Page 14 of Xel: Broken Bond

But his carefully neutral expression stayed exactly the same. “Yes, Master,” he said, with a studious nod. That was not what I’d expected.

But at the same time, I didn’t know what else to try. I couldn’t just keep changing my mind until I found something he liked.

Xel followed me to the kitchen, then set about chopping the carrots and potatoes I set out for him. I was intending to make a fairly simple casserole.

“Do you have any objections to eating meat?” I asked Xel, as I prepared the camel meat. Given that large portions of the planet were still not terraformed, camels had been brought here by the early human settlers, to be used both as working animals and asource of food. And while their meat was a bit on the tough side, it was still good enough to make soups and stews, or it could be slow-cooked if it needed to be more tender.

“No, Master,” Xel said simply.

Okay, so that wasn’t exactly a conversation starter.

“Did you do anything interesting this afternoon? Look around the garden, maybe?”

Xel looked sharply in my direction, before turning his attention back to the vegetables just as abruptly. “No, Master,” he said. I once again ignored the title. I was going to have to ask Aiden about that the next time I saw him – unless there was anything useful about it in the instruction manual.

Hell, what was I supposed to say to him now? For the past five years – ever since the fire – I’d been doing my level best to avoid people. I talked to the other staff here, but that was about it, so I was well out of practice at idle conversation. I thought about asking him if he’d liked working at the hotel, but nope, that fell into the ‘things that you like’ category, which was currently off limits. I thought about asking him if he had any experience working with animals. But knowing my uncle, he wouldn’t have allowed pets anywhere on the hotel grounds.

“Did you have a wall screen at the hotel?” I asked, grasping at even the most banal of conversation topics. “Did you get to watch any shows?” If he named one that I was even vaguely familiar with, it would give us something to discuss, even if only for a few minutes.

“No, Master,” Xel said again.

I gave up. We finished the preparations for dinner in silence.

An hour later, with the dishwasher running and the leftovers stored in the fridge, I settled on the sofa in the living room with a cup of herbal tea and pulled up the document Aiden had given me on my comm. Right. Time to get a handle on whatever the heck dimari psychology was all about. In the firstpart, Aiden said a lot of reassuring things about how it could be overwhelming to find yourself owning a dimari and how it really wasn’t that hard, once you knew how the basics worked. I skimmed over most of that section, since I needed real answers, not fuzzy reassurances.

Then there was a section about how dimari weren’t trained to understand many of the nuances of Alliance culture, and all the various misunderstandings that could result. I resolved to read that section in more detail later. But what I needed right now was to understand the basics, the surface-level dynamics of the master-slave relationship. How did I treat a slave with respect, and give him things to do without overworking him or exploiting him? What forms of feedback could he give me, and how did I go about interpreting each one?

I turned back to the contents page, scanning down the topics to see if there was one that could help. And thankfully, there was a chapter about the easy first steps to take in rearranging daily life, designed to make things more comfortable in the short term for both owner and dimari. I scrolled down to that section, then spotted a heading halfway down the page that read ‘Forms of Address’. Yes! That was what I needed.

Two minutes later, I was sighing with relief. It all sounded so thoroughly simple. I turned to look for Xel, somewhat surprised when I saw that he wasn’t sitting on the other sofa. I craned my neck to look behind me, across the hall into the kitchen. But he wasn’t sitting at the table. Had he just gone back to his room?

“Xel? Are you there?” I called, feeling a little baffled. He’d rather sit alone in his room than with me? That didn’t bode well for our future.

The pad of soft footfalls came down the hallway, then Xel appeared in the doorway. “Yes, Master?”

“Come in, sit down,” I said, feeling concerned about his reticence. Was this a symptom of grief, or an aversion to me?My right hand fisted as the thought occurred to me, and I fought the urge to hide it under one of the cushions. Xel hadn’t even blinked when I’d first met him, and he’d given me no reason since then to think he disliked the way I looked.

Steeling myself, I patted the sofa beside me, then shifted over to make more room for him. He sat down stiffly. “I’ve been reading the instruction manual Aiden gave me earlier,” I told him. “And I found something very helpful. You’ve been trained to call me master, correct?”

“Yes, Master,” Xel said, a wary tone in his voice. And he once again mumbled the word ‘master’, as he had been for much of the afternoon. But now, I understood why. I’d told him that I was unhappy with what he was calling me, despite the fact that he’d had two decades of intensive training conditioning him to call me that.

I took a moment to think about what I wanted to say. “In Alliance culture, we use the term ‘sir’ as a respectful way to address men. For women, it’s ‘ma’am’,” I added, just in case that ever came up. “But in the Alliance, it’s quite unusual for someone to be called ‘master’.” It wasn’t just unusual, it was entirely inappropriate. But telling Xel that wasn’t going to help him learn to trust me. “So from now on, I’d like you to call me sir instead of master.” I’d actually prefer him to call me Cole, but the manual had made it clear that wasn’t likely to ever happen.

Stating my request in such a direct and dictatorial way made me uncomfortable, and I felt a strong urge to ask Xel if that was okay. I wanted his agreement, not just his acquiescence. But, on the advice of the instruction manual, I stomped hard on that impulse. My place here was to give Xel orders, and his place was to follow them, the manual insisted. Any digression from that standpoint would be thoroughly confusing for Xel.

Xel stared at me for a moment, seeming baffled by the instruction. But then he brightened, his shoulders relaxing from their tight hunch. “Yes, sir,” he said, a ghost of a smile on his lips.

I answered it with a smile of my own, feeling relieved that I’d managed to solve the first major stumbling block of the day.

“Okay. Good. Thank you.” But then the next quandary was staring me in the face, though I hadn’t yet had time to see if the manual had any answers to this one. I wanted to invite him to sit with me, to watch a show, maybe, but at the same time, if he wanted some peace and quiet in his room, I didn’t want to force him to be social when he didn’t have the energy. “Do you want to…” Nope, that was the wrong question. Bloody hell, it was difficult to solve any problems when I wasn’t supposed to ask Xel what hewanted. I was almost inclined to dismiss that rule altogether, as simply being too unwieldy to work with. But Aiden had placed it as rulenumber one, and until I understood more aboutwhyit was so important, it seemed almost reckless to just disregard it. “You said you didn’t watch the wall screen at all, back at the hotel,” I said, searching for a sideways opening into this conversation. “Was that because you didn’t enjoy it? Or was there not a screen available?”

Xel seemed to fumble over his reply for a moment. “I was not allowed to watch it,” he said eventually. He offered no further explanation to the bland statement. Why was he so cagey about everything? Almost like he expected to be punished for even the slightest infraction.

I felt a cold chill run through me. Maybe that was because hehadbeen punished for minor infractions. If my uncle had found a stray dimari, then deliberately failed to register him, it was most likely because he’d hoped to exploit the man for as much free labour as he could possibly get.

And yet I was still stuck in this odd grey area in which I was not supposed to badmouth Xel’s former master.

Well, even if I couldn’t ask him what he wanted, surely I could ask him why certain things had been the way they were? I might just get the bland reply of ‘Because my master told me to’, but there was a chance he might tell me something more meaningful.