Snake Heart

by Lindsay Buroker

  Yanko could only shrug. Whether they were treated well or not, he doubted he would be allowed to keep the lodestone for long. He brushed its lump again and wondered what the Turgonians would do if he hurled it over the railing. That wouldn’t do anything to help Nuria, but if his people couldn’t have that continent, would it be better to keep the enemy from claiming it?

  Dak looked over at him and said a few words, perhaps explaining him to the admiral. Yanko lowered his hand. The Turgonians might very well have an underwater boat or two trailing this fleet of ironclads, and they would have the ability to dive down and retrieve the lodestone. As much as he hated the idea, he would just have to wait and see what happened.

  “Yanko.” Dak held out his hand, the same way Pey Lu had.

  He probably wanted the same thing she had wanted. He glanced at Kei, half tempted to give it to the parrot again and order him to fly away with it.

  “Seeds,” Kei announced, and Yanko had the feeling he had just been told that he wouldn’t get any more favors until he fed the bird.

  Dak’s eye narrowed slightly.

  Yanko clenched his jaw but tossed him the lodestone. Let them look it over. They had no magic. They’d probably think it a paperweight, and no matter where they tucked it on this ship, Yanko could find it again.

  Dak caught it and promptly handed it to the admiral. The man looked skeptically at it, and Yanko could guess the words that he spoke.

  “It’s a rock.”

  Dak shrugged.

  Another exchange occurred between the men, this time with much gesturing at Yanko. Dak’s expression grew even sourer than usual.

  As he was thinking that he needed to put some effort into learning Turgonian, Arayevo snorted and muttered, “That’ll teach him.”

  “Do you understand them?” Yanko whispered.

  “Dak did let me practice on him while we were on the underwater boat, but I can only get some of it. Enough to know he just got stuck in a cabin with you, since he’s the only one on the ship who’s had...” She shrugged. “Some kind of training.”

  Yanko could guess. Whatever the Turgonians called mage-hunter training, at least the part that involved repelling mental attacks. His bodyguard was about to become his captor. Or maybe his nanny.

  “Poor Yanko,” Lakeo said, “never gets to share cabins with beautiful women. Always gets stuck with surly Turgonians instead.”

  “I thought you found him appealing from the lips down,” Yanko said reflexively, though he wasn’t in the mood for trading barbs.

  “That doesn’t negate his surliness.”

  Yanko thought about pointing out that she was as surly as Dak, but the second longboat was being pulled up. Since the pirates had escaped before the Turgonians set anchor, he could only think of one person that the craft might have been sent to collect. Even so, he was surprised when it settled into its berth on the deck and the mage hunter stepped out, her hood down and a white bandana holding her hair back from her face. She ignored him utterly, though she snapped something at one of the soldiers who looked like he wanted to search her for weapons. She shouldn’t have any. Yanko was still puzzled as to when she had recovered the throwing stars.

  He looked to Dak, wondering if he understood why she would have been brought aboard—and why she would have voluntarily come with the Turgonians. Even if she and Yanko were enemies, they were both Nurians, both enemies of Turgonia. She couldn’t possibly be working with someone here, could she? Didn’t Turgonians consider assassinations cowardly?

  Dak did not look any more enlightened than Yanko felt. He asked the admiral a question and received a headshake and a short answer.

  The hunter—Yanko still did not know her name—stood with her arms folded across her chest, glaring defiantly about her. He almost labeled her as surly, too, though he caught a hint of concern in her eyes. Was she a prisoner? She snapped at anyone who came close to her, and the Turgonian who had wanted to search her did not try again. Instead, he looked toward his admiral, a question in his eyes.

  The admiral waved toward a hatch that had opened. A man in yellow and red silks strode out, a familiar man.

  Yanko nearly fell over. “What is he doing here?”

  He gaped until Sun Dragon, the man who had nearly incinerated him with a lava flow, looked over at him. Yanko snapped his mouth shut, not wanting Sun Dragon to see his shock—or how appalled he was.

  “I don’t know, but I’m glad there aren’t any volcanoes around,” Lakeo said. “You might want to summon any kraken friends that are sunbathing on the waves out there.”

