Children of Earth and Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

did do this they would come on a moonless night. They were vicious and arrogant, but never fools.
    Two war galleys, carrying three hundred and fifty oarsmen and mercenary fighters, with new bronze cannons from Seressa’s Arsenale, had been blocking the bay, both ends of Hrak Island, since winter’s end, but they hadn’t been able to do anything
but
that.
    The galleys were too big to come closer in. These were shallow, rocky, reef-protected seas, and Senjan’s walls and their own cannons could handle any shore party sent on foot from a landing farther south. Besides which, putting mercenaries ashore on lands formally ruled by the emperor could be seen as a declaration of war. Seressa and Obravic danced a dance, always, but there were too many other dangers in the world to start a war carelessly.
    The republic had tried to blockade Senjan before, but never with two war galleys. This was a huge investment of money and men and time, and neither ship’s captain could be happy sitting in open water with chilled, bored, restless fighters, achieving nothing for his own career.
    The blockade was working, however. It was doing real harm, though it was hard for those on the galleys to know that yet.
    In the past, the Senjani had always found ways of getting offshore, but this was different, with two deadly ships controlling the lanes to north and south of the island that led to sea.
    It seemed the Council of Twelve had decided the raiders had finally become too much of a nuisance to be endured. There had been mockery: songs and poetry. Seressa was not accustomed to being a source of amusement. They claimed this sea, they named it after themselves. And, more importantly, they guaranteed the safety of all ships coming up to dock by their canals fortheir merchants and markets. The heroes of Senjan, raiding to feed themselves, and for the greater glory of Jad, were a problem.
    Danica offered a thought to her grandfather.
    Yes, a thorn in the lion’s paw
, he agreed.
    The Seressinis called themselves lions. A lion was on their flag and their red document seals. There were apparently lions on columns in the square before their palace, on either side of the slave market.
    Danica preferred to call them wild dogs, devious and dangerous. She thought she could kill some of them tonight, if they sent a skiff into the bay, intending to set fire to the Senjani boats drawn up on the strand below the walls.
    â€”
    HE WASN’T GOING to say he
loved
her or anything like that. That wasn’t the way the world went on Hrak Island. But Danica Gradek did drift into his dreams, and had done so for a while now. On the island and in Senjan there were women who interpreted dreams for a fee. Mirko didn’t need them for these.
    She was unsettling, Danica. Different from any of the girls on Hrak, or in the town when he made his way across to trade fish or wine.
    You had to trade very cautiously these days. Seressa had forbidden anyone to deal with the pirates this spring. There were war galleys. You’d be flogged or branded if caught, could even be hanged, depending on who did the catching and how much your family could afford in bribes. Seressa almost certainly had spies in Senjan, too, so you needed to be careful that way, as well. Seressa had spies everywhere, was the general view.
    Danica was younger than him but always acted as if she were older. She could laugh, but not always when you’d said something you thought was amusing. She was too cold, the other men said, you’d freeze your balls making love to her. They talked about her, though.
    She handled a bow better than any of them. Better than anyone Mirko knew, anyhow. It was unnatural in a woman,
wrong
, ought to have been displeasing, but for Mirko it wasn’t. He didn’t know why. Her father, it was said, had been a famous fighter in his day. A man of reputation. He’d died in a hadjuk village raid, somewhere on the other side of the