Shadow's Son by Shirley Meier, S.M. Stirling and Karen Wehrstein ...

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woman's, the guttural accent; and thesmell , that no woman should have, nohuman should have, like an
unwashed arm-pit, or worse.
I threw myself at Fater's feet. But there was nothing he could do; if he'd clung she'd have torn me
out of his arms, and taken pleasure in doing it; worse for hiszight,what was left of it. He was proud
to the end . She began to understand, when she saw the barbarian woman grab Franc's hair, and draw
her knife. The witch stopped it, leaving him only slightly shorn, and said something about an
apprenticeship; but then the Zak turned her back, and in the barbarian's face, and her word, "Strip!", she
saw the truth.
She's claimingus.We're her slaves. She owns us . Yet even as the truth sank in, a good part of her
could not believe this was happening at all.It's all a dream, a make-believe; Fater will rescue us and
we'll go home . A leer on the big woman's face, the look, her mother had taught her, that only a doxy, a
whore, gets. Naked, the wind touching her all over, the eyes of the crowd, laughing, hating, while she put
one tiny hand over the place between her legs and the other forearm over her nipples, not yet grown into
breasts, as if that really hid anything, Zak eyes seeing her as she truly was and pointing, laughing, seeing
the tears she felt spill hot over her cheeks, and laughing harder.
She a learned enough trade-Zak to understand the barbarian's mocking words.He's not my type and
you're too young . But the eyes said different, running up and down her, contemptuously measuring, like
the hands of buyers in the slave-market.I'm too young , she would think later.She wants to save me for
sometime in the future. No. No, this isn't happening. Fater … Then the blows began, on both of
them, hand and belt and foot.
"The best you're likely to get is scutwork somewhere." Choices; they were saying something about
choices. That was the Zak's doing, it turned out; she'd had words with the barbarian."Stay with us, and
you'll have a berth and enough to eat…" The Zak had said they weren't slaves, that their answers weren't
final, but hadn't asked again. In the meantime, they had to do whatever either woman said, and got
beaten more than the household slaves.
The next weeks she remembered as a blur, of pain and exhaustion and shame, shame over and over
again, more shame than she'd ever thought she could bear. She had to say sorry and ask forgiveness of
Piatr, but no one ever said sorry to her, no matter what they did.Ugly, ill-mannered, weak, ignorant …
They'd made Franc and her do their slave chores for them, hit them if they didn't want to, and or when
they didn't know how because they were highborn, hit them for that… She remembered Shkai'ra asking,
exasperated, "Don't you have any will to survive?" just as she'd been thinking she'd be happier dead.
Even when I started to get stronger, even when she praised me, she always took it back by saying
someone of herrace two years younger could slice me to skunkbait or something like that .
Trying to make me useful, she said. As if I was worth nothing before. The image had stayed, since
someone on the ship had spoken off-hand of her being forged into steel: her on an anvil, Shkai'ra over
her with the hammer.No one ever asked the steel what shape it wants to be. It's made to be used .
"I'm remembering again," she said aloud in the dark, to no one. She felt her own tears, and began the
deep breathing to soothe them, a trick that Shkai'ra had taught her, which had, like everything Shkai'ra
had taught her, been ground into her instincts by endless repetition, and showed up whether she wanted
them to or not, like traitors. "I shouldn't remember. It doesn't do anything but hurt."
Then, being a child, she'd taken it all as part of life, however much the pain, knowing no other choice.
Like everyone else on the ship, seeing what fates Megan's friends had suffered at the hands of Habiku
Smoothtongue, she'd got drawn into the feud up the river, even fought, risked her life for it, when