They Came to Buy My Sister, So I Went in Her Place as a Boy novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Inspection

On the first morning the Bear stops at the new boy in the roll-call line, turns his chin with two fingers, and takes him out of the line for his own errands.

At the first bell the whole fortress stood in the yard in two lines.

The men faced the women across a strip of frozen mud.

Sixty of us stood there, in the grey before the sun.

I stood at the end of the men's line with my cap low and my hands in my sleeves.

I counted heads.

Forty on our side, twenty across the way.

I found Amaia at the end of the women's row in a borrowed shawl.

Her face was white, but she was on her feet, and she was looking for me.

I lifted two fingers from my sleeve, and she saw them.

Gotzon limped down the line with his ledger and read each name aloud.

Each person answered, with a word or a nod.

I had never seen a prison where a man said his own name and was answered with a "Good morning."

The ones I thought were guards were not guards.

They were the cook, the kitchen boys and an old woman with a keyring.

Nobody carried a whip or a stick.

I looked for the thing wrong with it and couldn't find it.

Then the Bear came down the steps from the abbot's rooms over the gate.

The whole yard went still.

He was bigger in daylight than he had been in the dark.

He was six-foot-three, with shoulders that filled the doorway and a black beard cut close.

The sheepskin jacket hung open over a plain wool shirt.

He walked along the men's line with his hands behind his back.

He didn't hurry, and he didn't speak.

He stopped at the old man beside me and asked about his chest, and the old man said it was better.

He stopped at a boy with a bandaged hand.

Then he stopped in front of me.

He stood there long enough for the whole line to turn its heads.

"Xabier," he said.

I looked up from under my cap.

His eyes were grey, the pale grey of river stones in winter, and they were fixed on my face.

"Etxeberria," I said.

"Here."

"You will carry for me today.

"Gotzon will tell you where."

The man beside me let out his breath.

Someone down the line muttered, and the Bear turned his head, and the muttering stopped.

He looked back at me.

"Take off your cap."

I did not move.

A boy who passes learns the answer to every order before he hears it.

The cap is never off.

I had slept in it for five years.

"It is cold," I said.

"Yes."

"I have a sickness of the head.

"My mother said I must keep it covered."

"Your mother is dead," said the Bear.

"The ledger says so."

I hadn't known Gotzon wrote that down.

I stood with my hands cold in my sleeves and my face turned up.

I understood that the Bear had read a book about me that I had never seen.

He did not repeat the order.

He lifted one hand, big and brown and scarred across the knuckles.

He put two fingers under my chin and turned my face to the light.

I had not been touched by a man since my father died.

His fingers were warm and rough.

He held my jaw and tilted it left, and then right.

I had seen a buyer at the Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port fair look at a ewe's teeth that way.

His thumb rested on the edge of my jaw.

I felt it all the way down my back.

I told myself the heat in my face was the cold.

I told myself my stomach had dropped because I hadn't eaten.

"You are very young," he said quietly.

"Nineteen," I said.

"Yes," said the Bear.

He did not let go.

His thumb moved, once, a quarter-inch along my jaw.

Then he lowered his hand.

"Gotzon," he said, without turning around.

"This one is mine today."

He walked back toward the steps.

The line began to move again.

Nobody looked at me, which was how I knew they were all thinking about me.

Gotzon limped up beside me with the ledger under his arm.

"Come, Xabier," he said, in the most ordinary voice.

"The master wants his boots and his bread and his letters.

"You may as well learn the way."

I followed him across the yard, and I kept my cap low.

My jaw still burned where the Bear had held it.

I thought about it, and I was ashamed of what I thought.

It was nothing.

It was an inspection, and it said nothing about me.

I carried his boots to the cobbler, who mended them for nothing.

He told me the Bear never let a boot go long without a stitch.

I carried his bread from the kitchen, where a woman put a whole round loaf into my arms.

I carried a bundle of letters to a post-boy at the east door.

He took them without a word and left the door open behind him as he went down toward the river.

I watched him go through.

Nobody stopped him.

Nobody looked at the door.

I counted that too.

By evening I had walked every wall of the fortress.

I knew where the cistern was and how thick the cloister arches were.

I knew the front gate shut at the sixth bell and opened at the first, and the east door never shut at all.

I knew sixty names and sixty faces.

What I didn't know was why he had given a new boy the job of walking through his house.

At the sixth bell, I was crossing the yard with the last of the Bear's letters.

Gotzon fell into step beside me.

He did not look at me.

He looked straight ahead with his white head bowed.

"The master sends for you," he said.

"Tonight."

"Why?"

"He does not give me his reasons.

"He gives me his orders, and I take them."

"What does he want with a boy?"

Gotzon was silent for a moment.

"That," he said, "is what I would like to know."

He turned toward the stairs up to the abbot's rooms, where one window burned yellow over the gate.

He held out his hand for me to go first.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend