Poetry of the Redeemed
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
The Floor
(Kara)
I was asleep, and then Dilly was waking me, and she was crying.
That brought me up out of it fast — Dilly does not cry, not easily, not since she was small; Dilly is the one who steadies the others when they cry — and I was sitting up with my heart going before I was properly awake, reaching for her in the dark.
“What is it? Dilly. What’s happened —”
“Mum, you have to come down.” Her voice was wet and low and trying to be careful, the careful you do when there’s someone you mustn’t wake or mustn’t frighten further. “We need you. It’s — please just come. We need your help.”
“Is someone hurt? Is it one of the —”
“It’s Wick,” she said. “He’s here. He’s — Mum, he’s not right. I’ve never seen him like this. Please come.”
So I came. I dragged myself up and into a shawl and down the stairs in the cold, and the house was that grey nothing-colour it goes in the first faintest light, before even the birds have properly started, the hour when the only people awake are the ones who couldn’t sleep and the ones who were sent for. And there at our own kitchen table, in that grey light, was Wick.
And Dilly was right. He wasn’t right.
I have known that boy a year, since Dilly first brought him into our orbit — a careful, watchful, contained boy, a boy who has learned to hold very still and give very little, the way you learn to when your life depends on no one minding you. I have never once seen him otherwise. And the thing sitting at my table was not contained. He was jittery, all wrong, his hands moving on the table top and stopping and moving again, his knee going, his eyes coming up to mine and skittering off. Dilly had her arms right round him, her cheek against his shoulder, holding him the way she held the others when they were small — and he wasn’t taking it. He sat inside her arms and didn’t lean into them and didn’t push them off, just suffered them, somewhere else entirely, his face doing something I didn’t have a name for.
“Wick,” I said, and sat down across from him, slow, the voice I use for the frightened ones, the no-sudden-movements voice. “Wick, it’s me. It’s Kara. What’s the matter, love? What’s brought you here in the dark?”
“It’s what he did,” Wick said. Flat. Not to me — past me, at the table, at the wood. “I can’t. I was part of it. Lady — I did wrong. I did a wrong thing.”
“All right,” I said. “All right. Tell me what you did.”
“I took her back.” His hands stopped. “I shouldn’t have. But he told me to. And her all — and her like that, all destroyed, and I — I got her back before dawn, like he said, before anyone. But I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have done it.”
And he was too far gone to make sense, the words coming out the middle of a thing I couldn’t see the edges of, so I did the first thing, the only first thing, which is you stop trying to understand and you settle the person, because a person in that state can’t tell you anything worth hearing and tearing at them for it only makes it worse. I reached across the table and I took his two moving hands in my two, and I held them still, and I waited until his eyes came up and stayed.
“Wick. Look at me. Listen to me now.” I held his hands and his eyes both. “Whatever you did — he told you to do it. Yes? Your master told you to. You did what you were told. That’s our lot, love, that’s the whole of our lot, you and me both — we don’t get to choose, we get told, and we do it, and it isn’t ours, the wrong of it, it’s theirs. You did what you were told. Didn’t you.”
“I did,” he said. “But it was wrong, Lady. It was wrong, wrong.” His face crumpled and came back. “Wrong wrong wrong.”
“Then tell me why it was wrong,” I said, still holding his hands, “and we’ll see what’s to be done. Slowly. From the start. Why was it wrong?”
“She was just a slave,” he said. “Like me. Just a slave, came in the night, and she went to him, and he — he —” He couldn’t get past it. His throat worked. “I can’t say it. He had me take her back to her home, after. After he was done. That’s what I did. That’s the wrong thing.”
“Wick.” I gentled it right down. “Should you not have taken her home? Where else would the poor woman have gone?”
And that — the plain practical question, the where-else — was the thing that caught him, the way a plain question sometimes catches a drowning person and gives them a board to hold. I watched him take a breath, and take another, and pull himself up out of the worst of it and into something he could manage; and when he spoke again it came out ordered, in sequence, a story with a shape, which is what I’d needed from him and couldn’t have got by asking for it.
