Free The Fox by Sherwood Smith

Inda forced down a few more bites. He glanced furtively around—so did Tau—then Inda said, “Thog and the others are making a set of red sails.”
    “So?”
    Inda looked into Tau’s face, saw only question. “That means the captain wants to be invited into the Brotherhood. ”
    “That’s a surprise?”
    “You knew?”
    Tau lifted a shoulder. “First night. One of what my ma calls unpleasantries of the pillow that he revealed.”
    Inda grimaced, stole a look at Tau’s golden eyes, and then asked, “They say he . . . watches. Is that true?”
    Tau smiled. “The first sign of human interest in you in two months. You are alive after all!”
    “Huh?” Inda blushed, looking very young, despite his scars. “Never mind. Sorry.”
    Tau laughed without sound. “It’s no matter to me. You spend years naked in a pleasure house, just living. What my ma used to call the symbolic boundaries between us that clothing represents become meaningless, the clothing a costume for players. Sex is a commodity you choose to sell or to trade. It can be a game, it’s nearly always a drama, or it’s a competition between wills—but always, always a commodity. That’s why I wanted to leave, and why it’s so ironic that I ended up doing it anyway, and for no pay, just the price of my life.” Of your life, too, had you known it, he thought, but now was not the time to tell Inda that—if ever.
    Inda looked up, his brown eyes sober, and even direct, like his old gaze. “I know you did whatever you did to buy our lives.”
    Tau only pursed his lips, but inside he felt unsettled as he had in the old days, when Inda, probably five years younger, would offer some remark that made it clear he was as observant as Tau was: observant, emotionally as distant as the seabirds overhead, yet not unconcerned.
    “I’m glad you can bear it. Him watching,” Inda said, looking away.
    Tau remembered how recent Inda’s own introduction to sex was, but he didn’t smile. Just saw that everyone was busy, and no one cared about a conversation between Stupid and Coco’s new pet. “I don’t know what Walic’s habits were before. But he wears a heavy scar down there. Coco was the only one who could bring him up, and it involves, oh, call it watching a seduction using both pain and pleasure.”
    Inda looked down at his half-eaten sandwich. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
    “Inda, why don’t you eat? Why try to get yourself killed?”
    A flickering look, and then away. Inda would not meet his eyes. “Brotherhood,” Inda mumbled. “He wants to join the Brotherhood. I’ve betrayed Thog.”
    “How is that possible?” Tau asked, forcing his voice to stay low. “Nothing here is your doing. Nothing .”
    “But I haven’t done anything to free us, either.”
    “You will,” Tau whispered, leaning closer. “Or I will. Or maybe it will be Thog. We will escape this recruiting ground for Norsunder; it’s the one thought that keeps me sane.”
    Inda’s color changed, but he didn’t speak, and Tau, who thought he’d gained insight into Inda’s despair, realized that he’d only penetrated a single layer. More lay underneath—probably having to do with that mystery back in Iasca Leror that Ryala Pim had flung in his teeth, whatever it was that had brought Inda to the Pim ships in the first place.
    Tau sensed a shadow at the edge of his field of vision and leaned against the rail. In Dock Talk, “So the prices of the pleasure houses along the north coast are for the toffs. But you get more sex games to choose from. Now, in the south coast—”
    Inda’s face slackened a heartbeat before a heavy hand smacked his shoulder.
    “Talkin’ sex, eh?” It was the second mate, who usually had the night watch. He was a big man, a golden hoop of a ship kill at one ear. His long braided hair was decorated with little golden chimes. “You’re not so stupid after all, Stupid, goin’ to the one that knows.”
    Inda looked up, his mouth