Snake Heart (Chains of Honor #2) -Lindsay Buroker Page 0,37

she found the lodestone. She was looking for it when we were dragged away by the party you rescued us from. Thank you for that. I wasn’t sure what our fate was going to be. At the least, we were going to embarrass ourselves further with our escape attempts.”

“I wasn’t trying to escape, and it wasn’t embarrassing,” Lakeo said.

“You just started punching our captors for no reason?” Yanko asked.

“Oh, there was a reason. I was angry.”

Dak leaned back from the controls, though the underwater boat continued traveling forward, the light brushing over blobs of sponge-like coral along the bottom of the lagoon. “If it’s possible that they might find the lodestone, then we shouldn’t go far.”

“Staying here wouldn’t be a good idea,” Yanko said. “I’m sure Pey Lu would be able to sense us. Or sense me, anyway. The same way Sun Dragon did. From what I’ve seen of her, I believe she’s more powerful than Sun Dragon.”

“Much more powerful,” Lakeo said. “We saw her incinerate a giant soul construct with her mind.”

“All magic is done with the mind,” Yanko said.

“Some is more worth emphasizing than others.”

Dak looked blandly at him. “You said this is your mother?”

“Yes.” A fact that Yanko did not want to dwell upon. “Shouldn’t you be looking out that porthole? That coral is getting tall.”

“I’m watching it, but I’m also wondering what our course should be after we get past the coral.”

“We don’t have the numbers to face her,” Yanko said. “I bet she can wave her hand and destroy this tub.”

“Tub.” Dak’s eyebrows twitched. “Really.”

A stolen tub, at that. Yanko rubbed his face with damp hands and fought back a shiver. The temperature wasn’t cold inside, surprising considering they were surrounded by ocean water, but his clothes and hair were still wet. He wished he had something dry to wear.

“How much trouble will we get into if we don’t return this to Kyatt right away? Will you be punished or fined for borrowing it? And how did Arayevo get here?” Yanko spotted her sitting on one of the double bunks fastened to the bulkhead behind Lakeo.

“Dak rescued me,” Arayevo said when Dak didn’t respond.

His attention had been drawn back to the porthole by the maze of coral before them, now rising higher than the underwater boat, almost to the surface in some places. It was strange to navigate through a reef rather than worrying about sailing over it.

“Dak seems to be good at rescuing people.” Yanko tried not to sound bitter that he had needed rescuing. He would have loved being the one to daringly rescue the women in his life. “I was wise to recruit him for our team.”

Dak did not look at Yanko, but his gaze did flicker sideways briefly. “Recruit isn’t the word.”

“Whine? Wheedle? Blackmail?” Yanko hadn’t truly blackmailed him, but he had shamelessly appealed to the man’s sense of honor.

Dak steered sharply to one side to avoid a stalagmite of coral, and he didn’t respond.

“After monkey-brains left me,” Arayevo said, “I walked along the beach, looking for you, but I wasn’t sure where you had gone. Like an idiot, I stumbled into a scouting party that was on the way to check the village. To see what our people were doing there, I guess. They took me back to some meeting spot on the opposite side of the island, bundled me up, and tossed me into a boat. I was attempting to work my wrists free, so I could slip out and sneak away, when a platoon of monkeys started howling.” She quirked her brows at Yanko.

Yanko flushed, pleased that she knew he’d had something to do with her rescue—even if he hadn’t known she was the one under that tarp. He was even more pleased that Captain Minark had been reduced in stature to monkey-brains in her eyes. He trusted that meant they would not be pressing lips together anymore.

“Before I knew it, my guards were gone, and I was being slung over a burly Turgonian shoulder.” This time, Arayevo quirked her eyebrows at Dak.

Yanko much preferred it when all of her facial expressions were directed at him, at least her whimsical and cute ones.

“How did you go from being on a burly shoulder to being inside a Kyattese underwater boat?” Yanko asked.

“We came looking for you,” Arayevo said while Dak continued to move them around coral masses. “Dak knew about the waterfall, and we got there just ahead of the main group of pirates. But there were already a