The Healing Wars: Book II: Blue Fire Read Free

weak, and I doubted the rent collector was all that wise to begin with. She could ruin everything.
    Aylin clomped down the stairs and threw a heavy canvas bag at her. “That should hold them.”
    “Nothing to wrap them in?” She frowned. “What if they chip?”
    “Goldstone doesn’t chip. That’s why it’s so valuable.”
    Her eyes lit up. Saints, did she even know the value of what she was taking?
    “Really? Anything else made of—”
    “Are we paid up now?” I said, hands on my hips. I tried to look menacing, but I’d never been good atit. Danello was better, and Aylin could do scary as a croc when she wanted.
    “Well,” she said slowly, her gaze again on the crystal decanters. “Just to be safe, you might consider paying next month’s rent as well.”
    “I think we’ve paid that already,” Tali said from the stairs. Everyone else stood behind her—all the Takers, even Danello’s family. His father looked pretty imposing glaring down at us.
    “Maybe even three months,” he said. The rent collector would have to be a fool to miss the threat in his tone. Trouble was, she could threaten us right back, and her threats had a lot more teeth.
    She knew it, too. She smirked at them, then carefully stuffed her treasure into the bag. “Oh, I think you’ll be gone by then, with nothing left for me. Why shouldn’t I get all I can now?”
    “Because someone will notice,” I said. “And if we have to run, we’ll make sure the owner knows Zertanik moved out.”
    She glared at me and tied the bag shut.
    I smiled. “Why don’t you come by next week? A weekly visit is a lot safer for all of us.”
    She hesitated, sizing me up and probably wondering if my emphasis on safer was a threat. If she believed the poster, I was a murderer.
    “Fine.”
    Danello yanked open the door and she jumped. She recovered fast and put her sneer back on her face.
    “Next week works better for me anyway.”
    She lumbered out, and Danello slammed the door behind her.
    “That’s not right!” he said as I sank to the stairs. “She can’t just come in here and—”
    “Yes, she can.” I knew how he felt, though. I’d seen the Baseeri do the same thing to my family’s home. Only they took it all. Saints! It wasn’t fair.
    “We’d better sell off what we can now,” Tali said, sounding just like Mama. We’d heard her say a lot of things like that right before the war started. Might as well stock up on food. Jewels trade better out of the setting anyway. You’re safer at the League with your grannyma. “She’s never been upstairs, so she can’t take what she doesn’t know about.”
    “We also need to look for a new place to live,” Aylin muttered.
    “Who’s going to rent to us?” Danello said, not nearly as quiet. “And how will we find someplace large enough for everyone?”
    Odds were we wouldn’t. “Maybe it’s time to leave Geveg.”
    Shocked silence, but they couldn’t argue with the idea. There was a lot of money in the town house, enough to bribe a fisherman for passage off the isle, no matter how tempting the reward was.
    “We could go to the marsh farms,” Danello said. “Da, doesn’t your friend need help?”
    His father nodded. “He does. He’s barely keeping his farm running. Some money and extra hands would let him hold on to it and help us out.”
    The Duke cared about Takers and pynvium, not sweet potatoes and sugar. I’d never done any farming before, but it sounded good. Honest work, fresh food, open fields with lots of places to run and hide if we had to. The soldiers probably wouldn’t look for us in the marsh farms either. Mama used to take Healers there every few months since the farmers didn’t have their own, and it always took her at least a week to visit them all.
    “Should you ask him first?” I asked. “Showing up with fifteen people is a lot to put on a person on short notice.” And I didn’t want to abandon the town house until we knew we had somewhere to