Warrior (2 page)

Then he stopped, a whisker away from killing his attacker.
“Almodavar?”

The man beneath him relaxed, smiling as Damin recognised him in the darkness.

“Not bad,” the captain said.

Lowering the blade, Damin sat back on his heels, breathing heavily, still astride his would-be assassin, and grinned broadly. “See, I told you . . . I could look after . . . myself.”

“Aye, you did, lad,” the captain of Krakandar’s guard agreed. “Pity you’re so damn cocky about it, though.”

As he spoke, Almodavar gathered his strength beneath him and threw Damin backwards, his blade slicing across the boy’s throat as he lashed out. Damin landed heavily on his back and skidded on the polished floor, coming to rest against the wall. He scrambled to his feet, blade at the ready, stunned to discover blood dripping from his wounded neck.

“Ow!” he complained, gingerly touching the long, thin cut across his throat.

“That was a stupid mistake, boy.”

“But I beat you!” Damin protested.

“I’m still breathing,” Almodavar pointed out, as he climbed to his feet. “That’s not beaten, lad.

It’s not even close.”

“But I’d won! That’s not fair!”

“What’s not fair?” a voice asked from the doorway.

Damin turned to find his Uncle Mahkas striding into the room holding a large candelabrum, his face shadowed by the flickering light of half a dozen candles. Mahkas was still dressed, so he hadn’t been called from his bed, nor had the room suddenly filled with guards, as it should have done following an attack on the heir to the throne.

Which meant Mahkas knew about this little training exercise, Damin realised; had probably sanctioned it. It might have been his uncle who had suggested it. Mahkas did crazy things like that sometimes.

“Almodavar attacked me!” he complained. “After I’d won.”

“If you’d
won
, Damin, he shouldn’t have been
able
to attack you,” Mahkas pointed out unsympathetically. “Always finish your enemy, otherwise he’ll finish you. You should know that by now.”

He turned to the captain of the guard with a questioning look. “Well?”

Almodavar sheathed his knife and nodded. “He’ll do, I suppose.”

His objections about his unfair treatment forgotten, Damin glanced between his uncle and the captain as he suddenly realised what this meant. “I’ll do?”

“You’ll do,” Mahkas told him, with a hint of pride in his voice. “If you can take down Almodavar, there’s not much else that’s a threat to you around here.”

“Really?”
Damin couldn’t hide his grin. “You mean it? No more sleeping with a bodyguard in my room?”

“No,” his uncle agreed. “You’re almost thirteen and I promised we’d dispense with the guard when you could prove you were able to look after yourself. If Almodavar is content you can, then I’m happy to accept his word on it.”

“Just wait ’til I tell the others!”

“You can tell them in the morning,” Almodavar informed him. “After you’ve done forty laps of the training yard. Before breakfast.”

Damin stared at him in shock. “Forty laps? For
what
? I took you down, Almodavar! I won!”

“You hesitated.”

“You think I should have
killed
you?” Damin asked, a little wounded to think Almodavar wasn’t thanking him for staying his hand; instead he was punishing him for it. He’d come awfully close to killing the most trusted captain in Krakandar’s service, too.

“How did you know I hadn’t
really
come to kill you, Damin?”

“You’re the senior captain of the guard.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“There’s a comforting thought,” Mahkas muttered with a shake of his head.

Almodavar glanced at Mahkas, a little exasperated that Damin’s uncle was making light of his point. “He needs to understand, my lord. I might have been subverted. For all any of you know, my family has just been taken hostage by your enemies and I came here willing to kill even the heir to Hythria’s throne to save them.”

“But you don’t have a family, Almodavar,” Damin pointed out. “Except for Starros.”

The captain ignored the comment about Starros. He always did. “You have no way of knowing the mind of every man in your service, Damin. And any man who can get near you is a potential assassin.

You shouldn’t hesitate just because you think you know them.”

“I
could
have killed you,” Damin insisted. “If I really wanted to.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I knew you weren’t really trying to kill me.”

“How?”

