Her words wakened nameless dread in Keffria, but she clenched her hands under the table and sought to still them. “Kyle says he will not be harsh with Wintrow. As for the slaves, as he has pointed out to me, to make them suffer needlessly would only be to damage a valuable cargo. I did speak to him, I did, of all I have heard of slave ships. And he promised me that the Vivacia would not become some stinking death-hole.”

“Even should Kyle treat Wintrow as gently as a girl child, he will suffer from what he sees on a slaveship. The necessary crowding, the deaths, the savage discipline to keep such a cargo under control . . . it's wrong. It's wrong, and we both know it.” Her mother's voice brooked no opposition.

“But we have a slave right here in the house. Rache, that Davad lent you while Papa was so ill.”

“It's wrong,” Ronica Vestrit repeated in a low voice. “I realized that, and I wanted to send her back to Davad. But when I tried to send her home, she fell to her knees and begged me not to. She'll bring a good price in Chalced, she knows that, for she has a bit of learning. Her husband was already sent that way, for being a debtor. They came from Jamaillia, you know. And when they fell into debt and could not find a way out of it, both she and her husband and son were sent to the slave block. Her husband was a well-educated man, and he brought a goodly price. But she and her small son were sold cheaply, to one of Davad's agents.” Ronica Vestrit's voice thickened. “She told me about her journey here. Her little boy did not survive it. Yet I do not think Davad Restart is a cruel man, at least not intentionally. Nor is he so poor a trader as to intentionally damage a valuable cargo.” Her mother's voice had remained curiously flat through this telling. When she mimicked Kyle's words back to her in that same tone, it made Keffria's skin prickle.

“I think I had grown immune to death. In the years since your brothers died of the plague, I had pushed it aside as something I had endured and had done with. Now your father has gone, and it has reminded me of how sudden and how permanent is that moment of ending. Hard enough to deal with it when it is delivered by disease. But Rache's boy died because his little belly could not tolerate the tossing motion in the crowded, airless hold. He could not keep down the coarse bread and stagnant water the crew fed them. She had to watch her little boy die.”

Her mother lifted her eyes to meet Keffria's and there was torment there. "I asked Rache, why did not you cry out to the crew when they came to feed you? Surely they could have given you a bit of time on the deck in the fresh wind, a little food that your boy could tolerate. She told me she did. That she begged and pleaded each time they came near to pass out the food or haul the buckets away. But the sailors behaved as if they could not hear her. She was not the only one aboard begging for mercy. Chained beside her, grown men and young women died as uselessly as her boy had. When they came and took the man next to her and her child away, they lugged him off like a meal sack. She knew they would throw his body to the serpents that followed the ship. And it made her mad.

“Oddly enough, her insanity was what saved her. For when she began to cry out, begging the serpents to break in the hull of the ship and devour her as well, when she began to call on Sa to send winds and tides to smash the ship on the rocks, her ranting moved the sailors as her pleas had not. They did not want this woman who cared so little for life as to call down death upon them all. She was beaten, but she would not be silenced. And when the ship docked briefly in Bingtown, she was put off, for the sailors vowed that the last storm they had endured was of her calling, and they'd sail no further with her aboard. Davad had to take receipt of her; she was cargo he owned. But as he could not call her a slave in Bingtown, he took her as indentured servant. And when he grew apprehensive of her stares, for she blames him for her boy's death, he sent her here to wait upon us. So you see, his gift to us in our time of need had more of fear in it than charity. And I mistrust that that is what Davad himself has become; a man governed more by fear than charity.”

She paused as if reflecting. “And with a good measure of greed thrown in. I did not think Davad the type of man who could listen to a tale such as Rache's and then continue the trade that had bred it. But he has. And he pushes, quite persistently, at those he knows well to ask them to vote to legalize his trade for Bingtown as well.” Again her eyes speared Keffria. “Now that you have inherited your father's holdings, you inherit his Council vote as well. No doubt Davad will begin to court you to use that vote to his bidding. And if your own economic interests align with that of slavery . . . what do you think Kyle will bid you do?”