12.18.07

5: Tarnach

Posted in Pages at 5:58 pm by Alexandra Erin

Of course, Jace wasn’t in a position to do anything to help the fallen feathered princess at the moment. He wasn’t really in a position to do much of anything period, when the slightest movement might give away his position to the men below. He could only watch as the slave auction unfolded, the mundane and familiar sight made strange and grotesque by the inclusion of such a rare and radiant jewel of a woman.

The tall, thin man who took the stage was not the usual barker, Mr. Thruppwist. He was not anybody that Jace recognized at all. He stood more than two full heads taller than the bound captive but was no more broad across the shoulders than she was. His body looked dark, but at the distance Jace was viewing it from, it could have been fur, feathers, or even skin. His face was concealed beneath the wide brim of a floppy hat. The beak-like hooked nose of a bone-white carnival mask protruded from beneath this.

The crowd, which had been abuzz with speculation, quieted to a murmur as the bandy-legged specter moved forward to the edge of the stage. He raised two long, unnaturally floppy arms, and they fell silent, waiting for him to speak.

He kept them waiting, his hands still raised.

The seconds crawled on, and gradually individual members of the audience came to the conclusion that the man was as mad as he looked. Everyone was overcome with the urge to talk, but nobody wanted to be the first to break the increasingly awkward silence.

Finally, at the very moment when the whole thing was coming to a head and it was inevitable that the whispers and murmurs would start again, the man dropped his hands and launched into speech, cutting off several dozen or so people who had just been opening up their mouths to speak.

“Gooood day to you, the gentle folk of Keeper’s Cove!” he said, drawing out the first word. “Good day, and welcome to a once in a lifetime opportunity! A chance like no other! A girl like no other! Some have called her the Princess of the Sky. Would I? Good folks, Tarnach makes no claims he cannot back up with facts! No, indeed not, sirs! Therefore, I will spin no tales for you today of a desperate flight from an unhappy betrothal, nor of forced exile from the upper realm to the lands below! I will not, as some unscrupulous salesmen might, intimate that the young woman who is the question at the center of our present drama managed to secrete a cache of precious jewels in a remote location before she was overcome and captured. I merely place her before you, and let you decide for yourselves: what is a gem of a girl worth to you?”

“You know, for the life of me, I never could decide if he was brilliant or insane,” the man whom Jace had showered with roof debris said, on the balcony below him.

“Why ever must he be one or the other?” his oily companion answered. “Hush.”

“Gentles,” Tarnach called out from the stage, “we shall start the bidding today at… two thousand tetrae.”

There was a collective gasp from the audience. Jace remembered the time a sleek-furred slave woman who’d been judged especially beautiful had been bid up to eleven hundred tetrae. He remembered it, though it had happened years before his arrival in Keeper’s Cove.

He remembered it because the folk in town still talked about it.

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