The sun was fully set, the bag of gems was half empty, and Oly had finally settled into a comfortable silence on the pile of pillows he had collected in a mound at Hesiat’s feet.

“Olymarté,” Hesiat spoke up, stretching his arms above his head again, “If you ever want to leave before I dismiss you, you know you just have to ask, right?” He said with a yawn. Oly jolted out of his haze and blinked hard.

“No, I didn’t know. Thank you.” It felt rude to ask right away, but his patience only lasted a minute or so.

“My king?”

Hesiat chuckled. “Yes, you may go.”

Oly stretched out his legs with a groan, making sure his knees wouldn’t give up the ghost on him when he pulled himself to his feet and reached for the ceiling.

“Olymarté.” Hesiat stopped him before he could take a step towards the door. Olymarté looked over his shoulder inquisitively. The king got up as well and touched the skin just above Oly’s collar. “I’m curious. Why don’t you have a tattoo yet?”

He could tell where this was going. “King Vendon didn’t want to make any assumptions about the kind of tattoo you would want a companion to bear, so he had a physical collar enchanted instead.” Oly replied with an easy smile, though he could feel his heart sinking.

Hesiat smirked. “He presumed a lot of things when he gave you to me. This, at least, he was considerate about.” He mumbled something about poor craftsmanship and turned to write something on a slip of paper. He blew on the ink to dry it, folded the slip in half, and handed it back to Oly. “Give that to Lucice right away. I’d like to quell some rumors before they have a chance to spread.”

Oly bowed his head. “Is that all?”

“Yes, you’re actually dismissed this time.”

--

Lucice’s brows shot up when he unfolded the slip and glanced over it. “Ah, so he won’t be tossing you to the side. My apologies for the assumption, little kingslave.” He remarked, waving the paper in the air and stepping around his desk. He directed Oly to move with a gentle touch to his shoulder. “Let’s get you to the inksmith.”

Oly tried to think of ways to delay on the way there. Just a few more seconds of not being marked as someone’s property, of having magic pricked into his flesh so he could never escape. Even if he made it home, there would be the need to delay so he could get his tattoo removed: alchemist’s shops and physicians in Aoskrali had that service for certain immigrants, but they needed to prove they’d become a citizen first. The law could provide legal services for citizens and the shops that serviced them, but no-one wanted an angry master at their door crying “stolen goods.”

Would he need to go back to his family to get that paperwork back? Would he be able to hide it? No-where in his fantasies of making it back home did he have to face the shame of telling his family he’d been a slave all this time. 

Lucice noticed he was walking slower and slower, because he nudged Oly’s shoulder again. “Come on, it’s better with than without.” The manager laughed. “We’re only in spring. Trust me, you don’t want that ugly thing on in the dead of summer.”

Oly picked up the pace. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears, his hands shaking. Every step was a step closer to the inevitable, but it was also another second without a curse in his neck.

Much sooner than he thought, Lucice opened one of two double doors and got hit with the smell of oil paints and ink. He scanned the room and found an eclectic collection of tools and canvases.

One was a half-finished portrait of Hesiat himself, his body finely rendered, but his tattoos and shirt only had the base color in rough, liberal strokes. Other paintings were in similar states of completion, stacked on shelves like books, propped against tables and easels, waiting in lines to be finished. He could see nobles, ladies, their children, gladiator matches, their victors, scenes of the garden or the ballroom, and other “documentation” he could expect from a royal court. ‘We were here, this is what we looked like, this is how we lived.’

The tables themselves housed instruments, mortar and pestles, ingredients in jars, alchemist’s equipment for brewing inks, and anything else you might need to make an enchanted tattoo. One could call this craft installing a potion in one’s skin, and an inksmith would definitely have more work than just leashing slaves. A shelf was pushed up against the window so that bottles of liquid were backlit in a rainbow of colors, but the two that caught his eye were a bottle of swirling metallic gold, and the other of what looked like liquid mother of pearl. There were other metallic colors, of course, but those two were the only ones which were full.

In the middle of the room was a padded mechanical table, the many segments of which reminded Oly of a tray of buns right out of the oven. If he were to guess, they could be locked or maneuvered so a client could be worked on from all angles. His blood ran even colder when he saw the leather belts hanging off the sides, reading to tie an unwilling canvas down.

