all of them in my head, the ones above and the ones below, and I was sorrier for leaving them than for anything else I left — the goose not included, the goose least of all. And then I went, because they would not have wanted me caught, and because love that cannot free you can still teach you how to go.
Out in the street it was perhaps a quarter-hour’s walk to the house I wanted, if I went quick and did not lose my way, and I knew the way. I knew the streets between, the turns of them, the dark stretches and the lit ones. I knew, too, what a young woman alone in them at that hour was likely to meet, because I am not a fool and never was. I stood at the mouth of the street and looked into my own heart the way the wizard had looked into it across my master’s table and found nothing — only he found nothing because there was nothing he could read, and I found, looking, that there was nothing in me afraid. I shrugged. Nothing was going to get in my way tonight. I had already decided that, and I am a girl who, once she has decided a thing, has it decided.
I was halfway there when three of them came out of a doorway — streetpads, the kind that work the late lanes, two big and one small and quick, fanning to put me between them. The old fear should have come up and did not. I laughed at them. I think it unsettled them more than a scream would have.
“You’re robbing a slave?” I said. “Look at me. I’ve got nothing. I am nothing. I belong to a man three streets back and everything on me is his, so rob him if you’ve the stomach for it.”
“The bag, then,” said the big one, reasonable about it. “Just give us the bag and go on your way.”
“This bag?” I took it off my shoulder and held it out, and got my fingers to the buckle of the flap. “I don’t think you want this bag. I really don’t. But you’re welcome to look.” And as they approached, I worked the flap open, just the corner of it, just enough.
It came out of the gap like cold water poured down the spine, like the floor going out from under the world, like the single worst moment of your life arriving all at once with no cause attached to it — a wave of pure fear with nothing to be afraid of in it, which is the most afraid a person can be. I had felt it once before, when the wizard cracked it to show my master what he was trusting, and I had seen him stand inside it the way you learn to stand in cold water, so I did; it is terrible and it does not actually touch you. I stood in it. I watched it hit them. I did up the flap.
When I had it buckled again they were gone — not run, not exactly; they were simply not there any more, the way a thing is not there when every animal part of it has decided at once that to be there is death. I do not blame them. I put the bag back on my shoulder.
And I will tell you a true thing about myself in that moment, which is that I was not shaken, not even a little, because there is nothing in a bag, no terror a wizard can fold into the dark, that is worse than lying still under a man you hate while he is still inside you, and he is pleased with you and calls you very nice. I had done that nearly every night for a season. A bagful of fear was nothing. I had been to worse places than that bag, in that high lord’s bath, and then under my own table, and come back from it on my own two feet, and I went on up the street, and nobody troubled me again all the way to the Vessant house.
The house, when I came to it, stood dark and shuttered and respectable, the way a good house sleeps, and on any other night of my life the sight of it would have frightened me — the wrongness of a slave at a free family’s door in the dark, the thousand ways it could go badly. Tonight it was none of that. Tonight it was a problem, and I have always been good at problems; the fright simply did not come, the way a tool you have set down does not follow you across the room. I needed to wake one person in that house without waking the street, and I set about working out how.
I went a little down the road to where a rich man let a vine and some ornamental plantings spill over his wall, and I gathered a handful of pebbles from the bed beneath, and came back, and found the window I wanted — the second floor, the left one, the room that had been Fiona’s since we were girls, and I knew it because I had thrown things at it before, in daylight, laughing, in another life. The first pebble missed and rang off the shutter and I held my breath. The second struck the glass square, a small clear tap.
Nothing. No light, no movement, no sleepy face.
I tried again, but still nothing.
And there was someone now at the far end of the street, a shape under the last lamp, standing or loitering, I could not tell which and did not care to wait and learn. A girl alone throwing stones at a window will be remembered; a girl alone climbing a wall, if she is quick, will not be seen at all. I looked at the drainpipe that ran up beside the window, the good iron kind a rich house has, bracketed firm to the stone, and I thought: well. It will have to be that, then.
