Free The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) by Glenda Larke Page A

years service, then if my application for citizenship was granted, I’d be able to look him in the eye as a person of worth. Then he and his fellows would have to address me as Syr-aware, then I would be able to own property in the Keeper Isles, then I would have a country. Five more years and I might just have that precious earlobe tattoo, the horned-marlin with the inlaid diamond splinter for a horn; the tattoo that would prove that I too had what most people automatically had at birth: citizenship of a nation, a place of belonging. Until then I was a halfbreed, welcome nowhere but a middenheap like Gorthan Spit, unable to own property anywhere else, or legally work anywhere else. Five more years…but only if I pleased the Keeper Council. Fail them, and my application had about as much chance as a tree had of ever growing in Gorthan Spit’s sand dunes.
     

FIVE
     
    I went to speak to the Cirkasian, of course. Syr-sylv Duthrick was right enough to question why I hadn’t done it already. She was a lead, and anyone who practised sylvmagic couldn’t be all bad.
    She wasn’t in her own room, so I knocked on Noviss’s door, and sure enough she was there. She was standing by the window, feeding some small dark birds on the sill. Noviss was lounging on the bed and the look on his face when he saw me was enough to sour whale-milk.
    ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ I said to him and turned to her. ‘I’d like to speak to you privately, if I may.’
    ‘She doesn’t speak to slavers,’ Noviss said primly. He hadn’t added the adjective ‘halfbreed’ but I heard it nonetheless.
    I almost sighed. The lad might look like an innocent but his self-righteous tongue was about as subtle as a sea-wasp sting.
    ‘She can also speak for herself,’ the Cirkasian reproved him mildly. She left the window and came across the room towards me. ‘My room?’
    I nodded and she led the way, without even glancing at Noviss. She might have been young, but she already knew how to put a possessive man in his place.
    There was nowhere to sit in her room except on the bed, but she had managed to procure decent brandy and a couple of whale-tooth mugs, so I was glad she’d suggested her room rather than mine. I was a little puzzled at her hospitality. On Gorthan Spit, gossip travelled as swiftly as a bore tide, so she doubtless had heard by now what I was after and I would have thought she’d be as touchy as her uptight friend—but she actually smiled as she handed me the drink. (I immediately wondered if it was poisoned and switched mugs when she put hers down and turned her back for a moment. I always made a point of being a suspicious bitch; it kept me alive.)
    ‘Well?’ she asked as she seated herself beside me and retrieved her mug from the wall ledge. ‘What do you want?’
    ‘I want to know what happened to the Cirkasian slave who sailed from Lem in the same ship that brought you here.’ I had a feeling that it paid to be blunt with this lady.
    ‘And can you think of a single reason why I should tell you?’
    ‘You do know?’
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘I want to buy her.’
    ‘We heard you were a pimp buying for a brothel.’
    ‘I did tell someone that, yes. It sounded a likely tale.’
    ‘And what’s the real reason?’
    ‘I was offered two thousand setus by her father to return her to her home.’ Substitute ‘Keepers’ in place of ‘her father’ and that was the truth.
    ‘Ah. Then you know who she is.’ She sipped her drink.
    ‘Certainly.’
    ‘The lady in question doesn’t want to go home. She is free and safe, and she will stay that way. You may as well say goodbye to your two thousand setus.’
    ‘She’s an innocent. How long will she last without protection?’
    ‘She’s not without protection. And what would happen to her if she went back would be worse.’ She took another swallow of her drink—without any ill-effect, of course. She was no poisoner. She continued, ‘The Castlemaid was to be married off to the