Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2) by J.C. Staudt

merouil .”
    The man gave him a bewildered look. “ Yarun merouil ,”
he repeated.
    Derrow folded his arms.
    The man’s anger softened to fear as he arrived at the sudden
sobering truth of his predicament. “You do not know me,” he said. “Yes. This is
plain. Allow me to introduce.”
    “I don’t care who you are,” said Derrow. “If the woman
doesn’t want you touching her, you stay away.”
    “Oale Haelicari,” said the man, speaking in a hurry.
    “ You’re Wally? Excuse me… Oale ?” said Jiren
with a laugh. “You. We heard you were some big-shot merchant with a mansion and
tons of slaves. We traveled here with one of them—a murrhod named Tazkitt.
Lethari Prokin brought him back from Belmond for you.”
    Even in the dim light, Oale seemed to pale at the mention of
Lethari’s name. He cast the woman a backward glance, though Raith could not see
enough of her to gauge her reaction. “I have many slaves, and many respectable
friends,” Oale said. “You belong to Lethari Prokin, do you?”
    “For the last time—we don’t belong to anybody,” Jiren
said. “We came here as free men, and we plan on staying that way.”
    Oale made a low gurgling sound. It took Raith a moment to
become aware that he was laughing. “No lathcu is a free man unless the
master-king wills it. Please forgive. Lathcui do not often wander the
city alone and unchained.”
    “So we’ve heard,” said Derrow. “As it happens, the
master-king has allowed us our freedom… even he knows it’s useless to
put us in chains.”
    Oale gave a slow nod and glanced at the remains of his whip.
“I know this also. So I tell you what I do. I let this be…” He grunted,
searching for the word. “Eh… mistake. Misunderstand. I let you go now and I let
woman go, and we forget all this thing.” He waved a hand.
    Raith was grateful, if suspicious, that Oale had decided not
to alert the master-king of their interference. Best make their exit now that
the situation had been diffused. “Jiren. Derrow. Let’s leave this man to his
business so we can attend to ours,” he suggested. “We apologize for the
trouble.”
    The two younger men followed Raith reluctantly as he exited
the tent, leaving Oale and the woman alone inside again.
    “What was that all about?” Derrow asked, when they’d started
back toward the city’s chiseled mountainside wall. “Why did you apologize? You
backed down from that dope like what he was doing was our fault.”
    “He’s hiding something,” Raith said without breaking his
stride.
    “What?”
    “You saw how his mood changed when he realized we weren’t
slaves. There’s more to that situation than he wants anyone to know, and I
think it’s best if we stay out of it. He claimed that woman was his slave, yet
I didn’t see or hear any chains in that tent. Did you?”
    Derrow shook his head.
    “As much as I admire your eagerness to do the brave thing and
save a person in distress, we can’t afford to make trouble of any kind. This is
a different world from our own, and you’d both do well to remember that Ros’s
life is at stake. Our actions have a direct consequence on Tycho Montari’s
treatment of him, and the second we cross that line, we might as well be
putting the knife to his throat ourselves.”
    Neither Jiren nor Derrow raised an objection. The rest of the
walk back they remained as silent as they’d been on the way down.
    Breakfast was on by the time they returned to Sig’s
household. There was a thick, salty smell in the air, and the others were
already seated around the long dining table before a decadent spread. There
were strips of fried meat ribboned with fat, simple round thinbreads, bowls of
seasoned rice, pungent cheeses, and plates of something soft and pillowy that
looked like cooked eggs.
    “Where’ve you been?” asked Ernost Bilschkin, the question
laced with his typical note of worry.
    “Just out for a walk,” Derrow said, slipping into an empty
chair.
    “We were