The Healing Wars: Book II: Blue Fire (2 page)

I
didn’t know whether to scream or shiver.

Danello scowled. “How could you turn her in? She’s Gevegian, same as you.”

“Look, I could have gone to the Governor-General and gotten the reward money from him. I
didn’t
. But I can’t let five thousand oppas pass me by.” She glanced around the town house, her eyes shimmering with greed. “None of this is yours anyway, so what do you care if I get some? We all win.”

Not if she took so much it drew attention at the alley market. That was the only place in Geveg to sell stolen goods, and even though the soldiers were bribed to look the other way, if enough riches hit the market at once, people noticed, so they
had
to report
it. We could both benefit if she didn’t get too greedy. She needed us to pose as tenants for the Baseeri owner. If he discovered Zertanik was dead, he’d claim everything in the town house for himself.

I looked at Danello, red-faced and shaking his head behind her.

“Can I offer you something in Verlattian teak?” I said, waving at the sitting-room furniture. If she wanted money so badly, let
her
haul it away.

“No, I think those blue crystal decanters are more my style. And maybe these statuettes?” She brushed past me and ran her fingers over the goldstone figures of the Seven Sisters. “These will cover it.”

And then some.

“Help yourself.”

“A lot for one person to carry.”

I gritted my teeth. “I’m sure we can find you a pack of some kind to carry them. Aylin? Could you check upstairs, please?”

Aylin slapped the banister, muttering something about finding a bag big enough to stuff her head into, and disappeared.

The rent collector pursed her lips and looked around the room. “More than just the three of you living here now.”

I crossed my arms. “We have guests for dinner.”

“Oh, I’d say longer than dinner.” She leaned over and looked up the stairs. The Takers fled into their rooms. “What are you all doing here anyway?”

“Trying to survive, same as you.”

She nodded absently. “Nice place. Wish I could move in myself, but the Baseeri scum who owns it would get suspicious, and then all these trinkets would go to waste, eh?”

I kept my face still. She kept scanning the room, the walls, and I pictured her totaling up the oppas. The neighbors would also get suspicious if they saw her carrying out load after load of items. As Grannyma used to say, wealth can make the wise weak, and I doubted the rent collector was all that wise to begin with. She could ruin everything.

Aylin clomped down the stairs and threw a heavy canvas bag at her. “That should hold them.”

“Nothing to wrap them in?” She frowned. “What if they chip?”

“Goldstone doesn’t chip. That’s why it’s so valuable.”

Her eyes lit up. Saints, did she even know the value of what she was taking?

“Really? Anything else made of—”

“Are we paid up now?” I said, hands on my hips. I tried to look menacing, but I’d never been good at
it. Danello was better, and Aylin could do scary as a croc when she wanted.

“Well,” she said slowly, her gaze again on the crystal decanters. “Just to be safe, you might consider paying next month’s rent as well.”

“I think we’ve paid that already,” Tali said from the stairs. Everyone else stood behind her—all the Takers, even Danello’s family. His father looked pretty imposing glaring down at us.

“Maybe even three months,” he said. The rent collector would have to be a fool to miss the threat in his tone. Trouble was, she could threaten us right back, and her threats had a lot more teeth.

She knew it, too. She smirked at them, then carefully stuffed her treasure into the bag. “Oh, I think you’ll be gone by then, with nothing left for me. Why shouldn’t I get all I can now?”

“Because someone will notice,” I said. “And if we have to run, we’ll make sure the owner knows Zertanik moved out.”

She glared at me and tied the bag shut.

I smiled. “Why don’t you come by next week? A weekly visit is a lot
safer
for all of us.”

She hesitated, sizing me up and probably wondering if my emphasis on safer was a threat. If she believed the poster, I
was
a murderer.

“Fine.”

Danello yanked open the door and she jumped. She recovered fast and put her sneer back on her face.

“Next week works better for me anyway.”

She lumbered out, and Danello slammed the door behind her.

“That’s not right!” he said as I sank to the stairs. “She can’t just come in here and—”

“Yes, she can.” I knew how he felt, though. I’d seen the Baseeri do the same thing to my family’s home. Only they took it all. Saints! It wasn’t fair.

