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

Her looks had already drawn a few admiring stares, and Gaved had firmly turned down a couple of quite profitable offers for her presumed services. Seeing that, she had taken over the situation, as apparently she had a penchant for, and cosied up to Sharmen himself, putting herself beyond the ambitions of the common soldiery. She teased the lieutenant gently and laughed at his jokes, and Gaved felt a sour jealousy come over him whenever she did. Fool, he told himself, but there was a hook in him and he could not deny it. He found himself recalling their journey together so far. Had there been an opportunity he had missed? Was the fear of her sting the thing that stood between her and his rightful Wasp-kinden urges? The turmoil of thoughts made him feel ill, and they would not go away.

Late on, the day after that, Sharmen found a village that he had orders to bring the joys of the Empire to, and Gaved was not sorry to take his leave of the man. That morning he had been forced to endure a particularly awkward conversation with the lieutenant, one he should have been expecting.

“This woman of yours, Gaved,” Sharmen had observed, “what’s the deal with her?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

Sharmen had cocked a sceptical eyebrow. “Come on now, she’s no slave of yours, not the way she talks. And she’s not yours any other way, either. Even the densest of my men have worked out she’s not for sale. So, she’s good family, perhaps, and you’re a bodyguard? But why the nonsense about hunting runaways?” Apparently the boy lieutenant was rather sharper than Gaved had thought.

“It’s not nonsense, sir,” and Gaved had contrived to suggest by omission that, yes, there was more to it, but that he had been ordered to keep his mouth shut. Orders were always a good excuse.

Aelta had heard the lot, and afterwards she met Gaved’s accusing frown coolly, without a hint of remorse. Soon after, with Sharmen’s crew out of earshot, Gaved tried to interest her in an argument, but she just smiled at him in a way that suggested she knew full well what had got under his skin. They travelled the next half-mile in silence. That was when Javvi caught up to them.

It was all executed with creditable efficiency. Gaved and Aelta had been trudging along a stretch of road cut into a sparsely-wooded hillside. Up ahead, cover was provided by the wreckage of an Imperial war-automotive, defeated by mud and weather rather than any effort of the locals, then left to rust by the army’s swift advance. Gaved’s excuse was that Aelta, her conduct and her charms and the sweep of her long legs as she strode ahead of him, was too much on his mind.

There was a startled moment of blurred movement before he was bundled to the ground, a pair of soldiers dragging him down and one getting a hand to his head, warm with Wasp Art that was ready to sear.

He had a lopsided glimpse of Aelta spinning, hands coming up, and then Javvi himself stepped between them. The Rekef man had a crossbow levelled at her, quite a big piece in his small hands, and strung with two sets of arms for extra power. Weapons like that didn’t care if the finger on their sensitive trigger was the child-size digit of a Fly-kinden.

“Shackle him,” the Fly ordered, and the two soldiers wrestled Gaved into steel manacles, wrenching his arms behind his back.

“No burning your way out of these, deserter,” one of them growled, and Gaved almost blurted out that it hadn’t been him, that Aelta...

The woman was standing, as downcast and meek as he could ever have wished. Once Gaved was properly secured, one of the soldiers went over and did the same service for her: hands behind her back this time, but trussed with rope. He got a hand on her breast, as he did it, making her cry out. Gaved expected that to be the prelude to worse, but Javvi was apparently a stickler.

“None of that,” the Fly snapped, and his diminutive word was law.

“Sir, they’re trouble,” the other soldier said sourly. “Do we need to take them back?” He had an open hand directed at Gaved, the meaning clear enough.

Javvi gave him a narrow look. “When we return them to custody I will review the evidence against them and apply the appropriate sentence, soldier. Justice will be done, exactly and to the letter. Law and justice, without which our society is nothing.” Had it not been for the little man’s heart-of-Empire accent, Gaved might have wondered if he had somehow wandered in from Collegium or somewhere.

“Pitch camp, now,” Javvi ordered. “One of you on watch at all times. Get the deserter lashed to a tree so he doesn’t get any ideas.”

“What about her, sir?” The soldier’s look at Aelta was full of possibilities.

Javvi scowled, a man frustrated by his own tools. Aelta herself was still being the submissive Wasp woman, her pose eloquently suggesting how she had been dragged off by fierce, lustful Gaved. A victim, said her stance.

“She can sleep at the front of my tent. Tie her hands to the poles and keep an eye on her,” the Fly decided.

They were none too gentle with Gaved, forcing him to his knees and then twisting his arms so that they could loop a cord through his manacles and up over a tree branch. No sleep for Gaved tonight, it seemed.

He was waiting for Aelta to try something. Her cowering didn’t fool him for a moment. He watched the soldier who’d drawn the short straw take the first watch, stamping and pacing about, and huddling close to the fire. Gaved’s eyes skipped to the supine form of the woman from time to time, waiting for her move. Past midnight the watch changed, the second soldier yawning his way over to poke the embers and curse his predecessor for not cutting some