Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 4: The Present
Vinda came from the kitchen still drying her hands, that small frown she wore when she’d been interrupted in the middle of something — and then she saw the girl kneeling at his heel, and the frown went somewhere else entirely, smoothed itself out into something Merko couldn’t read and didn’t try to.
“Merko.” She said his name the way you set down a cup you mean to come back to. “What is this?”
“This,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the grin off it, he’d been carrying it the whole way home, “is yours. A domestic. Pure blood, fully schooled — Madrigal, the same as you — cooks, manages a house, the lot. I had her for eight.” He’d been looking forward to the eight. It was a good number; it made the thing look like the bargain it nearly was.
Vinda’s eyes went over the girl slowly, top to bottom, the way she read a room before she entered it. The girl kept her head down. There was a silence that Merko, in the warmth of his own pleasure, took for the silence of a woman working out where the good linen would go.
“She’s lovely,” Vinda said at last, and she sounded like she meant it, because she did. “Truly. The hair’s good, the carriage will come with training, and if she can hold a kitchen and a conversation both, you’ve found something rare.” She tilted her head. “Madrigal. What years?”
The girl told her, softly. Vinda named a mistress of the place and the girl confirmed her, and something passed between the two women in the exchange that Merko didn’t have the equipment to catch — a recognition, a placing, two people who’d walked the same corridors finding the join. He felt only the glow of being proven right. He’d known she’d see it. He’d known.
“She’s perfect,” Vinda said.
“I thought so.”
“No, I mean it. You couldn’t have chosen better if you’d spent a month at it.” She folded the cloth in her hands, once, neatly, and set it on the table, and Merko should have known something by the care of it but did not. “Which makes it such a pity.”
“A pity?”
“That you chose her at all.” She said it pleasantly. She had not raised her voice and would not; that was not the instrument. “Sit down, my love. No — sit. I want to be sure you hear this, because I’m only going to say it the once, and I’m going to say it kindly, which is more than it deserves.”
He sat, because she’d asked, and because the part of him that was still glowing assumed this was the run-up to thanks.
“You went to a yard,” Vinda said, “and you stood in front of the most personal purchase two people make short of a house, the one thing in this marriage that will be in every room I am in for the rest of my life, that will dress me and feed me and hear every word that passes between us in our own home — and you decided it. By yourself. On a walk back from drills. The way you’d pick up a fish for supper.” She smiled. “A very good fish. I want to be fair. The best fish on the stall.”
“Vinda—”
“I’m not finished, and you’ll want me to be, so the sooner you let me the sooner we’re done. You bought me a person, Merko, without a word to me, and you’re standing in our front room glowing like a boy because you think you’ve been generous.” The word landed soft and went in deep. “And the worst of it — the truly artful part — is that she’s wonderful, so I can’t even be cross about the choosing, can I. You’ve arranged it so that to complain is to look ungrateful for a gift. That’s clever. I don’t think you meant to be that clever, which somehow makes it worse.”
Merko opened his mouth. She raised one finger, not sharply, just enough.
“Tell me something.” She came a step closer, and her voice didn’t harden so much as clear, the warmth thinning off it like mist off water, leaving the thing underneath very plain. “Do you think I respect myself?”
“Of course you—”
“Because I did. This morning I was quite sure of it. A woman of my house, my name, who married a fisherman’s son because she loved him and because she believed — she believed, Merko — that he saw her as his match. Not his ornament. Not a thing he furnishes the house with between a chair and a domestic. His match.” She let the word sit there, ruined. “And then my match went to a slave-yard and bought the most intimate fixture of my whole life the way he’d buy a brace of birds, and carried it home pleased, and it did not cross his mind — not once, not for the length of a single street — to wonder what his wife might want, or feel, or be, in the matter. So now I have to stand in my own front room and ask myself a question I never thought I’d have to ask. Whether the man I chose thinks I’m a person. Or whether I’ve made a very expensive mistake and dressed it up as a love match in front of the entire city.”
That reached him. He felt it go in somewhere the rest hadn’t — somewhere below the part of him that managed his career and his standing, into the part that had stood in a forest years ago and not been able to believe a girl like her would look at him twice. The glow was entirely gone now. He felt, briefly and completely, like the boy from the boats with the mud still on him, found out.
“Vinda. That’s not — you’re not a mistake. You know you’re not.”
“I don’t know anything, just at present. That’s rather the point of what I’m telling you.” She watched him a moment longer, watched it land and keep landing, and only when she was satisfied that it had — that he was properly hurt, that the lesson had reached bone and not just ear — did she let the mist come back, slow, deliberate, a thing she was choosing to give him. “But I’d like to know it again. So you’re going to help me. You’re going to consult me, the big things, every one, from this day — and you’re going to mean it — and in return I will never speak of this again, and I’ll tell the whole laughing city that I chose her myself, and we will be exactly what they think we are.” She tilted her head. “Is that a bargain a clever man takes?”
“It’s a bargain,” he said. His voice wasn’t quite steady and he hated that and she heard it and that, too, she had wanted.
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