Serving at a party for her owner, Zafira mingles among the elite Raider society and sees the huge chandelier lit up for the first time.
Content Note: Queen of the Raiders is dark, unflinching fiction. This story may contain depictions of child slavery, human trafficking, abuse, violence, and systemic cruelty. These themes are handled with intention, not gratuitously — but they are present throughout. Reader discretion is advised.
River Voss was turning thirty five and throwing a large party.
For weeks the kitchens had been preparing, the slaves up at dawn every day working through inventories of dried goods and preserved meats. They ground spices and rendered fat and produced quantities of food that took up every surface in the kitchen. Two additional slaves had been borrowed from another household to manage the volume. Even I was pulled away from my tasks in the Archive and made to clean.
The rugs in the main rooms were taken out and beaten, the floors scrubbed, the furniture moved and repositioned and moved again according to River’s specific instructions. The good linens had come out of storage, smelling of cedar, and were aired and pressed over the course of two full days. Pale Star and Bruno had been sent to the market three separate times: once for additional candles, once for a specific spice River decided she required at the last moment, and once for flowers. Dried and fresh, these were arranged by River herself in every main room while we worked carefully around her, being as quiet as possible.
My sisters and I were to help serve food and drinks to the guests. We were each made a pale gold tunic and light linen pants and instructed to go barefoot. The day of the party we were scrubbed clean by Pale Star, our long dark hair brushed until it shone. River lined us up, her hair already set but no makeup yet. Without kohl lining her eyes they looked less menacing, more tired. For the first time I saw concern in her face, but it was quickly masked as she addressed us.
“Listen up, you three. You’re going to be serving drinks and food,” she made eye contact with each of us. “Do not embarrass me. Do not speak to any of the guests. Be invisible. The Queen might make an appearance and you are to serve her well,” on this last part she stared coldly at me. “Am I understood?”
We nodded vigorously.
“Then, get out of my sight.”
At last, the guests began arriving. We crowded in the kitchen doorway and peered down the long hall until it was time to start serving. I walked, heartbeat in my ears, delicate champagne flutes balanced on my tray. Enid had made me practice with glass jars balanced on a book in the Archive every night for the last two weeks. I had dropped (and broke) most of those. I had improved, but not as much as either of us hoped.
The Voss ballroom was the largest interior space I’d ever been in, besides the old Mormon church in Provo. A long rectangular room with a two story ceiling, its wooden floor was polished to shining, its walls hung with tapestries and salvaged mirror panels that doubled the candlelight and the crowd into something that felt, from the doorway, like abundance.
Tonight the room held perhaps sixty guests – River’s friends, Raider officers and their wives, and traders of sufficient status. The queen had not yet arrived. The noise of the group filled the space completely, voices and boots and the scrape of chairs against wood underlying a three-piece ensemble playing in the far corner.
Suspended from the center beam, salvaged intact from a casino in what used to be the city of Las Vegas and transported at significant expense, hung the Chandelier.
A cascading mass of crystal beads strung in overlapping curtains; it caught every candle flame in the room and broke it into a hundred smaller lights so that the ceiling above it and the floor below glittered. On the dance floor the guests moved through the shifting patterns of light without appearing to notice, the way people who live with extraordinary things eventually stop seeing them.
I was transfixed.
“Zafira!” Topaz hissed, stopping me just before I dropped my tray. I tore my gaze away from the chandelier and re-centered, began weaving in and out of the guests, avoiding those already drunk enough to stumble into my path. It felt more natural than I had expected, and I realized I had been training for this since Marcus and I started playing games in the marketplace.
Be invisible, she’d said. And I was. I kept to the edges of the crowd the way Enid instructed, refilling cups and removing empties. My arms began to tire of carrying the heavy pitcher but I kept on. The guests talked around and past me without acknowledgment, but Enid had me memorize the guest list three days prior and I amused myself matching names to faces.
Commander Aldric, taller than expected, back to the wall all evening. The merchant Callo, who laughed too loudly and watched River when he thought no one saw. There were a few people I could not place and I studied their faces and who they deferred to – and who deferred to them. I paused near a conversation between two lieutenants by the east wall and adjusted the items on my tray, taking an extra few seconds before moving on so I could hear what they were saying; how the northern supply route was behaving unusually, how it could be the Resistance interfering. The other man seemed to disagree.
I was interrupted by Lt. Voss ringing a glass for attention. Silence settled over the crowd.
“We are all here for one reason today, and that reason is my beautiful wife’s birthday! Happy Birthday my love. Shall we all sing?”
A chorus of the birthday song was sung, River with an uncharacteristically happy smile on her face, making pointed eye contact with many of the guests and beaming. Upon the song’s completion Lt. Voss presented River with a small velvet bag. Inside was a porcelain bowl with a tiny pink ballerina on the lid.
River turned the porcelain bowl over and twisted a knob on the bottom. A haunting melody settled over the silent crowd, a tune I did not recognize.
“Oh, it’s perfect!” River gasped, beaming at her husband. She cradled the bowl in her hands as if it were a precious heirloom as the song wound down. He raised his glass again and everyone did the same.
“To my lovely wife, River! Proof that the strong endure, and what survives is worth having. God help anything that stands in her way!”
“To River!” the crowd cheered, and drank. She looked happier than I had ever seen her and began mingling again, still cradling the bowl.
There was a commotion in the hall. I noticed, standing close to her as I was, a shadow pass over River’s face but was quickly gone. A blonde woman in a long green silk dress swept into the room.
“Welcome, Evarra!” River called to the woman, hunger and triumph in her voice. To the crowd she crowed, “Welcome, your Queen!”