“She came to the door,” he said. “Late. Past midnight. A woman on the step, alone — a slave, you could see it, the way she stood, the state of her clothes — older, worn right down, a broken-looking woman. And she asked for the lord. By name. Said he knew her. Said he’d known her from before, and that he’d want to see her, that she hoped he’d see her.” His thumb moved against my hand. “So I didn’t turn her off. You don’t turn off someone who asks for the master by name and says he’ll want them — that’s how you get it wrong the other way. I let her in. Put her in the little room by the entrance, the cold one, where you put people you’re not sure of, and I went and I woke the man who wakes the lord, and I waited.”
“Good,” I said. “That was right. Go on.”
“And he came down. The lord. Himself, in the middle of the night, which he never does. And then he took her — gentle, he was gentle with her — took her in out of the cold room and into the house, the proper house, and the door shut, and that was the last I saw of her for hours.”
The grey light was coming up a little at the window. Dilly hadn’t moved, her face against his shoulder, her eyes on me.
“And then,” Wick said, and his voice went careful, “the mistress’s maid came and found me. Hours later. The gracious mistress’s own maid — and she was — she didn’t like it, you could tell, she was tight about the mouth, angry under it. And she told me. She said the woman had asked him. Asked him to make her free. That she’d come all that way, in the night, broken as she was, to ask him that one thing — to free her — and that he’d promised her. Said he would. Told her yes.” His hand had gone cold in mine. “And then he took her to the bath. And he — the maid said — he had her. There. After he’d promised. She said it plain, the maid, like it disgusted her. And I thought — why would she lie, the maid, she’s no reason to make it up, she was angry it happened — so it’s true. He promised the woman her freedom, and then he took her to the bath, and he had her, and —” Wick’s breath shook “— and then he gave her a new dress. A good one. Put her in a good new dress. And he found me, after, near dawn, and told me to take her back to where she came from and never bring her again. And not to speak of it. So I did. I took her home.”
“And the woman,” I said. “When you took her home. How was she?”
“Broken, Lady.” It came out of him like the last of the air. “Destroyed. She didn’t say one word the whole way, not one, just stared, holding the new dress shut at her throat like she was cold, and her face — I’ve seen a lot of faces. I never saw that one before. Like there was nobody in it. What was I to do? She wouldn’t speak, and he’d said take her home, and so I took her home. But it was wrong, and I helped, I carried her there and I helped him do it, and I couldn’t — I came here. I didn’t know where else. I came to you.”
And I held his hands, and I gave him the thing he’d come for, because he had earned it and it was true.
“There was nothing else you could do,” I said. “Nothing, Wick. Hear me. You let a woman in from the cold who asked for shelter — right. You didn’t turn her off — right. And when it had all gone the way it went, you took a broken woman home, gently, the way she needed, before the daylight that would’ve shamed her in the street — right. Every single thing you did was the kindest thing a person in your place could have done. You couldn’t free her. You couldn’t stop him. You’re a slave in that man’s house, love; you’ve no more power than a chair has. The wrong is his. All of it. Not one thread of it is yours.”
“But I helped —”
“You carried her. There’s a difference, and it’s the whole difference, and one day when you’re free you’ll feel it. He used you the way he used her, only less, and dressing it up as your fault is just one more thing he did wrong. You didn’t do a wrong thing. You were near a wrong thing, and you couldn’t stop it, and you’ve come all this way in the dark because your good heart can’t tell those two apart yet. It will.” I pressed his hands. “You’re a good boy, Wick. You did right. Now breathe.”
And I watched him breathe, and I watched it start to land, the absolution, the thing settling into him — and I understood, watching it, what had truly hurt him, under all of it. It wasn’t only the woman. It was that some part of Wick had still believed, despite everything, that the lord was a good man — the great liberator, the man who frees people — and he’d watched that man promise a broken slave her freedom and then take her in a bath and put her out at dawn, and it was the breaking of the expectation that had broken Wick, as much as the deed. The good men aren’t supposed to do that. He’d thought he served a good man.
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