Page 17 of C is for Captive

“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.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Brannik heard them before he saw them. He’d long since memorized Krebb’s heavy uneven tread—the male favored his left leg when he was nervous—and the second gait was slow and even and unhurried, the walk of someone who had never in his life needed to hurry for anyone. He let his head loll to one side and his eyes fall to slits, the way a broken thing settles. He let his breath go slack and let the chains take his weight. He was a beast in a hole, dull-eyed, and half-gone. He’d worn this skin since he’d been taken.

Then he caught the scent. Grorn. Cold and dry, dust and metal with something reptile beneath, a smell he knew from dozens of missed encounters. He kept his face empty and his eyes half-lidded, but every muscle was strung tight beneath the stillness. A Grorn priest had walked to the end of this corridor at last, and this was the moment Brannik had let them chain him in order to achieve.

The priest stopped in the passage. He didn’t come into the cell. He surveyed it from the threshold the way a male surveys a stall of livestock, and his black eyes moved over Brannik with the assessing look of someone inspecting something he didn’t consider a person.

Good. Look at me. Ask your questions. Tell me where you’ve been looking.

The priest’s nostrils flared slowly, and he turned his head back the way he’d come. Not towards Brannik, but back the way he’d come. Back down the corridor where he’d passed a small bundled shape trying to be invisible, and Brannik’s heart dropped straight through the cold floor.

No.

He’d forgotten. In all his careful patient scheming he had let himself forget the one thing that mattered more than anything now—a Grorn’s nose was as keen as a Tuori’s. Keener, some said. And Amy had knelt in his cell not a hundred breaths ago. Her scent was in the air, in the very stone of the passage. A human female. A scent the priest had probably never in his life smelled before, and the Grorn catalogued everything unfamiliar.

He forced himself to remain still because moving now would kill her. He kept the beast’s slack face and he watched, and inside him something roared so loud he was amazed the priest couldn’t hear it.