  Sun Dragon sneered at Yanko. It was a triumphant sneer. The Turgonians regarded him dubiously as he approached—one soldier refused to get out of his way as he walked toward the longboats—but that did not seem to worry Sun Dragon. He wore the confidence of a man in control of the situation.

  The admiral sighed deeply and said something to Dak.

  “Did you get that?” Yanko whispered to Arayevo, wishing he had a clue as to what was going on.

  “Only the part where he misses the days when they got to shoot Nurians.”

  That wasn’t the clue that Yanko had hoped for.

  Dak did not respond to the admiral. He did not look pleased, and he stood there in stony silence.

  Sun Dragon stopped in front of the hunter and frowned down at her. “You failed,” he said in Nurian. “Twice.”

  He was a few inches taller than she, so she had to lift her chin to stare him in the eyes, but Yanko wagered she would have lifted her chin anyway. She had a lot of pride and certainty for someone not much older than he was.

  Sun Dragon flung his arm out, a finger pointing toward Yanko. “He’s a boy.”

  Yanko found his own chin coming up. Not so much a boy that he hadn’t bested the mage—and his assassin. Yes, he’d had the help of a kraken, but surely the ability to summon help when it was needed was a legitimate battle tactic.

  “I had a chance to kill Snake Heart,” the mage hunter said.

  “That is not your mission.”

  She glared at him, the defiance still hard in her eyes.

  “Did you kill her?” Sun Dragon asked.

  “I do not know.” The mage hunter looked at Yanko. Because he had stopped her attack? Or simply because she wondered if he knew the answer?

  He kept himself from shrugging in response. Even if he had known the answer, he wouldn’t give it to her. He definitely would not give it to Sun Dragon.

  Sun Dragon lowered his voice, but not so much that Yanko failed to hear his comment. “I knew you’d be too young and inexperienced.”

  He spun on his heel, pointedly turning his back on the hunter, and strode toward the admiral. Dak tensed, his hand dropping to one of the two pistols jammed through his belt, weapons he had taken from the pirates.

  The hunter’s chin remained up, but a hint of red flushed her cheeks. Yanko knew the feeling well, but he refused to feel any sympathy toward her. She had tried to kill him and his mother. Let the wolf god eat her heart and spit it out.

  “May I examine the artifact, Admiral?” Sun Dragon asked, sounding more polite than Yanko had ever heard him, but Yanko felt the tease of magic being used.

  “Yes,” Admiral Ravencrest said, his tone dull and wooden.

  Yanko stirred uneasily, realizing Sun Dragon was using the mental sciences on the officer. And in a ship full of magic-dead Turgonians, who would know? Dak and the mage hunter, perhaps, but their training might only have made them attuned to magic being used against them, not people near them.

  Dak’s single eye did close to a slit as he watched Ravencrest hand the lodestone to Sun Dragon.

  “Is he controlling that Turgonian?” Lakeo whispered.

  “If so, he controls this entire fleet of ships,” Yanko murmured, his heart sinking further. His earlier hope that Dak might ultimately be in charge faded.

  Sun Dragon smiled over at Yanko, that triumphant expression on his face again, as he wrapped his fingers around the lod
estone. “This is, indeed, the item we’ve been seeking.” He rubbed the golden rock with his thumb, as he might caress a lover’s cheek. Then he turned toward the south, the lodestone directing him, the same way it had directed Yanko. “And it looks like we have a new course.”

  “A new course?” Ravencrest asked.

  “To find a long-forgotten continent. You, my good Turgonian admiral, are about to be a part of history.” He flicked a glance at Dak, but did not make the same promise to him. Most likely, he still thought Dak was nothing more than Yanko’s bodyguard.

  Ravencrest’s brow furrowed, and he waved toward Dak. “We just have orders to pause our training exercise and pick up—”

  “I’m positive your superiors will want you to investigate this, and you need my help to do so, as I don’t believe any of your people have the magical aptitude to use this device.”

  “I guess it won’t hurt to take a look,” Ravencrest said, his tone wooden again.

