01 - The Compass Rose Read Online Free PDF Page B

snapping her arm painfully upward. “Spying? Off to tell your witches all our plans?”
    She kept her face turned away, hoping her hacked-off hair would provide sufficient disguise.
    “Look at me, boy!” He jerked her arm again.
    Aisse shook her head, trying to pull away from him. He swore and backhanded her across the face. She couldn’t stop the reflexive high-pitched cry. A girl’s sound, not a boy’s.
    The farmer grabbed her face with the hand not gripping her arm and forced it upward, until he could see her. “Achz and Arilo!” He called on the Farmer caste’s twin gods in his shock. “You’re female.”
    He shook her, violently. “What in seven hells have you done? By all that’s holy…” His voice trembled with horror.
    And it was true horror to a Tibran male to think anyone might wish to escape his caste, to think a woman might wish to live some other life. Women lived in the women’s quarters of whatever caste they were assigned, doing women’s work, available to any man of any caste who might wish to use her. Most Tibran women didn’t mind. It was the way life was. Aisse hated it.
    She couldn’t lose her chance at freedom now, not when she was so close. “Let me go!”
    Her elbow punched into the farmer’s stomach as she struggled. He grunted with the blow, so she did it again, kicking, scratching and biting in desperate silence.
    “Witch.” He shook her hard enough to rattle her eyes in their sockets. The first blow of his fist stunned her and she collapsed, held upright only by his grip. He waited till she regained her senses before he hit her again, to be sure she felt every least bit of the punishment he had in store for her. He told her so.
     
    Torchay pressed his naitan closer into the angle between wall and walkway, his body covering hers. Not that mere flesh and blood were much defense against the cannon’s iron balls, but at least if he failed her this time, he would surely die first. He put his lips next to her ear and shouted so he could be heard. “We should pull back. They’re targeting the walls now.”
    “ And the town.”
    Since the bombardment started, she had argued against leaving the walls because the Tibran missiles sailed over their heads to crash into the shops and houses of Ukiny. Then, she had been right. They were safer on the walls. But no longer.
    The captain turned her head. Torchay pulled back, allowing her to find his ear.
    “It’s too late to pull back.” Her lips brushed his skin as she spoke. “Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t do it now. We’re safer staying put.”
    Torchay gave up. She was likely right, as usual. And even if she wasn’t, she was the captain.
    A cannonball smacked into the crenellations behind them, sending stones tumbling to the walkway. Hands molded to his captain’s head, he waited till the biggest debris settled, then lifted his head just enough to peer behind him. The other guards lay over their naitani in the space beyond his feet.
    “Hamonn!” Torchay bellowed the man’s name, but doubted he could be heard over the cannon’s roar. He propped himself on elbows to see better, and thought something moved past the South naitan’s guard.
    “Status?” his captain asked.
    “Checking.” He nudged Hamonn with his foot. Rubble spilled from the man’s back, but the man himself did not move.
    “ Casualties , Sergeant?”
    “Hamonn isn’t moving. Don’t think he’s dead, but I don’t know. Don’t know about Beltis either. Someone’s moving beyond them, so I assume Kadrey and his naitan are unhurt.” He didn’t like reporting incomplete information, but his captain needed something and that was the best he had.
    “Go check on Hamonn. See if Beltis is hurt. I need her with me.”
    Torchay flattened himself over her as another ball hit close by. “When it’s safe.”
    “Go now . By the time it’s safe, the battle will be over. That’s an order, Sergeant.”
    When she said that, it meant she was beyond reasoning