“Dawn!” Lucice called. “You in today?”

There was a clatter from behind a bunch of canvas shelves, a pause, and then a tall woman with her hair in a single black braid came out from around the corner, wiping something off her hands with a colorfully stained rag.

“Present!” She greeted. Lightly or heavily, every bit of her skin was tattooed: a finished painting capped each shoulder, colorful landscapes on her hands, and designs trailed in swirling unity everywhere else. He even saw them travelling into her hair line.

Everywhere except, of course, her neck. She glanced at Oly’s and smiled. “Ah, hello there. Where are you from?”

“Aoskrali.” He didn’t trust his voice to say anything more than that.

She laughed. “No, where were you bought from?”

Lucice broke in. “He’s a gift to King Hesiat from Kishalon.” He explained, handing over the slip of paper.

“So I should aim for “somehow sloppy and pretentious?” She joked, but she quirked a brow when she opened the slip and gave Oly a once-over. “Guess he likes this one.” She snapped her fingers at Oly and gestured to the table. “Get comfortable, gotta strap you down before we take the collar off.”

“What?” Oly squeaked, trying with increasing failure to not panic.

“Can’t have you making a break for it. Come on.”

Lucice gave him a sympathetic smile as Dawn walked to her instruments, but it seemed practiced and hollow. He’d done this many times before. “You’ll be done in an hour.”

Oly took a step towards the table, but he was frozen in place when his eyes met the leather belts. He looked to Dawn instead, who was picking out a black bottle and the mother-of-pearl. When she stepped over and put the bottles on the table, she squinted at him and reached out to run her hand over his pale skin.

“Consort ink isn’t going to show up too well on your skin.” She muttered. “I’d mix it with red or gold, but you have a such a cool skin tone, it might clash. Blue, maybe?” She looked up at Lucice. “What about a moon design? That could be cute.”

“That’s a little too close the old, ‘light of your light,’ don’t you think?”

She snorted. “I think the collar is gonna balance that out.” Seeing that Oly was still frozen by the edge, she grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him down. He crashed onto the cushioning with a yelp, wincing when he swung his legs fully onto the table and felt the leather rub and catch his skin. A byproduct of the humid air and the cold sweat he’d broken out into.

He stared at the ceiling and tried to ignore their words, but glanced down in fear when she locked and tightened the first leather strap in place around his ankle.

“Lucice lied. This is a consort tattoo, it’ll take more than an hour. Gotta make sure it looks nice enough for His Majesty to be seen in public with.” She informed, gesturing dismissively to the king’s portrait after securing his other ankle. “But the effort will be worth it.”

“What does that mean?” Oly probed with a shaking voice. Perhaps consort was a weaker word than it was back home. Maybe he’d been taught a false translation.

“It means that I’m good at what I do.”

“No, consort tattoo.”

“On a slave? Favorite toy. The one you find the most fun.” She finished tying down one wrist and walked around his head to tie down the other. He looked back up at the ceiling.

Dawn reached up and pressed on two words etched into a disk hung above the chair, whispering the word “Lonodi” for each.

He didn’t fine out what the first word was until she tapped on the second. A bright bulb of light appeared at the center of the disk, making him hiss and try to raise a hand to shield his eyes.

Only, he made no sound.

He looked to Lucice, but there was no explanation. The manager was surveying the various half-finished paintings, sometimes crouching down to look at the details.

Dawn was the first to speak, but Oly genuinely didn’t know if she was speaking to him or Lucice. “Slaves take advantage of this little “tradition” in all kinds of different ways. I have no real way of knowing what they’re saying. You know, some scream. Don’t know why.” She started assembling her tools, the components of which he couldn’t make heads or tails of. “You’d think it’d be for the catharsis of it, but I figure it’s only satisfying if you can actually make a noise.” She filled a capsule with a little bit of mother-of-pearl and midnight blue, then finally met his panicked gaze. “You go ahead and give it a try, if you like. Tell me if it does any good when we’re done.”

The needle buzzed and burrowed into his skin.

Try he did.