Manners and Means

I should start at the beginning I suppose, with my entrance in to Lord Gregori's home. I was still a lad, barely four and ten when he came. My village was small, barely a handful of families, nomadic ice fishermen all. Far to the north of Kazareen we lived, and we were so small a community that we had no name for ourselves. My father was a fur maker, rather than a fisherman, which gave him some status among our little group, but it also meant much work for my mother, who scraped and cured the hides that my father brought from his kills. My family was large, with many brothers and sisters sharing our tents for warmth and I remember feeling like I never had anything of my own, and no time in which to enjoy the vivid daydreams that came to my mind.

I was never my father's favorite, I'm afraid. Not that I shunned work, for I would work hard, for long hours at a time. He felt that imagination was fruitless, and was a stolid, serious man. He found me frivolous and given to flights of fancy and my mother was often needed to mediate between us. My older brothers felt much the same way about me, though for different reasons. I was, and am, small and thin and pale and my brothers were inclined to trounce me for nothing more than that.

So, it was with great relief on both my part, and my family's, when Lord Gregori came and spirited me away. It was the Dark of the year I turned three and ten, and the rivers and inlet waters were solid ice, allowing for ease of travel when he came, looking for furs. Somewhere, somehow, he had heard of the fur of the great white bear, and heard that my father was the last man to kill one. At that time I never even knew that other people existed outside of us and a few similar groups of hunters and fishermen, I was so ignorant. So when my Lord came, in his sleigh pulled by ferocious looking hounds, bundled in furs and jewel colored cloth, I thought he was the most bewitching thing I had ever seen. It was as if he had stepped straight out of a tale told to me by my musha. He must be a king or a prince, I thought. Something more than human. Perhaps one of the very saints, come back up to the earth.

Apparently my Lord was much taken with me, even then, as filthy and illiterate as I was. I have very dark hair in contrast to my milk pale skin and light blue eyes, and back then my mother teased that I was more girl than boy, and that she was only waiting for me to sprout teats. The first night Lord Gregori was in our camp he sat at my father's fire with the old men trading stories and the smell of bear grease and roasted meat was strong about him, and his eyes sought and found me almost as much as mine did he. Looking at him made my belly ache, so much that I thought I was sick somehow. He was utterly lovely to me, and so foreign, though I remember being much impressed that he spoke our dialect, even if his accent was strange.

His long, dark hair was clean and neatly combed, and my fingers actually twitched to touch it, making me hide them in the folds of my coat, so dirty and cracked were they. I was ashamed of them. Next to his soft, fine hands mine were an abomination. His eyes were so dark, so deep, and flashed with a ruthless intelligence behind the calm surface of his face, and I wanted to just sit and watch him forever. Whenever his eyes met mine I felt a thrill, and when he smiled at me I thought I might just melt away into nothing.

That very night I dreamed of him, one of those dreams that wakes you with your heart pounding and your furs wet and my brother put an elbow to my stomach and told me to shut it, as he was trying to sleep. I was hot and cold by turns, thinking how bad it would have been to get caught doing that, and how good it had felt anyway.

The next morning I heard from my next oldest brother, Nimahl, that Lord Gregori had successfully concluded his trade with father and was leaving as soon as his sled was ready. I was devastated. Really, the affect on me he had was so profound I cannot express it within the formality of the written word. I wanted to throw myself at his feet and beg him not to leave without me. I wanted to stow away on his sled, even if it meant sleeping with his dogs at night. Instead I crept away, miserable, and hid among my father's furs, crying for something lost that was never mine.

My father found me there, who knows how much later. He was furious, I could see that right away, his eyes, which mine so resembled, were icy clear, more white than blue, and I knew to shrink from that, although to run would have been a terrible offense, to be punished heartily once I was caught. He dragged me out of the small hut and shook me like bear-hound with a weasel and something in my expression must have spoken of insolence for he slapped me across one cheek, hard, narrowly missing my eye.

Then the most extraordinary thing to happen in my life to that point occurred. My father went flying backward, the sound of flesh upon flesh ringing in my ears, but it was not his fist hitting my face again, it was Lord Gregori's hitting my father. I vow, he looked like Saint Oligg, the patron of warriors, standing down my father. My Lord is neither broad, nor heavy, and was less so then, but he is tall, and imposing. His eyes blazed and his jaw was set, and his low, silky voice became a throaty growl. Instead of scaring me, it produced heat in my belly, but I could tell my father, great bully that he was, was terrified.

"He is mine now," my Lord said. "I have paid you for him in full. I will not have you damage him."

My father scrambled away, and anything he might have said faded into an annoying buzz as the great Lord's words became clear to me. I thought I might faint dead away. I belonged to him. He had bought me. Me! I did not care if that made me a slave, although my concept of that was cloudy. I was to go with this man when he left. I was to be his.

Shaking, I stood there, stunned, as he came to me and lifted my chin in his gloved hand and looked at my cheek, where the imprint of my father's hand must surely have been, and his eyes, oh his eyes were like nothing I had ever seen. Anger and sorrow and a whole universe of possibility wrapped in one. He tilted my face to one side, then the other, and a small smile curled his lips. "Mistral. I promise you, no one will ever hurt you that way again. But you must obey me, and do as I ask of you. Can you do that for me?"

Unable to speak around the lump in my throat, I nodded. The great, empty Dark seemed less threatening to me than it ever had before; the very air seemed warmer. It was somehow intimate, and I felt myself grow hard in the embarrassing way of a boy growing into manhood, completely beyond my control. Mortified, I tried to look away from him, but he gently turned me back to face him and stroked my filthy hair back from my face. "Can you, little one? Be good for me?"

"Yes, my Lord," I answered, finally finding the nerve to speak, my voice tearing and wavering in the cold air.

"Good. Very good, my young one. The sleigh is almost prepared. I want you to bathe and dress before then. Come."

"Bathe! In the Dark!?" I slapped a hand over my mouth, unable to believe I had spoken back to him that way, but he only laughed indulgently.

"Oh yes, Mistral. Bathe. If I am to share accommodations with you, I want you to smell better. Luckily it is too bloody cold here for you to have much in the way of vermin." Turning, he motioned for me to follow him, but I could not. My face heated with my shame, and I knew that I would never be worthy of this man, never be good enough. My feet seemed made of net weights, pulling me down, and I wished that the ice would crack and let me fall through to escape my misery. My Lord turned back and held out his hand, face going stern. "Come now, Mistral. I will not ask you again."

So I went, and endured my first bath since the Dark. My Lord's men scrubbed with brisk efficiency and my mother watched with sad eyes as she brought in water she'd heated for that purpose and I felt a pang for her. She was the one person I would miss out of the whole sorry lot, the only person who had cared for my ideas and feelings. When they were done with me, she wrapped me in a white fox fur from the last hunt before the Dark and whispered, "I love you, Mistral. Go, and have a good life, and think of me fondly."

I think I cried then, but I am not sure I remember anything past being dressed as a page of Lord Gregori's house and being bundled off in to the sleigh to start my new journey, to a place I did not even dare let myself believe existed.

Order Manners and Means