Elka considered that for a moment and then nodded. “Ja,” she said. “It’s better that way. We belong to no one, you and me.” She looked down at the chain that stretched between us. “Only to each other, until we can find a hammer or a good heavy axe.”
The remnants of the town’s shattered edges had begun to smudge and fade with a mist that rose as Elka and I searched from ruined house to ruined house to find some kind of useful implement with which to free ourselves from our shackles. I wondered silently what would happen when we did. Would my reluctant companion leave me to my fate and disappear into the forest as fast as those long legs could take her? Would I do the same to her?
“Tell me something,” Elka said, poking at a drift of leaves and refuse with her rusted sword. “What did you do to gain his favor? The slave master.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the water.” She tilted her head. “And how you always got porridge in your bowl before any of us. And the way Charon talked to you almost as if you were a person.”
I straightened up from searching. “I don’t know.”
“Really.”
“I don’t!” Although I knew, of course, what she was thinking. “I wouldn’t. All I know is that Charon told his men they weren’t allowed to touch me.”
Elka raised an eyebrow at me.
“On the ship, Hafgan—the ugly one with the mismatched eyes,” I muttered, feeling my face grow red, “he . . . he tried to . . .”
Elka’s expression darkened as she realized what had happened, what I couldn’t put into words. I tried to shake off the surge of revulsion and fear from those moments in the slave ship’s hold. “Nothing came of it,” I said in a rush. “Charon found us and stopped him before he could do much more than tear the hem of my tunic. He told Hafgan in plain terms that he’d cut the hand off the next man who so much as laid a finger on me.”
Elka’s angry frown turned contemplative. “But he never told you why?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe he wanted you for himself.”
“Pfft.” I rolled my eyes. “That must be why he never laid a finger on me either.”
“You’re lucky.”
“Did they . . .” I didn’t know how to ask the question. Or even if I should.
“No.” She shook her head. “One of them tried. The brute with the long orange beard. You know the one?”
I nodded.
“I bit off half his ear and kicked him in the balls so hard he still limps. You might have noticed.”
I had noticed, actually. He not only limped, he scowled. A lot.
Elka grinned fiercely. “If we hadn’t run away, Charon would’ve had to pay that bastard blood money, taken out of whatever price I fetched once we got to Rome,” she said. “But I also heard him say that whoever bought me would wind up paying far more than the price of bruised balls and half an ear. He seemed pretty sure of it, so I guess he decided I was worth keeping alive. Anyway, none of the other slavers felt much like trying their luck after that.”
We’d both been lucky, it seemed. I whispered a prayer to the Morrigan that our luck would hold just a little longer.
“Do you think he’ll come after us?” I asked. “Charon?”
Elka opened her mouth to answer, but suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I grabbed her wrist, pulling her down behind rubble that used to be a wall. I hissed at her to be quiet. Shadows at the edge of the weedy town square stirred and grew long, and I feared that my very words had conjured Charon and his men out of the night. Beside me, Elka held her breath.
But I was wrong. It wasn’t the slavers.
It was worse.
VIII
A PAIR OF MEN stepped out from between two burned-out houses and moved silently through drifts of gathered mist on the worn soles of their leather boots. They were long-haired with thick beards and dirt-smudged tunics. For a brief instant, I thought that they might be ghosts—shades of the Arverni dead—but they stepped into the clearing, and the moonlight didn’t shine through them. And the mist moved where they walked.
Elka shifted closer to me so that we were crouching shoulder to shoulder.
“You said the Varini are a warlike tribe?” I murmured, nodding at the sword in her hand. “I hope they taught you how to fight with something more than your knuckles before they bartered you away.”
She spat a quiet curse as the taller of the two gestured in our direction. They knew we were there. They were coming for us. And they were not alone. Other shadows detached themselves from the darkness, and suddenly another pair of men was moving across the town square toward us too. I hissed at Elka and nodded in the direction of the new threat, and I could almost hear her pulse start to race. With nowhere to run, Elka and I stepped into the middle of a wide, clear space where we had unobstructed views on all sides.
“Back to back,” I said tensely.