“We’d better sell off what we can now,” Tali said, sounding just like Mama. We’d heard her say a lot of things like that right before the war started.
Might as well stock up on food. Jewels trade better out of the setting anyway. You’re safer at the League with your grannyma.
“She’s never been upstairs, so she can’t take what she doesn’t know about.”

“We also need to look for a new place to live,” Aylin muttered.

“Who’s going to rent to us?” Danello said, not nearly as quiet. “And how will we find someplace large enough for everyone?”

Odds were we wouldn’t. “Maybe it’s time to leave Geveg.”

Shocked silence, but they couldn’t argue with the idea. There was a lot of money in the town house, enough to bribe a fisherman for passage off the isle, no matter how tempting the reward was.

“We could go to the marsh farms,” Danello said. “Da, doesn’t your friend need help?”

His father nodded. “He does. He’s barely keeping his farm running. Some money and extra hands would let him hold on to it and help us out.”

The Duke cared about Takers and pynvium, not sweet potatoes and sugar. I’d never done any farming before, but it sounded good. Honest work, fresh food, open fields with lots of places to run and hide if we had to. The soldiers probably wouldn’t look for us in the marsh farms either. Mama used to take Healers there every few months since the farmers didn’t have their own, and it always took her at least a week to visit them all.

“Should you ask him first?” I asked. “Showing up with fifteen people is a lot to put on a person on short notice.” And I didn’t want to abandon the town house until we knew we had somewhere to go.

“Might not be a bad idea. I haven’t spoken to him since we went into hiding. He may have lost the place by now.”

“How fast can you get there and back?” We’d
need time to search the town house for as many valuables as we could carry anyway.

“A day or two. He’s not far from the marsh docks.”

Danello’s little sister, Halima, dashed over and hugged him.

“I won’t be gone long, don’t you worry,” his father began, then looked at Danello. “You okay to watch them?” Something in his tone made me think he meant more than just the family.

Danello nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on everyone.”

“Hold them safe. I’ll be home tomorrow night.”

“Be careful, Da.”

“I will.” He sounded strong, but I caught the worry in his eyes.

Bahari glared at me at like I was purposely sending his father away. Jovan nodded stoically as ever, while Halima just looked scared. Danello’s father hugged his family one more time, then went upstairs to pack a bag.

“What about the Takers?” Tali asked after a minute.

“They’ll come with us.”

She shook her head. “I mean the ones we haven’t found yet. There are dozens more out there at least.”

“Tali, I can’t save everyone.”

“I know, but—”

“If we stay here, we risk everyone else getting caught.”

“Maybe we can get the word out that we’re leaving so more can come find us?”

“Someone besides the Takers will find out. The soldiers are actively looking for me now.”

She sighed and nodded. “I was just hoping to find a few more missing friends.”

“Me too. Maybe we’ll find some before we have to leave.” I turned to the group gathered on the stairs. “Everyone, go to your rooms and start searching for anything of value. Smaller is better since we’ll have to carry it, but if it’ll sell, grab it.”

“Who’s gonna sell it?” asked one of the less-trusting Takers we’d found. I couldn’t blame him. League guards had broken into his family’s home in the middle of the night looking for him. He’d barely gotten away.

“We’ll choose folks to go to the alley market first thing in the morning. If a bunch of us hit the vendors, it won’t be as obvious we’re selling off a lot at once and they won’t lower the prices on us. After, we’ll split up the oppas and make sure everyone has enough in case we get separated.”

This seemed to make everyone happy.

“A friend who repairs boats has been helping us smuggle people off the isle. He usually has several at a time he’s working on, so he’ll have enough space to get us all to the mainland.” Risky to use Barnikoff again if there was a chance he was being watched, but we could trust him. He had a good heart and no love for the Duke. “With a little luck, we’ll be able to leave tomorrow night as soon as Danello’s father returns.”

Or a lot of luck. It wasn’t nearly as easy to get off the isle as I was making it out to be, but they didn’t need anything more to worry them.

“What happens if this farmer doesn’t want us there?” a Taker asked.

