Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 3: The Purchase
The parade had gone well, and weapons practice better. Merko came off the field still warm with it — the particular satisfaction of a thing done in front of the right people and done cleanly. His sword arm ached in the good way. Two of the younger officers had watched him run the forms and had not quite managed to hide that they were watching, which was the most flattering kind of audience there is.
He was almost at the gate when he heard his name and turned to find Castellan falling into step beside him, out of uniform, grinning the grin of a man with nothing urgent to do.
“Hunsen. They still letting you play with sharp things.”
“Someone has to set an example. How’s the leg?”
“Healed crooked. I’ll feel every winter in it for the rest of my life.” Castellan said this cheerfully, the way they all reported their damage now, as a kind of currency. They walked. Castellan had made captain in the spring; Merko already knew this and congratulated him anyway, and Castellan already knew about Wandit Valley and brought it up anyway, and for a few minutes they polished each other’s recent histories to a high shine, the way men do who have known each other long enough to want the other’s good opinion and not long enough to be honest.
“And when’s the next one, then,” Castellan said. “I’m bored. My wife says I’m intolerable when there’s no war.”
“Sooner than the King would like to admit. You hear about the Karthan raid? Up past the Tellis ford?”
“I heard something. Supply column?”
“Salt caravan. Forty of them came down out of the hills, hit it at dawn, very bold.” Merko shook his head. “Made off with the salt and a good deal of self-regard, and got exactly as far as the Tellis bridge before Holt’s riders caught them against the water with nowhere to go.”
Castellan was already grinning. “How many got back over the hills?”
“Nine.”
“Nine.” Castellan laughed outright. “Forty Karthans look at the single most defended crossing on the eastern road and think — what, exactly? That we’d forgotten we built the bridge?”
“I’d love to have heard the plan. ‘Lads, here’s the one place in the whole border they’re certain to be standing — let’s go there.’”
“Against us.” Castellan wiped his eye. “You have to admire it, almost. The ambition. The sheer—”
“Don’t admire it too loud, you’ll encourage them.”
“Gods forbid. We need them encouraged just enough to keep me employed and not so much they hurt anyone important.” They both found this much funnier than it was, the way men do about the people whose business it is to kill, and whom it is their business to kill back.
“And the house?” Castellan said. “You’ve moved in? I heard you took a place down in the Merchants’ District.”
“Three months now. Vinda wanted the city — she’d wither on the hill, no one to see and no one to see her.” Merko heard the fondness in his own voice and let it stand; he liked the sound of being a man who indulged his wife. “It suits us. She’s happy. We’re settled.” He left it there, and Castellan, who was married too, heard everything that wasn’t said in settled and smirked, and Merko smirked back, and that was that handled between them without a word that could be repeated.
“Domestic yet?”
“Not yet. That’s the next thing. Can’t find a decent one at a price that isn’t an insult — the yards are picked clean. Everything good’s gone to the families that bought ahead.”
“Time for another war,” Castellan said. “Bring the prices down.”
“Now you’re thinking strategically. I’ll mention it to the Marshall.” They clasped arms at the gate, two men entirely pleased with one another, and went their separate ways into the late afternoon.
It was the sign that caught him, three streets on, where the road bent past the slaver’s yard he never normally had reason to pass.
BRAND NEW SLAVE!!! Female, 17yr Pure Blood + Complete Social Education! Healthy, Good Teeth, Unblemished Only 16 Gold Coins!
He had not been intending to buy a slave today. But Castellan had put it in his head, and the Marshall had been saying for weeks that a man of Merko’s standing ought to have a household ready to entertain, and it would cost nothing to look. Looking was free.
The trouble with looking was the man you had to look through to do it. Merko went in. To the right, the common pen — bodies standing at attention in rows, each with a placard wired to the chest, prices for labour. To the left, behind a clean rail, the showroom: four or five better pieces, posed.
“Good afternoon, sir, and welcome to Master Smith’s. Only the finest, at a price that respects your purse. How may I serve you?”
“I’d like to look at the showroom stock.”
The salesman drew a breath through his teeth and ran his eyes over Merko’s training clothes, pricing them. “Ah — the showroom’s for genuine buyers, sir, you understand. I’d be delighted to show you, only —”
“Senior Major Merko Hunsen. Second Division, King’s Guard.”
The change in the man was total and immediate, a thing he did with his whole body. “Senior Major — forgive me, I didn’t know you out of the dress uniform. An honour. A true honour, sir, to serve one of the heroes of the realm. This way, this way.”
He walked Merko down the line, selling. Each one chained at the wrist to its own post and placard. None of these were for labour — a cook with a list of great kitchens, a head gardener, two or three trained to run a large house. Fine pieces, the salesman kept saying, fine pieces, as though Merko might not see it for himself.
The last but one was a courtesan, and her price said so. She had served the King, the salesman murmured, and both the princes, and she could undo a man in ways he didn’t have words for in front of a gentleman — and he reached for the fastening of her dress to show what the price bought.
Merko put out his arm and stopped him. He didn’t need to see. He stood a moment imagining the scene at his own front door, walking in with this on a leash — Vinda’s face — it’d be like a Weapon of Magical Destruction going off, the whole house levelled to the foundations. He nearly laughed.
The girl, taking the pause for interest, parted her lips and looked at him from under her lashes. There seemed no harm in it; she was plainly keen to show willing. He set his thumb to her mouth and she took it and worked at it with a practised enthusiasm, watching his face the while. “Very nice,” he said, and withdrew his hand. “But not one for my wife, I think. Shall we go on?”
And then the salesman brought him to the one from the sign.
She was as advertised — he’d give the man that — and she was crying, and her face had set itself into something sullen and closed. Merko frowned. A slave ought to know how to stand, how to present; it was half of what you paid for. This one stood like a sack. It didn’t matter — she’d learn obedience, they all did — but it was strange, and the strangeness nagged at him.
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“Nothing in the world, great sir — she’s only a day enslaved. Hasn’t found her place yet. That’s the whole of her price, sir, if I’m honest with a man like you: educated, pretty, unblemished, and not a day’s wear on her. She’ll not last the week on the floor.”
“A day? What happened to her?”
“Her father, sir — a trader. Borrowed deep from my master, then went looking to borrow deeper elsewhere to cover it. My master moved first. Closed the debt, took the estate — and the estate, sir, includes the family. This time yesterday she was sitting in a class at Lady Madrigal’s. Today she’s yours for the asking, and a gift at the price.”
Merko looked at her properly then. Behind the tears there was something that hadn’t gone out yet — some hard thing she was holding. He’d seen girls like her, or girls who’d grow into women like her: the smooth ones from Madrigal, the ones who’d looked through him at the school dances back when he was nobody from a fishing family with mud still on him. Looked through him like a window. Bitches, all of them. There was a justice in it, somehow — one of those, standing here on a chain with a placard wired to her chest.