Page 13 of C is for Captive

“—said fresh khema, not this dried rubbish. Do you know what he’ll do to me if I serve him dried?”

“It’s what was on the order⁠—”

“The order changed! Everything changed this morning! Fresh khema, marrow-fowl, the blue Tarrenwine from the good cellar—” Resh spotted her and flung out an arm. “You. Boy. Put Pelloq’s slop down and get out from underfoot. Can’t you see we’ve no room today⁠—”

She obediently ducked her head and set the containers of stew on the end of the counter where they always went, but she took her time about it, and she listened.

Fresh khema. Marrow-fowl. The good cellar.

She knew what that meant. In a year of hauling food into this place she’d learned exactly what Krebb ate and what he fed the males beneath him, and the gulf between the two was as wide as a canyon. The warriors got ration-bricks and thin stew. Krebb and a few of his trusted lieutenants ate considerably better. But fresh meat and the blue Tarrenwine that Resh guarded like his own blood had only come out twice before, when Krebb wanted to impress someone. Someone he was afraid of.

“—and the east room. Is it done? Tell me it’s done—” Resh snapped, wringing a cloth in both hands.

“The servants have been at it since first light,” the other male said. “Fresh linens, flowers, the lot. Never seen the like.”

“He’s not to be kept waiting. That’s what Krebb ordered. Everything has to be perfect before he arrives.”

She stepped away from the counter. She should go. She’d delivered, she was done, and every instinct she owned was telling her to make herself scarce and leave this place of storms and males on edge before somebody’s fear turned into somebody’s temper and landed on the nearest small target. Leaving was the smart move, the safe move…

She thought of Brannik leaning towards her yesterday, closing the distance as much as the chains would let him. She thought of the way he watched everything with those brilliant silver eyes, as patient as a predator waiting for his prey.

Because he’s waiting for something. Or someone.

“Resh,” she said, pitching her voice low and rough. “Prisoner’s still to be fed?”

Resh flapped a hand at her without looking up. “Yes, yes, the beast, take it down, one less thing for me to worry about. Use the east passage. The yard’s full of the wine crates, don’t you dare knock one over or it’s both our hides⁠—”

The east passage.

She’d never once taken the east passage. It ran past Krebb’s rooms and the offices where his warriors gathered. In a year of careful invisibility she’d never had cause to go that way and never once wanted one. But the yard was jammed with crates and males, and Resh had said take the east passage. To argue was to be noticed, so she picked up the prisoner’s bowl and she put her head down and went east.

The passage was cool and dim, with cut stone walls, older than the rest of the compound. Her soft-soled boots made no sound on the floor. She kept to the wall. She made herself small in the way she knew, her shoulders in and her chin down. A boy who was nobody carrying a bowl of slop that nobody cared about.

Voices came from an open doorway ahead. She slowed without meaning to.

“—doesn’t matter if he believes it. The priest believes it, and the priest pays.” Krebb’s voice. She knew it from a year of overhearing it barked across the yard, always threatening. “That’s all that concerns us.”

“What about those coordinates you found?” A second voice, a cool, careful one she didn’t know.

Krebb made a dismissive sound. “Thressk hasn’t bothered with them yet.”

“Where?”

“Valkesh. Some abandoned settlement outside the northern trade routes.”

“And he thinks it’s worth looking at?”

“He paid for the coordinates, didn’t he? But this specimen is worth more to him, Ontar.”

“And if the specimen’s wrong? We thought we’d found Aurelian blood before and it came to nothing. The eyes might prove his heritage, but they don’t prove he’s a Key.”

She went still against the wall. Aurelian blood. Silver eyes, the first thing she’d ever noticed about him. The eyes that had told her he was watching and thinking and nothing like the animal they called him.

“The eyes are enough to hold him on,” Krebb said. “The priest wants any with the old blood. Bloodlines that can wake the machines. He’ll test the beast himself. If he’s one of these Keys he keeps talking about—” A smug, satisfied grunt. “Then we’ve delivered exactly what was promised.”

“We don’t even know what a Key is.”

“I know what Thressk pays for one. That’s all I need to know.”