Snake Heart (Chains of Honor #2) -Lindsay Buroker Page 0,4

said.

He, Lakeo, and Arayevo were also in the rowboat, sitting while Dak and Yanko manned the oars. Several of the captain’s crew followed in a second boat. Lakeo had offered to row, but Yanko had a notion that men shouldn’t sit idle while women worked. Besides, this had given him the opportunity to roll up his sleeves so Arayevo could admire the rippling muscles of his forearms. Unfortunately, she was sitting next to Minark and looking at the dwellings instead of at his physique.

“I’m talking to you, bodyguard,” Minark added when nobody responded.

Dak kept rowing. “I said nothing about ruins.”

“No, you said nothing about nothing. As usual. I’m the one making observations. What kind of pirates would bury their treasure in a populated village?”

“It’s not populated now,” Yanko said quietly.

Arayevo tilted her head. “Are you sure? I thought the people might be hiding. If there’s frequent pirate activity out here...”

“Nobody’s in the village. I’m not sure if anyone’s on the island at all. I can’t sense all the way to the other side, but maybe—” Yanko looked to where Kei perched at the stern of the boat.

He reached out to the parrot with his mind and found him thinking about nuts and seeds that he might hunt for on the beach. Yanko planted the suggestion that there might be more nut trees inland, asked Kei to look, and also to let him know if he spotted anyone along the way.

The parrot squawked and sprang into the air, flying inland.

“Did you do that?” Minark asked. “Or did it suddenly get an itch to go look for a mate?”

“He’s more interested in food than mates, as far as I can tell,” Yanko said, avoiding the question. The captain might have seen him use magic often enough that he wouldn’t be surprised to learn Yanko could communicate with animals, but it did not hurt to keep a few secrets to himself.

“Judging by the way he beats Yanko in the head with his wings, it’s possible he thinks Yanko is his mate,” Lakeo said.

“Have I mentioned how glad I am that you accompanied me from Kyatt?” Yanko muttered.

“Have I mentioned that Kei left a gift on the back of your shoulder the last time he visited?”

Yanko sighed.

“There.” Dak nodded toward the end of the pier, a single wooden boardwalk stretching into the cove. Nets and buoys decorated the wooden posts, the rope frayed and worn. He pulled the rowboat close enough to tie it, but he paused in the middle of the task, turning his head toward the beach and sniffing the air.

“What is it?” Yanko climbed onto the dock, the sword he had borrowed from the ship’s limited armory bumping against the edge. He sniffed, too, but couldn’t smell more than dead fish and seaweed.

“I don’t think the villagers left.” Dak pulled his rifle off his back, checked his ammunition, and strode down the pier, not waiting for the other boat to be tied.

Yanko trotted after him. “What do you mean?”

“I’d hoped to talk to these people and ask if any of the elders remembered Heanolik Tomokosis,” Dak said, giving the Kyattese name for the Mausoleum Bandit. “Reports I got from the police archives said he came here often to resupply and visit a woman. The Kyattese tried to lay a trap for him in this cove once, before they ultimately got lucky and sank his ship elsewhere. Someone here might remember him and have an idea if he had a cache on this island.”

“Are we sure there is a cache?” Yanko asked as they neared the head of the pier.

“None of the items he stole from the museum were recovered with the wreck. If he’d sold the purloined items, some of them should have turned up in personal collections and made their way back to Kyatt over the years. I did some research while you were hiding in the volcano, and I can confirm that nobody has seen that lodestone in decades.”

“We weren’t hiding. We were fleeing for our lives from a lava flow.” Yanko shuddered at the memory—he had lost his only pair of good walking shoes to that lava and was stuck treasure hunting in sandals. “In a brave and manly way.”

“Lakeo was being manly?”

“She’s better at it than I am.”

“I heard that,” Lakeo called from behind them.

She and Arayevo were heading up the pier behind Yanko and Dak while Minark and his crew members discussed something back at the rowboats—probably a strategy for clubbing Yanko over the head as