  Yanko was confused as to why Sun Dragon wanted to take a Turgonian ship—a lot of Turgonian ships—to investigate. Was it only because that was all he had been able to finagle access to? His first vessel had been destroyed, as had the ships he had scrounged up to send after Pey Lu. He was going through vessels like someone lighting matches in the rain. Could Sun Dragon have some deal with the Turgonian government? With the president himself? What if the Turgonians wanted to see the Great Chief and the current regime overthrown? What if they wanted Sun Dragon’s band of rebels, whoever they were, to win the civil war brewing in Nuria?

  Sun Dragon did nothing but smile at the admiral’s response. He shared that smile with Yanko, pinning him from across the deck.

  Don’t think you’ll get away without being punished, the mage spoke into his mind.

  What? Yanko asked, startled by the contact, as well as the fact that a man more than twice his age apparently felt the need to gloat and threaten.

  I haven’t forgotten that you dishonored me and cast doubt upon my command abilities.

  Dishonored you? I was defending myself. You tried to kill me!

  Because you are the spawn of that vile, disgraceful woman, and you’ve been in my way from the beginning. In the past, your family would have been put to death for her crimes. You should have been dead long ago. When the Great Chief and his kin are gone, and I rule, I will see to it that the White Foxes are no more, and I’ll also make sure that pirate bitch is truly dead.

  Yanko was too stunned to respond, more because the man claimed that he would take the Great Chief’s place than by anything else he had said.

  Dak walked up to him, blocking his view of the mage. It didn’t matter. Sun Dragon was done with his threats.

  “This way,” Dak said, speaking Nurian again and nodding toward a hatch. He gestured to include Arayevo and Lakeo.

  Yanko followed him, though he couldn’t keep from glancing back toward Sun Dragon. He wore the most blissful expression as he held the lodestone and gazed to the south. Yanko wished he had stayed on the island and hidden from the Turgonians.

  Chapter 22

  Yanko lay on his back on a bunk wider than the one he had been given on the Prey Stalker and much wider than his cot on Minark’s ship. As he stared up at the ceiling, unable to sleep, he wished he were back on Minark’s vessel now. At least there, he had held his fate in his hands. Now, it lay in the Turgonians’ hands. Or perhaps Sun Dragon’s hands, since he seemed to be controlling the only Turgonian that mattered.

  Well, not the only one.

  Yanko looked through the doorway in the two-room cabin. Dak sat at a desk, a lantern burning next to him as he studied the atlas he’d taken from Tomokosis’s cave. He did not appear overly worried that Yanko would try some evil magic on him. Even though Dak was a Turgonian and was the reason these ships had come, Yanko couldn’t find it within himself to be irritated at him. Though Dak hadn’t spoken more than three words since they had been ensconced here together, Yanko had the sense that this situation hadn’t turned out as he would have wished, either. A Nurian mage invited onto a Turgonian ship and chatting amiably with the admiral had to be unprecedented.

  Yanko wished Arayevo and Lakeo were sharing the cabin with them. He needed someone to talk to, someone he could trust to listen and to advise him on his foolish ideas. He couldn’t lie on this bunk and wait for Sun Dragon to come kill him, though it surprised him that the mage hadn’t tried yet, especially if he had the fleet admiral under his thumb. What was stopping him? Maybe he intended to send his properly chastened mage hunter to try again. To practice. She’d need practice if she was going to serve him on the Great Chief’s dais.

  With an irritated growl, Yanko swung his legs over the side of the bunk. All this thinking with no chance for action would make him crazy. Hadn’t his mother said that his brain was his worst enemy?

  Dak leaned back in his chair to peer through the doorway at him, but returned to the atlas after a glance. Kei, who had claimed the back of a second chair as a perch, ruffled his feathers but did not open his eyes.

  “Dak, are you here to keep me from escaping or to protect me from the mages and mage hunters wandering around your Turgonian warship?”

  “I’m supposed to keep you from harming the Nurian diplomats and from doing dastardly things to the rock.”

  “Diplomats?” Yanko stood up so he could properly gape through the doorway at Dak. “Surely, you’re talking about some other Nurian diplomats, because you can’t mean Sun Dragon and his assassin.”

