Lief rubs his beard with his thumb as he pushes to his feet. “I for one don’t like just sitting around. It’s as if we are allowing the killer to have a chance to make another move. Soon enough sleep will take us and then what? He slits our throats while we slumber?”
Mika starts crying, and Sasha throws him a glare as he rushes across the room to where she is sitting with her cousin to comfort her.
However, the guardsman steps forward, his eyes locked on Lief. “What are you suggesting?”
“We find the killer and stop them.” Lief holds out his arms. “We normal folk here outnumber the killer.”
“And how do you plan to find the killer?” Lek asks, his voice shaky.
“They killed a man. There must be evidence somewhere to point to the fiend.” Lek holds his hand. “Besides there are only two places for the killer to be.”
At this, Victor straightens. “What do you mean?”
Leif holds up his fingers. “Either the killer is hiding somewhere in this inn because he could not have very well escaped into the night in this storm…” as if to punctuate his words the wind howls outside, causing the shutters to rattle. “Or,” he continues, his icy eyes moving over the group. “The killer is one of us and they are here in this room.”
Chapter Nine
Victor
Ipace across the length of the lower deck of the ship. The boards creak under my feet. Outside I can hear the lapping sound of the still water.
I’m fortunate that this is my patrol route or else I would look ridiculous and nervous. But I’m being paid to pace, which is just as well because my mind is uneasy.
I try to keep my gaze focused straight ahead, but every few seconds I find my eyes turning to the woman towards the back of the ship, sitting next to a redheaded man who doesn’t look like he has ever done a day of manual labor. The woman is unassuming enough, I might even say that she is beautiful if Estelle had not ruined me for all other women.
She has short black hair, a tad unfashionable, especially for a Lowlander, but it seems to compliment her features well. Her eyes and mouth are both wide and they frame her small button nose. Gold eyes of a powerful magic wielder flash with panic.
Meruna Kotov.
That is what she said her name was.
She is not supposed to be here.
That’s all I can think about. I had thought that these prisoners looked different when we were loading them aboard, when I confronted my superior, I’d learned the ugly truth. There had been an epidemic at the Spice Isles, and with so many dead, the jails along the coast had been emptied of all their prisoners so that the spice quota could be met.
That meant that everyone who was in jail was being shipped off, even angry drunks who were cooling their heels after a raucous night.
I’d tried not to let it bother me, after all they were still criminals, but then I saw her. There had to have been some sort of a mistake for someone like her to end up in prison, let alone being shipped to the Spice Isles.
She is clearly a gentle soul; her hands are unmarked by harsh labor. If she is to be believed, she is a noble lady. There’s absolutely no way she will survive a day on the Spice Isles.
I give my head a sharp shake. It isn’t my problem.
But it feels like my problem. This young woman, who must be only just in her second decade, is going to die out there. What a waste of potential. She told me she was going to the Academy of Magickers, hallowed halls that she will now never see. All she will see are the dust riddled caves of the mines on the Spice Isle, before a more dangerous prisoner takes her life, or a cavern collapses, or she dies of a lung infection… honestly, the list could go on.
But on the other hand, there isn’t actually anything that I can do. I’m just a lowly guard who hates his job and is trying to impress a girl. I don’t control sentencing. that comes from far above my head.
As I’m trying to deliberate the moral dilemma, suddenly the ship comes to a jolting halt. I pitch forward, managing to catch myself on the bench where two women prisoners sit. Now unlike Meruna, these women both look like they should be here.
While one is a fair skinned, light-haired Highlander with cold blue eyes and the other is a dark-skinned foreigner with ebony black hair that cascades down around her shoulders there is something that these women seem to have in common.
An unmeasured fierceness that they both share.
But at the moment I have a larger problem than these two prisoners, namely what caused the ship to stop. For a second, I think that the prisoners had stopped rowing, but then I look over and see that some of them are still pushing on the oars. Besides, even if they had stopped oaring, we would have gradually glided to a stop, it would not account for the abrupt stop.
Have we run aground on some coral reef?
I hear a shout above deck and tilt my ear trying to listen. It sounded like whatever word was shouted ended in “and” perhaps a brigand attack? But that still wouldn’t account for our sudden stop.
