Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He can talk.
The knowledge filled Amy’s head as she fled the cell, her mind racing faster than her feet. Her mouth was still humming and her heart still slamming against her bound ribs like a fist on a locked door. Brannik can talk. His name had a taste, and she could still feel the heat of it on her lips.
He’d been able to talk the whole time, every silent day she’d knelt there prattling at him like a lonely fool, and he’d chosen not to. That made his performance even better than she’d realized. She’d nearly bought it herself, and she was better at reading people than almost anyone in Port Rusk.
And if his silence was a choice, then—
I’m sure you could get out.
She’d seen it in his face when she’d said it. Not surprise, but confirmation. He was choosing to stay, chained in the cold and half-starved and tortured by their interrogations, because whatever was coming was worth more to him than his own skin.
She was going to get the answer out of him.
She didn’t know how yet, but she was. Bit by bit, the way she’d coaxed him into eating and coaxed the first word out of him without even meaning to.
She had time and she had patience and she had the one thing no one else in this compound seemed to have, which was his—
Boots.
The sound came around the far bend of the passage and froze her mid-step. Not the loose, bored shuffle of the cell guards, but a hard, purposeful cadence. She heard two sets of feet, and two voices, one she knew and one she didn’t.
Krebb.
She was too late to avoid him. The corridor offered nowhere to hide.
A low ceiling, a run of sweating stone, and a shallow alcove that wasn’t deep enough to hide a child, let alone a person.
She did the only thing there was to do. She pressed her back flat to the wall in the alcove’s meager shadow, dropped her chin so the hood swallowed her face, and hunched her shoulders down and in until she was nothing—a bundle of rags, a nobody kitchen boy waiting to be forgotten.
She’d made herself disappear a thousand times.
She let the familiar stillness settle over her like water over her head and she stopped breathing loud enough to hear.
The two males rounded the bend, and she studied them from under her lashes.
She knew Krebb from a year of deliveries to the compound.
She knew his size and the heavy ridges of his face and the small mean eyes that skated over servants without registering them.
He wore his good coat, the one embroidered with pure gold thread, but he wore it without his usual arrogance. His hands kept moving, almost wringing.
The other one made Krebb look small. She’d heard the Grorn mentioned before, whispered in the shadows, but nothing she’d heard had prepared her for the size of him.
He wasn’t quite the size of Brannik, but he was tall enough that he had to stoop under the low ceiling.
Grey scaled skin, mottled like weathered stone, was drawn tight over a heavy reptilian frame.
When the dim light caught his face she saw his eyes were solid black, edge to edge.
There was no white, no color, nothing to read.
Even though Krebb had called him a priest, he wore a dark fitted uniform.
And on his shoulder, worked in pale metal, a fanged skull insignia seemed to watch the corridor along with him.
“—assured me the specimen is intact,” the priest was saying. His voice was low and smooth and cool, unhurried, a voice that had never once in its life needed to be raised. “You understand my concern, Krebb. Your methods are not gentle.”
“He’s whole.” Krebb’s voice came out oily with reassurance. “Maybe bruised a little, but nothing that matters. The eyes are what you wanted, and the eyes are—”
“The eyes are what your males saw.” A dry pause. “What I want is what runs beneath them. The bloodline does not live in the color, Krebb. It lives in the blood. And blood can be spoiled by careless handling.”
“He’s fed, he’s—”
“We shall see.”
They were almost level with her now. She kept her eyes on the floor, on the toes of the priest’s boots, and she made herself into a stone.
Don’t look up. Don’t move. I’m the wall. I’m nothing. I’ve always been nothing, that’s the whole trick of it, I’m—
She felt him look at her. She didn’t see it because her eyes were on the ground, but she felt it, like a draft from an open door at her back.
A cold, penetrating attention fixed on her and stayed.
Every survival instinct she owned screamed at her to keep her chin down and she kept it down, but she couldn’t stop the shiver crawling up her spine.
He didn’t slow his steps. He didn’t speak to her.
But as he passed, close enough that she caught the dry cold-reptile smell of him, she felt that black gaze travel down over the hood, the loose shapeless coat, the hunch of her shoulders, and the too-slight frame beneath the too-large clothes.
It wasn’t the way males had looked at her before, on the ship, in the bad time she’d worked so hard to bury.
There was no desire in his look. It was worse than desire. It was the flat, unhurried assessment of a male reading a label on a jar. He was cataloguing her and filing her away under some heading she couldn’t see.