“You sliced the blade across my throat. If you were serious about killing me, Almodavar, you would have stabbed me with it. Straight through the neck. Up into the brain. Splat! I’m dead.”

“He’s got a point,” Mahkas agreed with a faint smile, and then he glanced at the thin cut on Damin’s throat. “Although you came close enough.”

Almodavar shrugged. “The lad needed a scare.”

Mahkas squinted at Damin in the candlelight, shaking his head. “Let’s hope that slice has healed without a scar before his mother gets here. Seeing Damin with his throat almost cut is a scare I’m not sure Princess Marla is ready for.”

“He’ll be fine,” Almodavar promised Mahkas. “Anyway, it’d take more than a cut throat to put Laran Krakenshield’s son down.”

A part of Damin wished he’d had a chance to know the father Almodavar spoke of so admiringly.

All his young life, he’d heard nothing but great things about Laran Krakenshield, so much so that Damin sometimes wondered if he would ever be able to live up to his father’s legacy.

“That’s true enough,” his uncle agreed with a fond smile. “For now, however, I suggest we try and get some sleep. Well done, Damin.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mahkas left the room, taking with him the only source of light. It took Damin’s eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness again. He turned to Almodavar, grinning like a fool, his blood still up from his close brush with death.

“I
could
have killed you, you know.”

The captain nodded. “I know.”

“So do I really have to do forty laps?”

“Yes.”

“I
should
have killed you,” the boy grumbled.

Almodavar smiled at him with paternal pride. “If you’ve worked that out, lad, then you may have learned something useful from this little exercise, after all.”

Selling off the slaves she had known all her life was the hardest thing Luciena Mariner had ever had to do. Watching them being loaded into the wagon from Venira’s Slave Emporium, chained and forlorn, was the most heartbreaking scene she had ever witnessed in her meagre seventeen years.

Some of the slaves had been with her family since before Luciena was born. Young Mankel, the kitchen boy, was born in this house. He had never known another home. Her voice quivering with emotion, she turned away from the boy’s distraught sobs and instead tried to explain for the hundredth time since her mother had died how much better they would fare in Master Venira’s exclusive showroom than if she’d simply sold them on the open market.

Her words were little comfort. The slaves weren’t fools. They all knew the chances of finding a household as good as the one they were leaving were remote.

What choice did I have?
Luciena asked herself bitterly, as she climbed the stairs once the wagon had left. The heavy purse she carried made her feel worse, not better, even though it would go some way to reducing her debts. The big house echoed with loneliness, the blank spaces on the walls where paintings had once hung glaring at her like blank, accusing faces. On the first-floor landing, the pedestal where her father’s marble bust had always taken pride of place stood empty now. It had been one of the first things to go, sold to help pay the huge debts her mother’s death had revealed.

Luciena made her way along the tiled hall towards the small study where her mother had spent so much of her final days, trying to conceal the seriousness of their desperate position from her daughter. Her slippers hissed softly against floors that had been covered with expensive rugs. Luciena had sold them to pay the livery bill. The upkeep on the coach-and-four hadn’t been paid for months.

She’d sold the coach and the four matched greys without much emotion, but parting with her horse, Wind Hunter, had almost gutted her.

And I’m not out of the woods, even yet
, she thought as she pushed open the door to her mother’s study. To maintain their lifestyle, her mother had mortgaged the house, her jewellery, even the furniture and the slaves. Luciena would be lucky if she could keep the clothes on her back by the time the debts were paid. She stopped in the doorway, looked at the pile of paper on the small table, and felt tears welling in her eyes, yet again. It didn’t seem to matter how much she sold, how much she sacrificed—that damn pile never seemed to get any smaller.

“Luciena?”

She turned to find Aleesha standing behind her with a tray bearing a tall glass of something gold and sticky and several slices of flatbread and cheese. A year or two older than her mistress, Aleesha was the only slave Luciena had not been able to bring herself to part with. The young woman was more than just a slave. She was Luciena’s best friend.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You have to eat.”

“I can’t afford to eat,” she sighed, holding the door open to allow the slave through with the tray.

