Free Heart's Desire by Amy Griswold

hair that fell in long curls nearly to her waist. An affectation, he thought, one that didn’t match her practical clothes, a dark leather coat and dark wool trousers tucked into the tops of her stained leather boots.
    â€œDo what?” Daniel said, turning with his hands open. Beside him, Teal’c abandoned his attempts to bend the cell bars and turned reluctantly as well.
    â€œTry to escape,” she said. “This ship is crawling with my men, and unless you can grow wings and fly, I don’t know where you’d be planning to go.”
    â€œI hadn’t gotten that far,” Daniel admitted.
    â€œI see that.” She turned her attention to Teal’c, looking him over with an expression of interest that Daniel didn’t much like.
    â€œYou should release us,” Teal’c said. “Our friends will be looking for us, and it will be unfortunate for you if they find us.”
    â€œAlso unlikely,” the woman said. “But believe me, I have no plans to hold onto you any longer than it takes for me to get a good price for you. You may as well get comfortable in there in the mean time, because I’m not about to let you run around loose as long as I have you aboard.”
    â€œI think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here,” Daniel said. “Let’s start over. I’m Daniel Jackson. This is Teal’c. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish here, there must be a better way of doing it than kidnapping us.”
    â€œMy name is Reba,” the woman said. “You’re aboard my ship, the  Heart’s Desire .”
    â€œPleased to meet you.” He couldn’t entirely keep the note of sarcasm out of his voice. “So, were we just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or what?”
    â€œMore or less,” Reba said matter-of-factly. “I was actually after the metal tablets with the writings of the Ancients.”
    Daniel blinked. “You know what they are?”
    â€œBetter than you do, I think,” Reba said. “There are other copies of the texts. Incomplete copies. The ones I saw were hidden away in one of the temples of Asherah, high in the mountains.”
    â€œAren’t we high in the mountains?”
    â€œHigher,” she said, looking unimpressed. “When I worked out what they were describing, and figured out that the copies were incomplete, I knew I had to find the original tablets. We were hoping to find a less dramatic way of getting our hands on them, but when we heard the High King was planning to trade them to the Tau’ri, we went for dramatic.”
    â€œWhat’s so valuable about the tablets?”
    She shook her head a little. “And why would I possibly want to tell you that?”
    Daniel repressed the urge to say  Actually, I have no idea.  “I might be able to help you interpret them. You said yourself you haven’t seen the full inscriptions before. As far as I can tell from just a couple of looks, they’re using a very abbreviated form of the Ancient language, almost a code, but I’m sure I can work it out.”
    â€œI’ll work it out myself when I have the time,” she said, which suggested that she expected it to be a challenging task herself. While that was disappointing in the sense that he would have liked to meet someone who was more fluent in Ancient than he was, it did suggest that his help really would be of value to her. “I ended up getting my hands on something better.”
    â€œAnd what would that be?” Daniel asked. He had a sudden sinking feeling that she meant them, and considered how best to tread the path between raising unreasonable expectations and making them sound expendable. “Our people will be willing to make some kind of reasonable deal for our safe return, it’s true, but I don’t want you to get the idea —”
    â€œI’m not interested in dealing with the Tau’ri,” Reba