A bald man reached out and touched Klym’s hair, and she shrank back.
Staria shoved him. “Don’t touch the selissa.”
Klym pulled Staria back, Monna and Sylese staring around with wide eyes. “L-let’s just go. Quickly.”
They darted through the crowd, but with all the clapping and cheering and the amplified voices shouting about poverty and yenna and grain, it was impossible to think.
Staria clutched her hand, Monna and Sylese only a breath ahead of them, and the crowd was so thick now that they had to elbow and push their way through, running openly.
Monna disappeared into the crowd. Then Sylese.
More heads turned. People kept grabbing at her hair and pulling it, too hard, smarting and making her eyes water. She lost Staria’s hand.
The last she saw was Staria’s eyes, wide and terrified before she was lost in a sea of hands, tugging at her clothes, touching her hair.
Someone crashed into her. A hard elbow connecting with her orbital bone so hard her vision blackened.
In that moment, far from home, on a foreign planet, surrounded by people who saw her as their enemy, blinking with blurry eyes at a sea of angry faces, she realized something.
She only wanted one person. It wasn’t Agammo. It wasn’t her father.
It was Tor.
Because whenever he was there, he made things okay.
She threw her elbows out and kicked with her feet. Screamed and bucked and hissed. She connected too, and if there was pain she didn’t feel it.
Someone shouted about pale hair, their breath rancid in her face.
Someone else tugged at her clothes. A fist closed around her hair in a grip so strong her eyes burned, and she screamed out, but they kept on pulling.
A hand slid around her waist, a hard groin bumped against her hip.
She connected with someone’s nose, and there was a nauseating crunch, but the pressure never left her scalp. Everything came in bright flashes.
Rancid breath.
The metallic glint of a knife as it slashed near her head and the grip on her hair was gone. The pain faded. More shouts and groping hands, and bodies slamming into her from all sides.
Someone held a length of golden hair over his head, shouting, and she had the vaguest feeling of ridiculous sadness. She’d lost her hair.
A hand closed around her waist, pulling her forward, and a man’s voice growled in her ear. She didn’t understand a word, not amidst the havoc.
She kicked and screamed and shouted, but all her noise was lost in the din of the crowd, and nothing she did made any difference. His grip was far too strong, and every time someone got in his way, he kicked or elbowed them aside, dragging her behind him.
29
He had her what?
TOR PROPPED HIS HIP against the back of the boat, surveying the landscape of the farm in Iurrassa. It was one of the closer farms to the cassia. Tammin grew on trellises in tidy rows up a hillside, vibrant under the sun. Orchards and fields. This was the heart of this country, and this country was the heart of all Vesta.
A broadfly with wide, iridescent wings quivered in the breeze, keeping time with the boat's motion up the river.
The man he’d come to see, Fandig, tapped the rail. He’d been the Captain of the Guard for ten years, then fired by Tor’s father a few years ago for disagreeing with him publicly. He stood on the prow of the boat now, and the last ten years had only made him harder. He crossed his arms. “What you’re asking isn’t simple.”
“I know that.”
“It’s treason.”
“It’s not.” Tor held his finger in front of the bug. “Or maybe it is. But if it’s treason, it’s treason against a government I don’t recognize.”
Fandig rolled his massive shoulders. He was one of about ten men Tor would be scared to face hand to hand. Wide shoulders, long arms, hard sinew and weathered skin. Fandig was no joke. “Your father fired me.”
“That’s a hell of a commendation in my opinion.”
Fandig laughed, but it sounded like a hiss. He was really just blowing air through his teeth. It was more a sound of acknowledged humor than an actual laugh. “Don’t you want to know why?”
“Not really. I knew you, before. I fought with you. I never fought with him. I trust you. I didn’t trust him.”
“Who killed him?”
“Don’t know. Not sure I really care.”
“Sanger?”
“Probably.” The bug landed on Tor’s finger, its slender body so light he scarcely felt it. The wings moved so fast he could barely track them. He brought the bug closer, and he’d have sworn it cocked its head at him, round green eyes trained on him.
Fandig tilted his head. “They say you’re a slave to a foreign whore who won’t even fuck you.”
Tor spread his free arm wide, letting the breeze blow in his shirt, still studying the broadfly on his finger. “You knew me from boyhood, Fandig. Why would I tolerate that?”
“They say she bathes a lot, but no bath could wash away the truth.”
Tor caught his tongue in his teeth and looked out over the land beyond the boat. “She wears my mark. She sleeps in my bed. She’s my wife.”
Fandig opened his mouth, but the buzz of the comm on Tor’s belt stopped him.
Tor glanced at the read. Jeor. He tapped the screen. “Yeah?”
“Klymeni went into the city with a group of felanas.”
The bug’s wings drew together tight when his hand tightened, and it lifted off, getting lost in the breeze. “Who the fuck authorized that?”
“No one,” said Jeor quickly. “They aren’t prisoners.”
“I know they aren’t fucking prisoners, Jeor. Who’d they take?”
“No one.”
He turned away from Fandig’s shrewd gaze. “I hope to hell you’re calling to tell me someone just brought her back.”
“There was a riot.”
Tor bared his teeth against the hillside. She’d run off before he could give her the comm. Fuck. “Where is she now?”
“We don’t know.” There