For one long, horrible second she was certain he saw straight through the disguise she’d hidden inside for four years. She was certain he saw the woman beneath the disguise, saw the whole of her laid bare in the dark.
Then he passed. The boots went on. The cold attention lifted off her back all at once, and she nearly sagged.
“…the room adequate?” Krebb asked, farther off now.
“It will do,” the priest answered, and then they turned the bend towards the cells, towards Brannik, and she couldn’t hear any more.
She stood pinned to the wall long after the sound of their footsteps faded.
Then she peeled herself off the stone and walked—not ran, because running got you noticed—walked quickly and stiffly towards the loading yard, her heart racing so hard she thought she might be sick right there on the compound floor.
Pelloq’s kitchen was the warmest place she knew, and she practically fell into it when she returned.
The smell of seared fat and green oil and the low sweet reek of the fermented root he braised for the evening trade filled her head.
Under her feet the floor was gritty with spilled meal and slick near the wash-trough, all of it as familiar as her own skin.
Steam clung to the tiles. A pot rattled its lid on the big burner, and somewhere in the back the old cooling unit ground away with its permanent arthritic wheeze.
Pelloq stood at the block with a cleaver, splitting a rack of pale ribs, his reddish-brown fur pushed flat with sweat at the temples. He glanced up when the door banged, then looked again, harder, and the cleaver went still.
“You’re grey,” he said. “Well—greyer. What happened?”
“There’s a Grorn priest.” The words came out before she could measure them. “At Krebb’s. I saw him.”
The cleaver came down hard on the block, and Pelloq crossed the kitchen faster than she’d ever seen the old Ordanian move.
He caught her by the arm, his four thick fingers, careful even now, and pulled her away from the open doorway, into the corner by the spice shelf where the noise of the burners would cover their voices.
“Keep that behind your teeth,” he said quietly.
His heavy-lidded green eyes had gone wide and alarmed, and that frightened her more than anything, because Pelloq did not frighten easily.
Pelloq haggled with slavers and shrugged off Krebb’s males and once threw a drunk twice his size out the front door by his belt.
“Don’t say the words in here. Don’t say them in the yard. Don’t say them in your sleep.”
“Pell—”
“You know who they are?” He didn’t wait for her to answer.
“I do. A hauler out of the Sarn belt, a sober reliable male, told me they’d wiped out a whole colony.
Terraced farms, three thousand souls, and a decent little port.
The Grorn wanted something beneath it. The people said no.
” He snapped his fingers. “Gone. Fields and all. He said you can still see it from orbit, a black smear where a town used to be. Nobody buried, because there was nothing left to bury.”
Her mouth had gone dry. “This one’s alone. There’s just the one. I only saw him and Krebb—”
“One.” Pelloq’s laugh had no humor in it at all.
“You think it takes an army? Child, if they’ve sent a priest, it’s already worse than an army.
An army wants land or coin. A priest wants something he thinks the gods owe him, and there’s no bargaining with that.
No credits. No favors. Nothing you can offer, and nothing you can take away.
” He slowly shook his shaggy head. “The one that wiped the colony? They say he came smiling. They say he was polite.”
She thought of that flat black gaze traveling down her body in the corridor. Studying her and filing her away. She thought of Brannik in the cell at the end of that passage, and the priest’s cool voice—the bloodline lives in the blood—and her stomach turned over.
“Pell.” Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. “The prisoner. The one I’ve been feeding. That’s who he’s here for. The priest came for him.”
Pelloq went very still. Then he let go of her arm and stepped back, dragging one broad hand down over his face.
“Then that’s the end of it then,” he said. “You don’t go back.”
“What?”
“The deliveries to Krebb’s.” He said it flatly, in the same voice he’d use to tell her a batch had spoiled.
“I’ll go myself. Or I won’t send anyone.
I’ll eat the offense and grovel if Krebb’s males come asking.
I’ll say the boy took ill—” He looked at her, and beneath the gruffness she saw the thing he never let show, the fear that she was worth more to him than an excellent cook, that somewhere in four years the girl he’d bought half-dead had become someone he didn’t want to lose.
“You don’t set one more foot in that place, Amy.
Not while that priest is inside it. Do you hear me? ”
She heard him.
She stood in the warm, safe, familiar kitchen, with the pots rattling and the steam beading on the tiles, and she thought of silver eyes watching her from beneath dark hair, and a rough voice that had broken through that stubborn silence to warn her, of all people, to stay away from danger.
And she opened her mouth to tell Pelloq that she couldn’t stay away.