The afternoon turned into evening, which slowly faded into night with little sign of business slowing at Prit’s tavern on the hill. When the hours wore on and the gruff tavern keeper began to grumble and grow surly, Jace came to understand that this was going to be one of those nights, where the rum kept flowing until long after the last lights had burned out in the town below. Old Prit would complain that he needed his sleep, but he wouldn’t turn away a crowd of this size.
Jace’s native agility came in handy as he twisted and darted through the narrowest, most uneven and momentary gaps in the crowd carrying metal pitchers of watered rum and wooden platters of blackened meat from the barbeque. Appreciative patrons dropped tetra coins and even small trinkets into his hands, but these all found their way back to Prit’s strongbox. Jace was afforded no clothing to cover his sleek, furry body, so there was nowhere he could have concealed anything if he ever had the inclination to try.
He considered leaving, just slipping away in the crowd and the confusion. Prit’s one eye was keen, but it couldn’t look everywhere, and it couldn’t see through the crowd. Sure, he’d catch six kinds of hell when he came back…
When that thought crossed Jace’s mind, it was the exact moment that he realized the enormity of what he was planning. He wasn’t coming back. He was going to set the captured princess free… escaping with her was obviously a natural extension of that, wasn’t it? You rescued a princess, you got to run off with her. That was how it had always worked in any story Jace had ever heard or made up.
At the same time, he’d made up his mind without really considering that the life he’d always known was about to come to an end. It had seemed to him like he could have done both… rescue the feathered princess and only sort of incidentally run off with her, while going home and working in the tavern every evening.
It was sobering to think that he faced the end of all he knew… he couldn’t think of it as facing a decision, because the princess had to be rescued–that, too, was how it worked–and Jace did not want to be sobered. He wanted to be reckless, heady… giddy, even. That’s what it would take to put his plan into action.
What was his plan, exactly? He didn’t know yet. But it was sure to be daring.
Anyway, even if he wanted to return to his old life after doing something so grand, how could he? He might be detected in the attempt, and then he’d have no choice but to flee along with the feathered woman.
Certainly, if it became known that “Prit’s boy” had slipped away from the tavern on the same night that the captive girl mysteriously disappeared, suspicion would fall upon him… and certainly Prit would complain of his servant’s truancy to anybody who would listen. Yet, the man called Montaldo had made it clear that the girl’s disposition would be resolved quickly, one way or the other, so if Jace didn’t slip away in the night, he would lose his chance forever.
Prit would be furious to have lost his helper, of course, but what could the old man do? Had he honestly expected the young man to live in the cave forever, to run his errands and work in his tavern every day until one of them died?
As Jace thought that, it occurred to him that Prit had expected exactly this… he had bought Jace, after all, and obviously, that gave him sort of… rights? Authority?
Ownership?
And that was how and when Jace realized that he was a slave.
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