It had the added function of hiding her tears.
“Do you have any idea of how many homes and dancing rooms and halls and theaters there are where girls are being sold tonight?” The golden-haired Guardian looked at him sardonically.
“If I knew that,” Damon said with a cold and ominous smile, “I wouldn’t be here asking you.”
The Guardian shrugged. “Our job is really only to try to keep the peace hereand you can see how well we succeed. It’s a matter of too few of us; we’re insanely understaffed. But I can give you a list of the venues where girls are being sold. Still, as I said, I doubt you’ll be able to find your runaway before morning. And by the way, we’ll have an eye on you, because of your little query. If your runaway wasn’t a slave, she’s Imperial property — no humans are free here. If she was, and you freed her, as reported by the baker across the street—”
“Sweet-seller.”
“Whatever. Then he had a right to use a stun gun when she ran. Better for her, really, than being Imperial property; they tend to char, if you get my drift. That level’s a long way down.”
“But if she was a slave — my slave…”
“Then you can have her. But there’s a certain mandatory punishment set before you can have her. We want to discourage this kind of thing.”
Damon looked at her with eyes that made her shrink and look away, abruptly losing her authority. “Why?” he demanded. “I thought you claimed to be from the other Court. You know. The Celestial one?”
“We want to discourage runaways because there’ve been so many since some girl named Alianna came around,” the Guardian said, her frightened pulse visible in her temple. “And then they get caught and have even more reason to try it again… and it wears out the girl, eventually.”
There was no one in the Great Hall when Bonnie and the others were hustled off the giant litter and into the building.
“It’s a new one, so it’s not on the lists,” Mouse said, unexpectedly at her shoulder. “Not that many people will know about it, so it doesn’t fill up till late, when the music gets loud.”
Mouse seemed to be clinging to her for comfort. That was fine, but Bonnie needed some comfort of her own. The next minute she saw Eren and, dragging Mouse behind her, headed for the blond girl.
Eren was standing with her back against the wall. “Well, we can stand around like wallflowers,” she said, as a few men came in, “or we can look like we’re having the best time of any of them right here by ourselves. Who knows a story?”
“Oh, I do,” Bonnie said absently, thinking of the star ball with its Five Hundred Stories for Young Ones.
Instantly there was a clamor. “Tell it!” “Yes, please tell!”
Bonnie tried to think of the fairy tales that she had experienced.
Of course. The one about the kitsune treasure.
“Once upon a time,” began Bonnie, “there were a young girl and boy…”
She was immediately interrupted. “What were their names?” “Were they slaves?” “Where did they live?” “Were they vampires?”
Bonnie almost forgot her misery and laughed. “Their names were…Jack and…
Jill. They were kitsune, and they lived way up north in the kitsune sector around the Great Crossings…” And she proceeded, albeit with many excited interruptions, to tell the story she had gotten from the star ball.
“So,” Bonnie concluded nervously, as she opened her eyes and realized that she’d attracted quite a crowd with her story, “that’s the tale of the Seven Treasures, and — and I suppose the moral is — don’t be too greedy, or you won’t end up with anything.”
There was a lot of laughter, the nervous giggling of the girls and the “Haw! Haw haw!” kind of laughter from the crowd behind them. Which Bonnie now noticed was entirely male.
One part of her mind started unconsciously to go into flirt mode. Another part immediately squashed it. These weren’t boys looking for a dance; these were ogres and vampires and kitsune and even men with mustaches — and they wanted to buy her in her little black bubble dress, and as nice as the dress might be for some things, it wasn’t like the long, jeweled gowns that Lady Ulma had made for them. Then they had been princesses, wearing a fortune’s worth of jewels at their throats and wrists and hair — and besides, they had had fierce protection with them at all times.
But now, she was wearing something that felt a lot like a baby-doll nightgown and delicate little shoes with silvery bows. And she wasn’t protected because this society said you had to have men to be protected, and, worst of all…she was a slave.
“I wonder,” said a golden-haired man, moving through the girls around her, all of whom hurried out of his way except Mouse and Eren, “I wonder if you would go upstairs with me and perhaps tell me a story — in private.”
Bonnie tried to swallow her gasp. Now she was the one hanging on to Mouse and Eren.
“All such requests must go through me. No one is to take a girl out of the room unless I approve,” announced a woman in a full-length dress, with a sympathetic, almost Madonna-like face. “That will be treated as theft of my mistress’s property.
And I’m sure we don’t all want to be arrested as if we’d been caught carrying off the silverware,” she said and laughed lightly.
There was equally light laughter among the guests as well, and movement toward the woman — at a sort of mannerly run.
“You tell really good stories,” Mouse said in her soft voice. “It’s more fun than using a star ball.”
“Mouse, here, is right,” Eren said, grinning. “You do tell good stories. I wonder if that place really exists.”
“Well, I got it out of a star ball,” Bonnie said. “One that the girl — um, Jill, put her memories in, I think — but then how did it get out of that tower? How did she know what happened to Jack? And I read a story about a giant dragon and that felt real too. How do they do it?”
“Oh, they trick you,” Eren said, waving a dismissive hand. “They have somebody go someplace cold for the scenery — an ogre probably, because of the weather.”
Bonnie nodded. She’d met mauve-skinned ogres before. They only differed from demons in their level of stupidity. At this level, they tended to be stupid in society, and she’d heard Damon say with a curled lip that the ones that were out of society were hired muscle. Thugs.
“And the rest they just fake somehow — I don’t know. Never really thought about it.” Eren looked up at Bonnie. “You’re an odd one, aren’t you, Bonny?”
“Am I?” Bonnie asked. She and the two other girls had revolved, without letting go of hands. This meant that there was some space behind Bonnie. She didn’t like that. But, then, she didn’t like anything about being a slave. She was starting to hyperventilate. She wanted Meredith. She wanted Elena. She wanted out of here.
“Um, you guys probably don’t want to associate with me anymore,” she said uncomfortably.
“Huh?” said Eren.
“Why?” asked Mouse.
“Because I’m running through that door. I have to get out. I have to.”
“Kid, calm down,” Eren said. “Just keep breathing.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Bonnie put her head down, to shade out some of the world. “I can’t belong to somebody. I’m going crazy.”
“Sh, Bonny, they’re—”
“I can’t stay here,” Bonnie burst out.
“Well, that’s probably all to the good,” a terrible voice, right in front of her, said.
No! Oh, God. No, no, no, no, no!
“When we’re in a new business we work hard,” the Madonna-like woman’s voice said. “We look up at prospective customers. We don’t misbehave or we are punished.” And even though her voice was sweet as pecan pie, Bonnie somehow knew that the harsh voice in the night shouting at them to find a pallet and stay on it, had been this same woman.