Dragon's Apprentice (10)

Part 10

Lynn knew that something was wrong as soon as the bidding started on the first girl and the sounds of the auction began. There were far too many voices and the few glimpses she got as the curtain parted only confirmed her worst fears. This was one of those years where half the bloody world turned out for the auction. Slavers, rich men looking for help for their impossibly large mansions, and who knew who else now stood beyond that curtain. Hundreds, possibly a thousand or more, people had gathered and most of them wouldn’t know her. She was going to sell! She was going to get taken away!
Lynn looked around franticly as reality sank in. She knew she was pretty enough to sell…to anyone who didn’t know the bite of her personality, at any rate. With so many strangers she was bound to go as soon as she stepped out on that stage, but by this point there was no longer any hope of running. There had been girls who had tried to run in the past, a few who had even made it, so careful guards of married village men were now posted all over the place, stoic and unmoved by the tears of many of the other girls lined up behind her. It was too late to get away.
Abruptly rough hands gripped her shoulders and shoved her, all dignity aside, out through the curtain. She’d been so busy panicking that she hadn’t heard her name called. She spun, fully intending to run, only to see her father standing just out of sight of the crowd behind the curtain, staring at her with intense blue-gray eyes and it occurred to her that her parents were counting on her. She didn’t know what they were counting on her for, but they were counting on her and, as there was apparently no escape, the least she could do was face her fate with pride.
Slowly she turned to face the crowd and froze again. There were more people clustered about the stage then she’d ever seen in one place in her life, almost all of them talking, one over the other. The shear noise was astounding, the volume was massive and she had to wonder how anyone heard anything. Even as she stood there the auction continued, people signaling for the next highest bid as the town magistrate called out with more voice then she’d ever heard him use so fast she couldn’t understand him.
She shivered, but still stood as straight as she could and walked over to stand center stage where she gazed coldly out over the clusters of people. She tried to gather her best ice queen stare and felt that she managed fairly well until she spotted him.
He stood at least a head above the others around him in a space that had been cleared for him. In one hand he clutched the reigns of a golden horse with white mane. The horse and man both stared at her, the man with an intensity that was almost frightening. He was silent within the throng, unmoving, an island in a sea of human bodies, just listening to several other bid on her, but just as it seemed a man dressed in leather and chains was about to win the bid he put in a bid that had caused a thick silence to descend over the crowd like a blanket of snow on a winter night. All heads turned to stare at him. Even Lynn had never heard such a sum of money come from a human mouth. A dragon’s, yes, but never a human.
She stared at him with the rest of the town until the sound of a gavel pounding broke the silence.
“Sold!” The town magistrate bellowed and almost everyone jumped.
Lynn swallowed hard and thought again of running, but even as she thought it she spotted the men coming to collect her and guide her to her new husband who was already being ushered off to sign papers. Before they could reach her, though, she turned on her own and headed for the steps that led over to the coral where those that had made purchases were taken to sign all of the correct paperwork. It had been a horse coral, one of the small ones used for training colts, but now it had several old, battered desks pushed close to the fencing, each with a man seated behind it. The steps to the stage led directly down into it and she went willingly, proudly, to stand at the coral’s center, not looking at anyone even though her mother drifted within her line of sight, tears streaming down her face.