Snake Heart (Chains of Honor #2) -Lindsay Buroker Page 0,58

mages,” Pey Lu said.

“You go there?”

“Yes.” She did not smile with nostalgia or look wistful for some bygone era. Maybe she had loathed it. Who knew?

“Why did you leave?” Yanko asked, surprising himself with the question. He hadn’t thought he cared. Arayevo was the curious one. Maybe Yanko had been as a boy, but he had long ago accepted that his mother had left and simply did not care about any of them. She had never checked on them, and there had been no letters. Even a pirate could have managed to send letters, if she wanted to.

“Who is the Turgonian man you were with?” Pey Lu asked, ignoring his question.

He glared back at her, feeling petulant. Didn’t she owe him an explanation? She hadn’t left after Falcon’s birth, but months after Yanko had been born, she had walked away forever. It was hard not to take that personally.

“I don’t know his full name,” Yanko said. “He’s my bodyguard.”

Gramon snorted.

Pey Lu looked at him. “You never saw him, did you?”

“No,” Gramon said. “I have no idea if he’s anyone but some soldier booted out of the service for beating up an officer, but a Turgonian warrior isn’t going to sign on to be a bodyguard for some Nurian boy.”

“Do they actually kick Turgonians out of the army for beating up officers?” Pey Lu asked, some of her dry humor returning. “I thought that might be taken as a sign of gumption.”

“It depends how important the officer was. Mangling a lieutenant a little might be all right.”

This time, she snorted, but her face regained its serious mien as she focused on Yanko again.

“And the young women that were with you?”

“Friends from back home.” He wasn’t sure he should be answering her questions, even vaguely, but so far, they did not seem to be anything important. Dak and the others had gotten away. What did it matter now if she had a faint notion as to who they were?

“And who did you say charged you with the task of recovering the lodestone?” Pey Lu asked.

“I didn’t.” Yanko had no intention of telling her, either. Unless in doing so, she might be convinced to turn her back on the person who contracted her and join him. Would she? Would the prince consider paying pirates? If it helped the country? He groped for a way to test her. “Someone important, someone who might be able to pay more than your benefactor.”

“Doubtful.”

“Someone who might be able to clear your name and let you return to Nuria as a citizen, not as a wanted criminal.”

“That is also doubtful. And I have no interest in returning. Or currying favor with some bureaucrat.”

“Don’t you miss anything about home?” Yanko asked, though he was starting to get the sense that she might be even more like Arayevo than he had realized. Maybe the sea was home, and she cared nothing for the place she had been born, just as she cared nothing for the family she had been born into—or the one she had married into, for a time.

“Nothing that would make me sell out those who hired me.”

“The Turgonians?” Yanko guessed, glancing at Gramon. If that were true, wouldn’t Dak have known about it? No, perhaps not. He had spent much of the last year in Nuria. Even though he had checked in with his people on Kyatt, he might not be high enough ranking to know what was going on in the government.

“The rightful owners of the artifact,” Pey Lu said.

“Who? The Kyattese? They wouldn’t hire pirates.”

“You don’t think so?” Pey Lu didn’t appear affronted by his comment, nor was she in the least defensive. His skepticism probably didn’t matter to her.

“Your face is on wanted posters in their harbor,” Yanko said.

“Just hers?” Gramon asked.

She looked at him, a hint of a smile on her lips. “Jealous?”

“Usually, yes.”

“Yanko,” Pey Lu said. “The Kyattese harbor police aren’t likely aware of what their government is doing, who it’s talking to, who it’s hiring. I assure you, this isn’t the first time we’ve been hired by a government. We’re a large and organized force with no ties to any nation. We can strike—or retrieve—without starting a war. Everyone hates us equally.”

“She says that with such glee,” Gramon muttered.

“That was glee?” Yanko asked. Pey Lu’s tone had been deadpan, as far as he could tell.

“Practically ecstasy. You have to know her a while to be able to read her emotions. I’d suspect her of having some Turgonian in her if she