“We’ll find another farm. Let’s not worry about that right now. Once we get out of the city, we’ll have more time to figure out where to go without soldiers breathing down our necks.”

Aylin kept sneaking me looks, and she’d have her own set of questions as soon as she got me alone. So would Tali, no doubt.

The others though? A few looked unsure about this plan, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they grabbed their share of the money and ran. And Saints help me, a few less people to worry about suited me just fine.

But what if we weren’t welcome anywhere? Refugees from the Duke’s siege of Verlatta couldn’t be fleeing just to Geveg. The farms might be flooded with them. We might get there only to find there was no room for us.

Or worse, we might find the Duke cared about sweet potatoes after all and there was nowhere to run
to
.

“Can we keep any of this for ourselves?” Tali asked as we searched through the drawers in Zertanik’s study. She dangled a string of rose-colored beads from her fingers.

“We need to sell as much as we can. We don’t know who we’ll have to bribe or how long it’ll take us to find work once we’re settled.”

“What if we can’t find a place?”

“We will. Hand me that knife, would you? This drawer is locked.”

Tali slipped the beads over her head and passed me the knife. “Half the drawers and cabinets in this place are locked. Zertanik didn’t trust people, did he?”

I jammed the knife into the lock. “He
was
a thief.”

“I guess that would do it.”

The lock popped and I pulled the drawer out. Stacked on the bottom were pages written in neat glyphs, like Papa used to write.

Those are funny letters, Papa. What do they do?

They help me teach the pynvium to hold pain, Nya-Pie.

Pynvium talks to you?

No, but it listens.

“Nya?” Tali touched my arm and I dropped the pages. They fluttered to the carpet. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just…nothing.” I grabbed for the pages before she saw them, but she snatched one first.

“Papa used to write like this.”

“I know.”

“Enchanter’s glyphs.”

It surprised me she even remembered. She’d been seven when he died, and he hadn’t done much enchanting in the year before that. Like everyone else in Geveg, he’d been busy fighting a losing war.

She stared at the pages, her eyes watering, then wiped away the tears. “Are they worth anything?”

“I don’t know. Depends on the enchantment, I guess.”

“They’re easy to carry, so we should try to sell
them.” She collected the pages from the floor and smoothed them. “Are there more?”

“I didn’t look.”

She rooted around in the drawer and pulled out a thin pynvium plate the size of a book. Glyphs were carved into the metal with the same neat handwriting as the papers. Shiverfeet raced down my spine.

“Ooo, pretty.” She ran her fingers across the glyphs. “This is worth something for the pynvium alone. Look how blue the metal is. It has to be pure.” She handed it to me.

I jerked away. “That’s okay.”

“What’s wrong?” She stared at me funny, then looked at the pynvium. “It won’t bite.”

“I…” Didn’t want to touch it. Didn’t even want to be in the same
room
with it, and I couldn’t say why. “Put it back.”

“Put it
back
? Do you know how much this is worth?”

With the pynvium shortage going on, probably more than anything else in the town house. I still didn’t want it near me. “But it’s…wrong.”

She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. The way I felt, maybe I had. “Fine, it’s gone,” she said. It thunked into the drawer and she shoved it closed.

I could feel it though, and I’d never been able to sense pynvium in my life. Hadn’t even sensed
that
one until I saw it. It didn’t feel like what Tali had described when she’d tried to teach me how to push pain into pynvium like a real Healer. No call, no hum, just a quiver at the bottom of my stomach.

It couldn’t be my shifting ability, either. Moving pain from person to person had nothing to do with those glyphs. But there was sure as spit
something
wrong.

“I’m going to go check the library,” I said, jumping to my feet.

“Nya!”

I ignored her, eager to get out of that room and away from the pynvium. I shut the library door and flopped into a chair big enough for me
and
Tali. The quiver faded, but my unease remained.

What was wrong with that pynvium? I’d never felt that way around the metal before.

A chest with a band of blue around the lid, carved with glyphs. Men from the Pynvium Consortium had brought it, and Papa had yelled at them. “You brought that here? To my home? You don’t even know what it does!”