Encrypted Read Free Page B

reverberations of a
nearby engine told the story: she was locked in the bowels of a
Turgonian warship.
    And her brother—had the marines brought him
too? She remembered the sickening thud of that rifle butt striking
his head. She prayed they had left him alive, where her family
could tend him, but a selfish part of her wished he was in the brig
with her. The idea of being alone on a ship full of hostile
marines...
    She shuddered.
    Tikaya rolled onto her belly. No pain lanced
through her body, but stiff muscles suggested she had lain on the
deck for hours.
    Across the corridor, a second gate marked
another cell, though darkness—and her poor vision—shrouded the
interior. She stood and pressed her face between the bars. A blurry
lantern burned at the base of a ship’s ladder leading up. No guards
stood within sight.
    She probed the small lock set in her gate.
She could not even get a fingernail into the fine hole. Alas,
picking locks was not a typical course in the Kyattese school
system.
    “ Wonderful day.” Tikaya
realized she had probably been on the floor throughout the night
and amended the last word: “week.”
    Chains clanked in the cell across the way,
and Tikaya jumped.
    “ Hello?” she asked in her
tongue.
    Maybe her brother was there, or others of
her people had been taken. Maybe she was not alone against the
Turgonians after all. The clanks stilled, leaving only the rumbling
of the engine.
    “ Hello?” she asked again,
this time in Turgonian and this time with less hope.
    Silence.
    Tikaya peered into the cell. Was that a
human form slumped in the back corner? She tried other languages
from the islands and coastal nations on the Eerathu Sea. Nothing
elicited a response.
    A hatch thudded open, catching her trying
yet another greeting. Boots rang on the ladder, and a pair of
marines strode toward her.
    “ Don’t poke the grimbal,
girl.” The tall man in the lead jerked a nose sharper than
Herdoctan potsherds at the opposite cell.
    “ Grimbal?” Tikaya
frowned.
    “ Giant shaggy predators up
on our northern frontier. They’re probably the most irritable
beasts in the empire, and they’ll sink their teeth into you if you
get anywhere near their territory.”
    Tikaya stopped herself from saying she had
heard of the creature and the expression—if she hoped to deny she
was their cryptomancer, she ought not appear too worldly. It was
curiosity about the other prisoner that had prompted her query. Her
shoulders, and her hope of denying anything, slumped when the
second marine drew close enough for her to identify without her
spectacles: the man from the cane fields. No doubt he had arranged
her capture when she failed to convince him she was no one of
consequence.
    She squinted to read the name sewn on his
jacket: Agarik. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, watching
the other marine, his superior, she assumed, though she did not
know what ranks the pins on their collars denoted.
    “ How’re the
accommodations, Five?” The speaker—his jacket read Ottotark—rapped
a baton against the mystery prisoner’s gate. “A lot better than
what you’re used to of late, eh?”
    There was no response, not even a tinkle of
chains rattling. Despite the silence, Ottotark chuckled at his own
wit. He turned his attention to Tikaya and when his gaze lingered
on her breasts, she forced herself not to step back.
    “ Where is my brother?” she
asked. “Is he...”
    “ We left him in the
distillery,” Agarik said. “He’s alive.”
    “ Thank you,” she murmured,
hoping she could trust his word.
    “ So, the source of so many
of our troubles. A woman.” Ottotark shook his head. “Seems strange
you’d be involved in military matters.”
    Tikaya bit back a response about how it was
hard to remain uninvolved when invaders were trying to take over
one’s whole island chain.
    “ I reckon you just sat in
an office on a beach,” Ottotark continued, “and someone brought our
messages to you. Is that how it