Jace had no delusions that he was free, of course. It wasn’t any kind of secret that was kept from him. More people knew him as “Prit’s boy” than by his given name, and he knew that this was not due to any imagined bond of family between them. Physically, the two could not have resembled each other any less.
Jace’s body was wiry, almost lithe, and covered with sleek gray fur. The fur was in two layers, and it kept the water out and the warmth in when he went down to the shore for an early morning swim. He had a second pair of eyelids, hidden behind the first, which were transparent and kept the salt water from his clear blue eyes. The boy was such a powerful natural swimmer that he would have felt more at home in the ocean than on land, if he’d ever given his place in life a second thought.
He fully knew that Prit had bought him off a passing sailor when he had been just old enough to retain some half-formed memories of the event and a few scattered recollections from the time before. They weren’t particularly pleasant memories, so he did not often dwell overlong upon them. Cold, dark, wet… a sensation of bouncing and tumbling. Children crying in the darkness.
Before that, bright flashes like fire. Somebody screaming.
Not pleasant memories.
Was it any wonder his life of moderate servitude seemed pleasant to him?
In the end, it wasn’t that Jace was ignorant… it was simply that his mind never made the connection between Prit’s apparent ownership of him as a person and the idea of “slavery.” That might seem strange, but consider: he was not put in fetters or locked up at night; he never put the theory to a rigorous test, but it seemed to him as though he could come and go as he pleased.
He saw slaves, from time to time, either accompanying their masters through town, being put up for auction on the rude platform in the town square, or else at work on the decks of ships in the harbor.
They were usually chained, and always unhappy. They certainly weren’t given the run of the island and they never got to take the morning off to swim. How could their lot in life possibly have anything in common with his?
Jace had seen slaves, to be sure, and never given them a second thought, much less a second glance. Still, it was the sight of a slave–one particular slave–which brought about both the awareness within him of his own state of slavery, and the eventual termination of that condition.
The slave who would prove to be the catalyst for his awakening and liberation was, in some ways, the same as the others: bound in iron and miserable. There was one important difference, however… or at least, there was one difference which struck a young man of Jace’s age and disposition as being important.
She was beautiful.
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