Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1), Adrian Tchaikovsky [13 ebook reader .txt] 📗

couldn’t tell why, but then he realized that she was simply displaying the bonds. A moment later she was twisting and turning them, an exaggeratedly innocent expression on her face, but she had a hand free in moments. Deadpan, she waved it at him, and then twisted and wriggled it until she was bound once more.

“One of the things about being a thief,” she told him, “is that you learn all sorts of things to do with your hands. So, do we have a deal, deserter?”

“The name’s Gaved,” he snapped.

“Aelta,” was the name she gave him. How attached to her it really was, he could not say.

But when she put her question to him again, he nodded. He had little faith in the impartiality of the Rekef, or in any genuine attachment to justice this Javvi might harbour. And the prospect of travelling in company such as hers was hardly an argument against.

She wouldn’t talk much after that, although he caught her cool eyes on him more than once. The yard outside the Quartermaster’s was quiet now – a lot of Messer’s people must have either been taken up or run off. The little stock of soldiers the Fly commanded patrolled regularly, though, and cast suspicious eyes over the prisoners, and over Gaved most of all. A few stayed to ogle Aelta, but no more than that. The Fly had them on a tight leash.

Only after dark did she make her move. She waited until a lone sentry had made his turn about the yard, dragging his feet somewhat, and then she stopped pretending to sleep, uncurling into a crouch and sliding her hands free.

“Second thoughts?” she murmured.

“Not me,” Gaved confirmed. “So... You’ve a key, or...?”

“Or.” And she began to twist out of her clothes right there. The soldier’s tunic came off first, shrugged over her head, and then she had her britches off, a careful, minimalist ballet of economic motion. Beneath she had only a ragged shift that left very little to his imagination. Her skin gleamed pale in the wan moonlight.

“Like what you see?” she asked him.

His mouth was dry. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think? A private show, for all the fugitive deserters of the world.” But she was staring at his face, trying to read him, to see what his true reaction was, body and mind. “So, you’re a red-blooded soldier after all, are you? Do your duty well enough, there might be a bonus for you at the end.”

With his burn scar and his low status, it wasn’t the sort of offer Gaved got often, his quick nod came without the need to think about it.

“But not before,” she added, still standing there with only a little linen between his eyes and her.

“Is that right?” His voice was rough, when it came out.

She nodded flatly. “Object lesson, deserter.” She gathered up her shed clothes and turned to the cage door, bundling and looping them swiftly about the lock. “For my next trick,” she said softly, working her hands into the muddle of cloth.

He barely heard the stingshot, just a muffled creak and a slight rattle of hinges. All Wasps could sting, of course, women as well as men. A woman’s sting was a feeble thing, though, that was the general belief. They had no chance or need to develop or practice the Art. The only reason a woman had a sting was to give it to her sons.

When she unwrapped her clothes from the door, the wood around the lock had been shattered into charcoal shards, the metal itself hanging loosely by a few splinters. She turned back to him, one white palm presented. In a man, it would have been a threat. Abruptly it was a threat from her, too.

“Easy, now,” he told her.

“Not so easy as you were hoping, I’ll bet.” She slipped from her cell and came right up to his door. If his hands hadn’t been tied behind him, he could have grabbed her through the bars. “But what can I say? I’m a miser with things of value.” And the smile came back. “They have to be earned, Gaved.”

She was pressed up against the slatted wood, half-naked and utterly stripped of the modesty and humility a Wasp woman was supposed to show. And he wanted her very much. There was a part of him telling him to seize her as soon as her back was turned, but he had fought that down before and he did so again now. Perhaps she had seen in his face that Gaved had been many bad things in his time, but never that.

She shattered the lock to his cage as quietly as she had her own, and undid his hands when he turned to present them to her. A moment later she had stepped back swiftly as he stalked out.  That was the first moment where there was nothing between them but distance, and perhaps she had thought he would assert command then and there, just manhandle her away. His mind was already working on the strategy of escape, though.

“Them too,” he said to her, nodding at the Commonwealer prisoners in the third cell. “Give the little maggot as much to chase as possible.”

“You do it,” she told him, and for a moment he felt anger rise in him: the Wasp man he had always been taught to be, denied by a woman. The pressure of time was greater, though, and anyway, all of that way of thinking seemed inextricably linked with the army life he was so desperate to get away from.

He grimaced – good coats were hard to come by – but he copied her scheme and broke the lock on the last cell, though he needed two stingshots to do so. When he turned back to her, she had her clothes on again, though they were scorched and holed, revealing as much as they concealed.

The Commonwealers were already running, scattering too, each one of them to their own path. That