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‘Well, well,’ he exclaimed in vast satisfaction.

‘I do believe I’ve earned myself quite a bonus here.

Quite a bonus.’ His eyes roved up and down Wintrow, taking in the straw clinging to his worn robe, to the shackles around his chafed ankles and his face white with cold.

‘Well, well,’ he repeated. ‘Doesn’t look as if your freedom lasted long, holy boy. ’

‘Do you know this prisoner?’ the keeper demanded as he came to stand beside Torg.

‘Indeed I do. His father is… my business partner. He has been wondering where his son disappeared to.’

‘Ah. Then it is fortunate for you that you have found him today. Tomorrow, his freedom would have been forfeit for his fine. He would have been tattooed the Satrap’s slave, and sold.’

‘The Satrap’s slave.’ The grin came back to Torg’s face. His pale eyebrows danced over his grey eyes. ‘Now there’s an amusing idea.’ Wintrow could almost see the slow workings of Torg’s brain. ‘How much is the boy’s fine?’ he demanded suddenly of the keeper.

The old man consulted a tally-cord at his waist. ‘Twelve bits of silver. He killed one of the Satrap’s other slaves, you know.’

‘He what?’ For a moment Torg looked incredulous.

Then he burst out laughing. ‘Well, I doubt that, but I imagine there’s quite a tale attached to it.

So. If I come back with twelve silver bits tonight, I buy him free.

What if I don’t?’ He narrowed both his eyes and grin as he asked, more of Wintrow than the keeper, ‘What would he sell for tomorrow?’

The keeper shrugged. ‘Whatever he would bring. New slaves are generally auctioned. Sometimes they have friends or family who are willing to buy them free. Or enemies eager to have them as slaves. The auction bidding can be quite fierce. And sometimes amusing as well.’ The keeper had seen who had the power and was playing to him.

‘You could wait it out, and buy him back. Perhaps you’d save a coin or two.

Perhaps you’d have to pay more. But he would be marked by then, marked with the Satrap’s sigil.

You or his father could grant him his freedom after that, of course.

But he’d have to have some tattoo from you, and some sort of paper or ring to say he was free. ’

‘Couldn’t we just burn the tattoo off?’ Torg asked callously.

His eyes devoured Wintrow’s face, looking for some kind of fear.

Wintrow refused to show any. Torg would never dare to let it go so far.

This was but the same kind of mockery and taunting the man always indulged in.

If Wintrow gave any sign of being upset by it, Torg would only indulge in more of it.

He let his eyes wander past Torg as if he were no longer interested in him or his words.

‘Burning off a slave-tattoo is illegal,’ the keeper pronounced ponderously. ‘A person with a burn scar to the left of his nose is assumed to be an escaped and dangerous slave. He’d be brought right back here, if he were caught. And tattooed again with the Satrap’s sign.’

Torg shook his head woefully, but his grin was evil. ‘Such a shame, to mark such a sweet little face as that, eh? Well,’ he turned abruptly aside from him. With a jerk of his head, he indicated the slaves he had not yet inspected. ‘Shall we continue?’

The keeper frowned. ‘Do you want me to send for a runner? To take word of this boy to his father?’

‘No, no, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll see his father hears of his whereabouts. He’s not going to be pleased with the boy. Now what about this woman? Has she any special skill or training?’ His voice caressed the last two words, making it a cruel joke on the elderly hag who crouched before them.

Wintrow stood trembling in his pen. The anger he felt inside him threatened to burst him wide open.

Torg would leave him here, in cold and filth, for as long as he could.

But he’d tell his father, and then come down here with him to witness their confrontation.

With a sudden cold sinking of his heart, Wintrow considered how vast his father’s anger would be.

He’d feel humiliated as well. Kyle Haven did not like to be humiliated.

He’d find ways of expressing that to his son.

Wintrow leaned against the wall of his pen miserably.

He should have just waited and endured. It was less than a year now to his fifteenth birthday.

When it came, he would declare himself a man independent of his father’s will, and just step off the ship wherever it was.

This foolish attempt at running away was only going to make the months stretch longer.

Why hadn’t he waited? Slowly he sank down to sit in the straw in the corner of his pen.

