But that doesn’t mean she has to see. After long enough, she can be blind with her eyes open.

ONE MORNING, SIX months into her servitude, they woke to discover that the girl who rocked side to side and never spoke had thrown herself into the well and drowned.

Twenty-three days after that, Ebba stabbed with an embroidery needle one particular customer who was trying to do something to her the old woman would not speak of afterward, and as the days passed the bleeding from her flower wouldn’t stop and turned into a horrible infection that killed her.

Fourteen days after the dead girl was hauled out of the compound to be thrown into the waste pits, eight of the girls got a flux, maybe from eating tainted meat, and five died after days of agonizing cramps.

The best-earning girl, after Kirya, got pregnant, and died from a bad batch of purgative.

The next day, the old woman took Kirya to the market and sold her to one of the masters of a passing caravan, handing over the girl, the mirror, and the beaded nets.

“Bad ghost,” she said, in a rare moment of honest assessment. “Demon eyes unlucky.”

But the men could not take their eyes off her pale hair and pale skin and blue eyes. They had a long journey to make, many months traveling east on the Golden Road across the Qin pastures and farther east still through the fabled wastelands of the bone desert. It was good in such circumstances to have entertainment and, really, you could do anything you wanted to a demon because it wasn’t human.

WHEN SHE TRIED to run away, the guards caught her, and after they were done with her, the master whipped her, and after he was done with her, he chained her to the whores’ wagon so she couldn’t run.

SHE LOST COUNT of the days.

ONE OF THE guards took her mirror and gave it to another of the caravan whores, and when she tried to get it back, the master whipped her.

WITHOUT HER WOMAN’S mirror to show what is truth and what illusion, she might as well be dead, her shell an empty vessel that imitates the motions of life. Maybe it is better that way. Maybe everything that came before was the dream, and she is after all a demon and the ones who torment her are human, just as they say they are.

THE CARAVAN WAS plagued with bad luck. Dead birds littered the path they followed. A way station where they usually picked up water and supplies had been abandoned. A guard crawled away into the night, raving, and was never seen again. A water hole known as safe proved to be tainted, and everyone got sick with a flux that felled a number of sheep and three grooms and left the rest trembling and weak. Which was a respite for her.

A company of Qin soldiers clattered past, in a hurry to get to the border on some military errand, so they only stole what they could easily carry on their horses—wool thread, vials of western spice, saddle blankets, silver bars—but when they ripped open the canvas entrance to the whores’ wagon and saw her, they made warding signs, hurried back to their horses, and cantered off as if fleeing from an approaching storm.