Children of Earth and Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t pay them to defend his land (their land!), or send soldiers to do it, or allow them to find goods and foodfor themselves, asking nothing of him, what did he want them to do? Die?
    If Senjani seafarers boarded trading galleys and roundships, it was only for goods belonging to heretics. Jaddite merchants with goods in the holds were protected. Or, well, they were supposed to be. They usually were. No one was going to deny that extremes of need and anger might cause some raiders to be a little careless in sorting which merchant various properties belonged to on a taken ship.
    Why do they ignore us in Obravic?
she asked suddenly, in her mind.
    You want honourable behaviour from courts?
A foolish wish
, her grandfather said.
    I know
,
she replied, in thought, which was how she spoke with him. He’d been dead almost a year. The plague of last summer.
    It had taken her mother, too, which is why Danica was alone now. There were about seven or eight hundred people in Senjan most of the time (more took refuge if there was trouble inland). Almost two hundred had died here in two successive summers.
    There were no assurances in life, even if you prayed, honoured Jad, lived as decently as you could. Even if you had already suffered what someone might fairly have said was enough. But how did you measure what was enough? Who decided?
    Her mother didn’t talk to her in her mind. She was gone. So were her father and older brother, ten years ago in a burning village. They didn’t talk to her.
    Her grandfather was in her head at all times. They spoke to one another, clearly, silently. Had done so from the moment, just about, that he’d died.
    What just happened?
he’d said. Exactly that, abruptly, in her mind, as Danica walked away from the pyre where he and her mother had burned with half a dozen other plague victims.
    She had screamed. Wheeled around in a mad, terrified circle, she remembered. Those beside her had thought it was grief.
    How are you here?
she’d cried out, silently. Her eyes had been wide open, staring, seeing nothing.
    Danica! I don’t know!
    You died!
    I know I did.
    It was impossible, appalling. And became unimaginably comforting. She’d kept it secret, from that day to this night. There were those, and not just clerics, who would burn her if this became known.
    It defined her life now, as much as the deaths of her father and brother had—and the memory of their small, sweet little one, Neven, the younger brother taken by the hadjuks in that night raid years ago. The raid that had brought three of them fleeing to Senjan: her grandfather, her mother, herself at ten years old.
    So she talked in her thoughts with a man who was dead. She was as good with a bow as anyone in Senjan, better than anyone she knew with knives. Her grandfather had taught her both while he was alive, from when she was only a girl. There were no boys any more in the family to teach. They had both learned to handle boats here. It was what you did in Senjan. She had learned to kill with a thrown knife and a held one, to loose arrows from a boat, judging the movements of the sea. She was extremely good at that. It was why she had a chance to do what she was here to do tonight.
    She wasn’t, Danica knew, an especially
conventional
young woman.
    She swung her quiver around and checked the arrows: habit, routine. She’d brought a lot of them, odds were very much against a strike with each one, out here on the water. Her bow was dry. She’d been careful. A wet bowstring was next to useless. She wasn’t sure how far she’d have to aim—if this even happened. If the Seressinis were indeed coming. It wasn’t as if they’d made her a promise.
    It was a mild night, one of the first of a cold spring. Little wind. She couldn’t have done this in a rough sea. She dropped her cloak from her shoulders. She looked up at the stars. When she was young, back in their village, sleeping