Aleesha walked past her mistress and placed the tray on the side table by the window before turning to face Luciena, hands on her ample hips. “I’ll hear none of that, my girl. I know this is difficult, but we’ll find a way to survive it.”

Luciena smiled wanly at the slave’s determined enthusiasm. “How, Aleesha? I’m running out of things to sell faster than I’m running out of creditors.”

“Is there nothing left of your father’s money?” the slave asked, obviously puzzled by how easily their fortune had evaporated.

Luciena knew how she felt; she had trouble believing there was nothing left, too. “Mother wouldn’t have mortgaged the house to that leech, Ameel Parkesh, if there was any money left.”

“But she always claimed your father had made generous provision for you,” Aleesha insisted.

“When he married the princess . . .”

Luciena’s expression darkened at the mention of her father’s only marriage, very late in life, to the High Prince’s sister. “That was a marriage of convenience, Aleesha, and the only one who seemed to do well out of it was Princess Marla.”

Aleesha shook her head, even now refusing to believe someone so powerful had robbed Luciena of her inheritance. “Your mother believed Princess Marla would take care of you, lass. I
know
that’s what your father promised.”

“Then more fool my mother and father.” Luciena walked across the room to the table and dropped the proceeds of the slave sale onto the desk. The purse landed with a dull thud. “Her Royal
bloody
Highness refuses to even acknowledge I exist. She married my father, extorted his fortune and his shipping business out of him with false promises of a grand future for his only child and then drove him to an early grave, leaving his bastard daughter and her
court’esa
mother to fend for themselves.”

She stared down at the pile of debts still left to pay. “That’s why we’re in such a mess, you know.

Mother kept waiting for a summons from the palace. She had us living like lords, waiting for an invitation that was never going to come.”

“Perhaps the princess doesn’t know—”

“Princess Marla knows
everything
that happens in Greenharbour,” Luciena scoffed, turning to look out the window. The street outside was deserted now. It was the hottest part of the day, and although it wasn’t officially summer yet, the heat was enough to drive people indoors until the sun passed its zenith.

“I’m sure your poor mother only did what she thought was best,” Aleesha insisted, obviously disturbed Luciena was speaking ill of the dead.

“I know,” Luciena sighed, leaning her head against the warm glass. “But what’s it got us besides a pile of debts I can’t jump over? Or repay?”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

Luciena shook her head, looking over at the letter that lay on the top of the pile on the desk. It was that letter, more than any other, that burned a hole in her gut. “There’s a difference between owing money and owing a debt, Aleesha. I can live with owing money, but to be unable to help my father’s only brother . . . that hurts more than anything else I’ve had to deal with lately.”

The slave glanced at the desk, and the letter from Fardohnya to which Luciena was referring, and shook her head. “You can’t be expected to take on the woes of every poor sailor in the world, Luciena.”

“The poor sailor you refer to is my uncle.”

“The uncle who fought with your father with every breath he took and never spared him a kind word in twenty years,” Aleesha reminded her mistress unsympathetically. “I don’t care what your father promised him, Warak Mariner had his chance to be a partner in your father’s business and threw it all away for some Fardohnyan fisherman’s daughter. If he’s in trouble now, it’s not your fault. Or your responsibility to make it better.”

“But the boy he wants me to help is my cousin.”

“Second cousin,” Aleesha corrected. “And he’s a Fardohnyan.”

“But he’s still family.”

Aleesha sighed heavily and placed her hands on her hips, frowning at her mistress. “Your uncle fought with your father, Luciena, before you were born and pretty much every day after. When he ran off with that woman, your father warned him he’d never have anything else to do with the Mariner family. He ran off with her anyway. That was his choice and, to be honest, I always secretly admired the man for throwing away so much for love. But now I’m starting to wonder about him, because here he is, with your poor mother barely cold in the ground—and when you can least afford it—suddenly in need of your help.”

“I’m sure the two events are unrelated.”

“Really? Convenient, don’t you think, that this urgent need for money to send his grandson to Greenharbour coincides with your mother’s death?”