Once, this was the sort of thing I did in a walled garden in a green tunic with a mistress clapping time, the climbing and the vaulting and the rest of it, the accomplishments of a girl being raised for a good marriage — useless, pretty, the kind of thing you are taught so that you will be a delight. Tonight it was simply the way up. I have noticed this about the things they taught me: every one of them, that was meant to make me ornamental, has turned out to have a hard practical use the teachers never dreamed of, once a girl needed to survive instead of to charm. I went up the pipe hand over hand, found the ledge, got my weight onto it, and was at the glass before I had time to think about the dark drop behind me; it was, in any case, less bad than the dark thing behind me. I tapped on the window. Three times, soft.
A face swam up out of the dark of the room, blurred and cross with sleep, and pressed to the glass, and I watched it try to make sense of a thing it could not possibly be seeing — a person, a face, a known face, at a second-floor window in the middle of the night.
“Hi, Fiona,” I said, through the glass.
I will give her this: she did not scream, though she had every reason to, and the not- screaming may have saved my whole night. She went white, and her mouth opened, and then something in her caught up to the fact that the impossible face was mine, was Kara’s, and she got the latch undone with shaking hands and the window up and her arms around me and hauled me half over the sill and into the room, and then she was crying into my neck and holding me hard and saying my name, and “you’re alive, oh, you’re alive, we heard such things, we heard — are you all right, are you hurt, what have they — “ all of it at once, the way it comes when you have grieved someone and they turn up at your window.
I held her and let her. It had been a long time since anyone had held me who wanted nothing by it, and I found it was a thing I had to brace against rather than melt into, because I could not afford to melt tonight; there was no time in the night for what that embrace was offering.
And then I felt the change go through her — felt the exact moment the joy ran out and the sense arrived, when her mind, catching up behind her heart, finally asked the question her arms hadn’t: what does it mean, that Kara is here. She drew back and looked at me, and the fear came up into her face, real fear now, because she had understood at last what I was — a slave who should be in her master’s house and was instead in hers — and what that was, and what it cost to have me here.
“Kara,” she said, in quite a different voice. “Kara — how are you even here? You can’t — you can’t be here. Do you know what — “ She stopped. “What have you done?”
“I need to talk to your father,” I said. “Tonight. Now. Wake him.”
She stared at me as though I’d asked her to set the house alight. “It’s the middle of the — Kara, I can’t go into my father’s room in the night, nobody — that isn’t a thing that’s done, you don’t understand, he’d —”
“Tell him this.” I took her by the shoulders, gently, because she was shaking and I was not. “Tell him Kara is here, and that I have a poem to share with him the like of which he has never heard in his life, and that he needs to hear it this minute, before morning, and that it cannot wait. Use those words. The poem. He’ll understand.”
“A poem? Kara, have you lost your —”
“He’ll understand,” I said again. “It’s his business, Fiona. Go.”
And there — at the word business — I watched the fear in her change its shape and go deeper. Fiona knew, the way the children of such men come to know without being told, what kind of business her father did: that he was not merely a man at the courts but a man people were brought to in the night and did not always leave; that his business was the dark serious kind, the kind with a gallows at the far end of it. I knew it too, by then. I had not known it once — once he had only been the niece’s kind father who liked poems, in a life of mine that was over — but I had learned a great deal since, listening where no one thought a stool could listen, and I had not chosen this house and this man in the dark by accident. I had chosen him precisely because of what his business was. It was Fiona who could not bear the word; I had walked the whole quarter-hour toward it. And to hear that I — her old friend, her father’s old friend over poems — had come to him in the night with business, frightened her past any rule about whose room you may enter when. Until that word she had thought me a trouble to be hidden and sent quietly on. After it she understood I was a trouble that had walked in at the serious front of her father’s life, the part the family did not look at directly. She went very pale, and she went.
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