  The atlas had to be extremely interesting, because Dak did not respond to the gape or the comment. Yanko did not know if he was trying to put some distance between himself and Yanko, now that he was back among his own people, or if he was simply engrossed in the project.

  “What do you mean supposed to?” Yanko asked quietly—reasonably.

  He wasn’t going to throw a tantrum. He just wanted to know. Maybe he should be trying to negotiate with Dak. Nobody else here was going to listen to him. And if Dak was somebody among the Turgonians, couldn’t he possibly do something?

  Yanko looked toward the wall, wondering if Arayevo and Lakeo were in the next cabin or if they had been given something less sophisticated. This double-cabin wasn’t exactly luxurious—the Turgonians liked hard edges and gray paint a lot—but it was roomy, and space was a luxury on a ship, even a big ironclad. Yanko had no doubt that it was Dak who warranted the special treatment, not him.

  “I’m not pleased with the situation, either, Yanko,” Dak said. “I don’t know how Sun Dragon finagled himself aboard, and when I talked to Ravencrest, he just said something about an order from the Turgonian embassy on Kyatt. There’s not a communication orb on here, so I can’t contact anyone.”

  “Anyone? Like the Turgonian president, perhaps?”

  “You think a stowaway diplomat warrants his attention?”

  “A lost continent being discovered might. Besides, I figured you two might chat regularly about life, the universe, pretty women, oh, and about how lovely it is to share a surname with the man.”

  “If a lost continent appears, I’ll be happy to talk to him about it. I’m still highly skeptical the rock will lead us to that.”

  So skeptical he was perusing that atlas like a student cramming for an exam that started in ten minutes? “And the other things?”

  “Rias has been happily married for more than twenty years, and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that he’s even aware that other women exist.”

  Rias? Was that their president’s name? If so, it wasn’t the one the newspapers used. A nickname?

  “And Turgonians don’t usually philosophize about life and the universe unless a lot of alcohol is involved. He doesn’t have time to drink.”

  “So... how closely are you related? To Rias?”

  Dak leaned his arm on the back of the chair and sighed at him. At least he had stopped looking at the atlas.

  “Look, I’d just like to know so I can better formulate my negotiating tactics,” Yan
ko said.

  “We’re negotiating?”

  “I haven’t started yet, but I intend to.”

  “Ah.”

  “Brother?” Yanko guessed.

  Dak’s eye widened. “Do I look that old?”

  “Too old to be one of his children. I’ve heard they’re closer to my age.”

  “You’ve heard? Yanko, you met two of them.”

  “I? Oh.” The kids who had been so eager to defend their homestead against invaders. Yanko rubbed his forehead. “I was distracted that night. And I didn’t speak the language.”

  “He’s my father’s brother, and he spent most of my adult life at sea or in Kyatt with his Kyattese wife.”

  “So you don’t know him that well?”

  “I know him better now than I did a couple of years ago, but he’s not going to jump in front of a steam wagon for me. And it doesn’t matter insofar as your negotiations. A blood relation to someone powerful doesn’t make you someone important in the empire. I’m just a soldier, like I said.”

  “Your clan doesn’t receive increased status because of his war fame and presidency?”

  Dak’s expression grew sour. “Our status was fine before he came along.”

  For the first time, Yanko got a hint as to why Dak might be... surly, as Lakeo said. Or maybe the term was bitter. Had he grown up in his uncle’s shadow? Long before Turgonia had switched from an empire to a republic that had needed a president, Fleet Admiral Sashka Federias Starcrest had been famous—infamous, from the Nurian point of view—for his battle tactics. He had sunk countless Nurian ships during the war. He might have even encountered Pey Lu. Yanko had no way to know who had come out ahead in that encounter, but the senior Starcrest clearly hadn’t been utterly destroyed.

  “Did you become a soldier because of him?” Yanko asked, then wondered if he should have dropped it and moved on to the proposition that was tinkling around in the back of his head, a proposition that could get him killed back home if anyone heard about it. Any minute, he expected Dak to decide the conversation was over and return to studying the atlas.