He closed his eyes to sleep. Sleeping was far better than considering his father’s anger to come.

‘Get out,’ Kennit repeated in a low growl. Etta stood where she was, her face pale, her mouth firm. One hand held a basin of water, the other was draped in bandaging.

‘I thought a fresh bandage might be more comfortable,’ she dared to say. ‘That one is stiff with dry blood and—’

‘Get out!’ he roared. She whirled, sloshing water over the rim of the basin and fled. The door of his cabin thudded shut behind her.

He had been awake and clear-headed since early morning, but those were the first words he had spoken to anyone.

He had spent most of that time staring at the wall, unable to grasp that his luck had forsaken him.

How could this have happened to him? How was it possible for Captain Kennit to suffer this?

Well. It was time. Time to see what the bitch had done to him, time to take command again.

Time. He braced his fists deep in his bedding and hauled himself upright to a sitting position.

When his injured leg dragged against the bedding, the pain was such that he felt ill.

A new sweat broke out on him, plastering his stinking nightshirt to his back once more.

Time. He grabbed the bed clothes and tore them aside.

He looked down at the leg she had ruined.

It was gone.

His nightshirt had been carefully folded and pinned back from it.

There were his legs, swarthy and hairy as ever.

But one stopped short, snubbed off in a dirty brownish wad of bandaging just below his knee.

It couldn’t be. He reached toward it, but could not touch it.

Instead, stupidly, he put his hand on the empty linen where the rest of his leg should have been.

As if the fault might have been with his eyes.

He keened, then drew a breath and held it.

He would not make another sound. Not one sound.

He tried to remember how it had come to this.

Why had he ever brought the crazy bitch aboard, why had they been attacking slaveships in the first place?

Merchant-ships, that was where the money was.

And they didn’t have a herd of serpents trailing after them, ready to grab a man’s leg.

This was their fault, Sorcor’s and Etta’s.

But for them, he’d still be a whole man.

Calm. Calm. He had to be calm, he had to think this through.

He was trapped here, in this cabin, unable to walk or fight.

And Etta and Sorcor were both against him.

What he had to figure out now was if they were in league with one another.

And why had they done this to him? Why? Did they hope to take the ship from him?

He took another breath, tried to organize his thoughts.

‘Why did she do this to me?’ A second thought occurred to him.

‘Why didn’t she just kill me then? Was she afraid my crew would turn on her?

’ If so, then perhaps she and Sorcor were not in league…

‘She did it to save your life.’ The tiny voice from his wrist was incredulous.

‘How can you be this way? Don’t you remember it at all?

A serpent had you by the leg, he was trying to pick you up and flip you into the air so he could gulp you down.

Etta had to cut your leg off. It was the only way to keep him from getting all of you. ’

‘I find that very difficult to believe,’ he sneered at the charm.

‘Why?’

‘Because I know her. That’s why.’

‘As do I. Which is why that answer doesn’t make sense either,’ the face observed cheerily.

‘Shut up.’

Kennit forced himself to look at the wrapped stump. ‘How bad is it?’ he asked the charm in a low voice.

‘Well, for starters, it’s gone,’ the charm informed him heartlessly. ‘Etta’s hatchet chop was the only clean part of the severing. The part the serpent did was half chewed and half sort of melted away. The flesh reminded me of melted tallow. Most of that brown stuff isn’t blood, it’s oozing pus.’

‘Shut up,’ Kennit said faintly. He stared at the clotted, smeary bandaging and wondered what was beneath it. They had put a folded cloth beneath it, but there was still a smear of ochre stuff across his fine, clean linen. It was disgusting.

The little demon grinned up at him. ‘Well, you asked.’

Kennit took a deep breath and bellowed, ‘Sorcor!’

The door flew open almost immediately, but it was Etta who stood there, teary and distraught. She hastened into the room. ‘Oh, Kennit, are you in pain?’

‘I want Sorcor!’ he declared, and even to himself it sounded like the demand of a petulant child.

Then the brawny first mate filled the doorway.

To Kennit’s dismay, he looked as solicitous as Etta as he asked, ‘Is there naught I can do for you, Captain?’ Sorcor’s unruly hair stood up as if he had been pulling at it, and his face was sallow beneath its scars and weathering.