Free Dragon Soul by Jaida Jones Page A

wasn’t gonna be around forever, and eventually he’d have to start picking up on these things for himself. “Men tend to lose their reticence once their bladder’s done the same, if you’ll pardon the allusion.”
    I didn’t know what the fuck he was asking me to pardon since I was the one who’d made the guy piss his pants in the first place, but I figured playing along’d be faster than starting another argument. My teeth were gonna be powder by this time tomorrow with how tight I had ’em clenched. I deserved some kind of award just for keeping a civil tongue in my head, but bastion if I didn’t hate all this prancing around.
    “It does make sense,” Thom continued, stopping up the inkwell he carried around with him and rubbing his thumb over the top nervously. I folded my arms over my chest and waited for him to start making sense.
    “Well, it makes sense that contraband items would be appearing from the conquered territory,” Thom continued. “Not to sound like a lecture—I know how much you hate that—but all the Ke-Han’s resources are no doubt currently quite strained; they can’t attempt to rebuild their city, recall all their soldiers from their stations, deal with the chaos currently visited upon their capital,
and
keep a sharp eye on everything that enters and leaves the city, all at once. The black market thrives even when conditions are prime for stopping it. And besides…”
    “There’s a whole lot more they can sell now,” I finished. Lecture or not, that was something I could understand.
    “It is a curious question,” Thom murmured, suddenly lost in his own little ’Versity world. I wanted to tell him to snap out of it right away, but it was finally a topic that was halfway useful. “One would assume that all the major parts
have
been returned to Volstov—the Esar issued strict commands on that matter. But Balfour
did
say there was a great deal of protest—”
    “Politics,” I muttered. “None of my fucking business. Better than having ’em in a museum, anyway. They wouldn’t’ve wanted it.”
    “It is troubling,” Thom concluded, looking up at me. “A great many things about the past few hours have been exceedingly troubling, but I mean this more on a hypothetical level.”
    “You mean what,” I said, with enough bite to my words to make him rethink the gobbledygook he was currently spouting.
    “There’s a difference between sitting back and watching as you help a man to piss his breeches for information,” Thom clarified, “and wondering what will happen to the world if the technology behind such weaponry is being sold to whoever is capable of paying for it. Do you see the difference?”
    Bastion help me, but I almost fucking laughed.
    “In any case,” Thom went on, looking away from me to attend to his collection of fucking quills, “it would seem that the scale you have now must have come from the Ke-Han capital. The route it traveled is conjecture; we can’t trace its trajectory beyond knowing where it began and where it ended up.”
    “So you’re saying we gotta make a detour into Ke-Han territory?” I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less if I was being perfectly fucking honest with myself. My skin twinged just thinking about it—a whole mess of scars left neat as you please across my back like
I’d
been the one thrown from my horse into some nasty fucking blueberry brambles, only these weren’t by accident. There wasn’t much love lost between the Ke-Han and me, and I was pretty sure they knew what I looked like a little better than some backwater Volstovic farmhands.
    “I…Oh,” said my genius brother, catching up with the lead dog in the race at fucking last. “I suppose that
is
what I’m saying, isn’t it?”
    Not one word about the Hanging Gardens of Wherever, either, and I had to give him credit for that if nothing else.
    Thom drew in a deep breath, so I knew that whatever he said next, it was going to be something real