Free Trickster's Choice by Tamora Pierce Page A

enjoying the calls of colorful birds, the clear blue water under the ship’s prow, and the sheer loveliness of the spring day.

    She registered movement along the cliff tops on either side of the strait. Aly sharpened her Sight for a good look. Her fingers clenched on the rail as she realized that she saw hundreds of copper-skinned raka, men and women alike, dressed in the traditional wrapped jacket or round-collared tunic, and the tied skirtlike wrap called a sarong. Some wore garments that were richly decorated and jeweled, with more jewelry on their fingers and at their throats. Others wore plain colors with embroidery and strings of beads for ornament. The women drew their straight black hair away from their faces in a double-domed style, much like that of Yamani women, while the men wore headbands, turbans, or hats. The raka groups were of all ages, from the smallest infants to the oldest adults. They stood in silence, as far as Aly could tell, watching as the Balitang vessel passed by.

    She turned to look back down the strait, to check whether the natives watched all shipping out here. Two vessels earlier had overtaken the three that carried the duke’s household. No other ships followed in their wake, and nowhere did she see people on the cliffs behind them. The raka left as soon as the duke’s ship drew out of easy view.

    She tugged at a sailor’s arm as he coiled rope on the deck. “Do they always do that?” she asked, pointing at their audience. “Come and see boats go by? They don’t look like they mean to attack.”

    The half-raka man looked at her, then at the cliffs. “No,” he said quietly, “they do not do that. They prefer to remain unseen when the luarin pass.” He touched Aly’s slave collar. “Do not draw attention to it,” he said, nodding toward the duke and duchess, who sat at a small table in the bow playing chess. “The luarin get uneasy when the raka do things they don’t understand.”

    I
want to understand. Aly thought it, but she did not say it. She doubted that the sailor would confide in her. One thing seemed obvious: something about these ships drew the interest of many people on the two islands. The raka faces, when she used her magical Sight to better examine them, were expectant and eager. The sailor had told her the watchers were not typical. Something about the duke’s party drew their attention.

    His servants? Aly wondered, drumming her fingers on her thigh as she turned the matter over in her mind. Or his oldest daughters? Mequen was a Rittevon, a lesser one, but still of the line of the luarin conquerors.

    Belowdecks she heard Elsren yell, “I want
up
!” Aly’s rest time was over.

    Before she fetched the child, Aly took one more look at the cliffs. The raka they had passed were leaving, returning to their jungle towns and their luarin masters’ estates.

    That night after supper the duke and duchess read to their younger children from a book of raka myths. Aly returned to the ship’s rail to watch the cliffs around their anchorage, a small cove on Kypriang’s lush western shore. The night, warm and damp, folded around her like a blanket. With her magical vision she didn’t need light to see the raka, standing or seated on rocks that overlooked the cove. It seemed they required no light, either. Lamps burned only aboard the trio of ships that rocked on the gentle waters. The moon had just begun to show its rim over the mountains that formed Kypriang Isle’s spine.

    “They’re our people, too.” Twelve-year-old Dovasary rested her hands on the rail as she came to stand beside Aly. She spoke in Common, not Kyprish. “Our mother—Sarai’s and mine—was a raka. Sarugani of Temaida. Her family was of the older nobility, from before the luarin came, but they don’t have a title higher than baron now.”

    “They’re lucky to have that much. None of our raka family talks about who they were or what they did before the invasion,” Saraiyu remarked