The Seer by Jordan Reece Read Free Book Online

thought with well-worn loathing, and succumbed to sleep.
     

 
    Chapter Three
     
    He dreamed of angels and demons, delicate fingers slipping protectively over his shoulder as claws with fire at their tips scored deep gashes into the night sky. As winged armies stormed forth, shrieking and chattering in fury, Jesco awoke and stared up to the ceiling of his room in the asylum. It was a child’s nightmare, but that scrap of fabric in the alley had allowed him to touch the mind of a child, and in that mind fantasy and reality stood not as flip sides of a coin but side by side, their arms around one another. Jesco did not have those dreams on his own merit any longer.
    He was too weak to turn, so he was trapped in his head until Gavon came to prop him up. That would not be for some time still. The light was gray. It was closer to night than it was to morning. Up on the wall, his star twinkled. That had been a gift from Collier. It was not a true star but a fragment of telaza held in a glass pocket within a star made of golden-dyed metal. In his childhood, Collier had been an Asqui roamer from Lotaire, just one more of those great waves of poor that moved with the seasonal tides through Ainscote. West they went in spring to pick the early greens at the industrial farms; then south as the days lengthened where they spread out to toil amongst fields of berries and vegetables and grains. In late summer, farm owners bid on lots of roamers to pull in the harvest. Those callused hands so desirable in the autumn months found no work in winter, sending the roamers east to the mountains where they cut through Modello Pass in their wagons for the warmth of Lotaire beaches. They spent their earnings, drank and lazed, and in spring, they returned to Ainscote again.
    Collier’s father had lost him one winter in a card game to a whoremonger. He had only been fourteen at the time. Outright slavery was illegal in Lotaire, but people could be put in bondage for up to thirty years. Whoremongers circled the poorest Asqui communities like vultures, seeking prey in comely children on the edge of puberty.
    Two days after the card game, Collier found himself in a different sort of lot. Naked and inspected like cattle, he was bid upon by brothels’ proxy buyers. When an old man representing a Lotaire brothel grasped his chin and demanded to see his teeth, Collier obliged and then spat in his face. It was his pride that caught the eye of another buyer, this one who purchased for the best Lotaire-owned brothels in Ainscote. That was a stroke of luck. Ainscote regulated its brothels, and took a dimmer view of bondage. A citizen of Ainscote could not be put in bondage at all; one coming from Lotaire or Brozzo had his sentence reduced automatically upon setting foot in the country. Fifteen years was the maximum, and his work was compensated commensurate with free laborers in his trade. It paid back his bondage swiftly, and if he made enough before those fifteen years were up, as often happened, the law required him to be released. After that, he was considered a full citizen and could go where he pleased.
    Sold to The Seven Temptations, which supplied a finer crust of prostitutes to its clientele, Collier spent four years in training. Reading and writing, elocution and charm, he was not allowed a client of his own until he reached his majority. By then, there was nothing left of the dirty, hard-handed roamer boy in the poised young man in a fashionable suit, nothing but old stories and songs from Lotaire, and the folk remedy of a telaza to ward away nightmares.
    It didn’t work, but Jesco liked it up there. He could not have a man with his condition, or live in a house like a normal person, and that had once pained him greatly. He had fallen in love with Collier at their first meeting and lived in torment for months that someone else would pay his debt to the brothel and steal him away. But Collier set him right, and gently. The intricacies of his