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

Bastionlord of Breth, a fat, boy-loving tyrant twice her age.’
    ‘So?’ I drawled indifferently. ‘I’m told such alliances are sometimes necessary. A cross-island royal marriage brings certain advantages: international accords, trade treaties… An internal one often leads to feuds between noble families. So, the Castlemaid has to marry the Bastionlord: that’s the penalty of her birth. There are plenty of compensations.’
    The Cirkasian didn’t move a muscle in her face, yet her eyes changed. They flattened; the irises became solid discs of steel. Not for the first time I had to revise my opinion of her. There was a core of hardness there that I hadn’t been aware of before. She said harshly, ‘Doesn’t that kind of double standard bother you? You especially? Why should Islandlords put themselves above the breeding laws?’
    I shrugged. ‘It’s always been that way.’ Still, I thought of my mother, trapped by passion or rape or ignorance into bearing a halfbreed, forced to abandon me so as to escape the punishment that would have been hers had anyone known of her crime. I fingered my bare earlobe bitterly. No one kept an Islandlord’s child from his citizenship because of his mixed blood. No one hounded him from island to island.
    I thought of Syr-sylv Duthrick. He and his fellow Councillors connived to break the breeding laws for Islandlords even as they upheld it for people like my unknown parents. Like me. For a moment I was thirteen again, lying on the table in the Physicians’ Hall in The Hub, knowing what was about to be done to me… knowing it, yet not really understanding. Not then. Bastards all.
    But I didn’t want to think about that. My future depended on Keeper goodwill.
    ‘It’s the Keepers who are to blame for this proposed marriage,’ she said suddenly, as if she had read my mind.
    I pretended ignorance. ‘What have the Keepers got to do with a dynastic marriage?’
    ‘Is there anything in the Middling Islands that the Keepers aren’t involved in? The royal families of Cirkase and Breth only exist because the Keepers prop them up. The Keepers like royal dictatorships; dictators are easily manipulated—and they keep the lower classes in their place. Keepers aim for a unity of the Middling Islands under their leadership, with everyone bowing down to them because they are the ones with the power: with the sylvmagic. They tell us that without their protection, we’ll fall to the dunmagickers. And people like the Bastionlord and the Castlelord jump to do their bidding, partly because they believe in the danger, but mostly because they know where the sauce for their fish comes from. The Keepers have bought them, just as they have bought everyone in the Middling Isles. We have become so dependent on them we can no longer stand alone…
    ‘And in the meantime, people like the Castlemaid Lyssal get caught in the middle. Nobody cares, least of all people like you.’ She looked at me bitterly. ‘All you care about is your two thousand setus. ’
    Her tirade had caught me utterly by surprise. Everything she said was true up to a point, and she couldn’t have found a better way of making me feel about as low as a lugworm. But I needed my two thousand setus. Money was the only thing that kept me from joining the pox-ridden whores in some back street somewhere, and that two thousand setus was a small fortune. Without money, I had nothing except an unguaranteed hope I might earn Keeper citizenship with twenty years of service. Without an ear tattoo, earning a living was difficult: I couldn’t legally live anywhere for more than three days at a time, except on Gorthan Spit; I could be legally harried across the Isles of Glory like a criminal—and had been, often enough. Even my services to the Keeper Council were unofficial and I couldn’t claim exemption from the law because of them. At least with money I could buy some peace, I could bribe a landlord to turn a blind eye to his tenant’s