Dak waved to the back, to a hard bamboo seat in front of the engine and a pulsing green power supply. Yanko and Lakeo climbed in.
“Where are we going?” Yanko asked as Akstyr coerced the vehicle into motion. It groaned under the combined weight, but trundled off toward the road obediently.
“The Komitopis plantation,” Dak said.
Lakeo shrugged. The name sounded vaguely familiar to Yanko, like he might have read it in a newspaper. He puzzled over it, but they were well out of the city and driving along a dark road overlooking cliffs and the ocean before the answer came to him. That was the surname of the Turgonian president’s Kyattese wife.
Chapter 14
T
he plantation lay several miles outside of the city, with few lights burning to show off the land, but Yanko smelled the mango and citrus orchards they passed and recognized fields of sugar cane crowding the road. It grew down by the coast back home, and he remembered a boyhood trip he had gone on with Great Uncle Lao Zun to harvest some for the baker back in the village. A twinge of homesickness filled him, and he found himself wondering if his family was all right and if they were missing him. Instead, he should have been concentrating on the fact that he was going to the homestead of someone who at best must be a Turgonian sympathizer.
Snores floated from Lakeo’s side of the seat. Apparently, she wasn’t worried.
Akstyr and Dak had been having a long, quiet conversation up front, and Yanko would have given his mother’s robe to be able to understand it. He couldn’t imagine what they might have in common, aside from their nationality. Akstyr didn’t seem like someone who responded well to authority figures or liked to talk to adults, even if he might be old enough to be one now.
Now and then, Dak glanced into the night behind them, and it made Yanko nervous every time. If these were some friends of his, then why would he bring trouble here? Unless he thought the people here were capable of handling it. Yanko didn’t think he had ever read that the Turgonian president’s wife was a practitioner, but maybe she had kin back here who were? Still, there was the mage hunter, as well as the warrior mage, after Yanko. Even a powerful magic-user could fall to an assassin’s blade.
They passed a bunkhouse with a couple of lights burning and men’s voices raising in laughter from inside. Beyond it, a large rambling house came into view, with magical lamps brightening the cleared land around it. Despite the size, its log walls made it feel more rustic than palatial, and it looked like it might house multiple generations of a large family, much like Yanko’s own home.
The plump, gray-haired woman whose face Yanko had glimpsed in the communication orb waited next to a swing hanging on the front porch, alongside a boy and girl his age or perhaps a little younger. Grandchildren? Another figure—a man in dark clothes—leaned against the wall on the other side of the door. He stayed in the shadows.
Akstyr rolled the open-air carriage to a stop in front of the steps, waved to the grandmother, and gave the teenagers a salute, the female one most likely. She smiled back at him, but seemed more curious about Dak, Yanko, and Lakeo.
“This is our port,” Dak said, hitting more body parts on the carriage frame as he climbed out.
“Greetings,” Yanko told the crowd as he stepped out, then attempted the salutation in Kyattese, as well.
The grandmother ambled down the stairs with the help of a cane and examined Dak. She plucked at his shirt, clucked her tongue, and said something that sounded like the Nurian equivalent of, “You’re as scrawny as a chicken leg. We’ll have to fatten you up.” It sounded grandmotherly, anyway, and Yanko almost choked. As brawny and tough as Dak was, it was hard to imagine anyone daring to mother him. Did he even
have
a mother? It seemed implausible. But he did not fight off the woman. He merely sighed and looked at the man in the shadows.
Yanko glanced at him, too, but was more curious about the teenagers because they wore a few magical baubles, and the girl carried a book the size of a small table. He couldn’t read the title in the dim lighting, but it had the heft and age of a Science tome. Maybe she was also studying to become a mage.
“You
are
from Nuria,” the man in the shadows said in Nurian.
The grandmother was now clucking over Lakeo, Dak was grabbing his gear, and Yanko realized the shadowy figure was talking to him.
“Yes... sir.” He couldn’t guess at what the man’s title or status would be and winced at what was an inappropriate honorific. “I’m Yanko.”
“Clan name?”
Yanko hesitated. The man hadn’t shared
his
name yet, and if he was from the Great Land, he might recognize the significance—or lack of significance—of Yanko’s. Still, the manners that had been ingrained in him demanded he answer an elder.
“White Fox.”
“Oh? Huh. I’d expected... or assumed you would be from a more distinguished family. And older,” he tacked on as if he had realized his other words had been insulting. “I’m Mee Nar Silver Star. Or I was before I retired and moved here. Over there actually.” He waved up the beach in the opposite direction from town.
“Yes, he’s been spying on the house for some twenty years, I understand,” Dak said, giving Mee Nar his squinty-eyed glare. “I wonder how long it was after you heard we were coming that you waited before showing up here. Five minutes? Two?”
“Spy? I’ve merely been enjoying the climate,” Mee Nar said blandly. “Being married. Having children. Hardly the activities of a spy. I’m certain
you’re
far more aware of what that lifestyle entails than I am.”
Yanko kept his mouth shut and did his best to filter out the conversation Lakeo and the grandmother were having—which, yes, had to do with not eating enough food—so he could listen to this one. They were being good enough to speak in Nurian. Maybe he would finally find out what the rest of Dak’s name was and what mission he was on.
“I doubt it,” Dak said, then turned his back on Mee Nar and spoke to the grandmother in Kyattese again.
She pointed toward the front door.
“This way.” Dak gripped Yanko’s shoulder and prodded him toward the steps.
Yanko almost balked, wanting to hear more from this Nurian, even if he had been somewhat insulting. It wasn’t as if Yanko wasn’t used to that. But Dak’s prodding turned more determined, and Yanko would have had to fight to escape—and he would lose any fight with Dak. He didn’t want strangers to see him carried across the threshold over his bodyguard’s shoulder, so he went along meekly.
He did manage a glance back at Mee Nar and caught more of his face this time. His hair was far more gray than black, and he had a potbelly. Not the image Yanko had in mind for a spy, but then neither was Dak.
The scents of roasting pork and pineapple teased Yanko’s nose as soon as they made it into the house’s open great room, and his stomach gurgled, reminding him that he had not eaten since breakfast, and that had only been a couple of rock-hard biscuits from the ship.
Before his nose could lead him to the source of the food, an ear-splitting squawk came from the left of the door. A large red and blue parrot perching on a coat tree peered at Yanko and Dak.
“Jorrats, jorrats!” the bird announced, then followed it up with a stream of Kyattese words Yanko did not recognize.
Dak sighed.
“That’s a racial slur, isn’t it?” Yanko asked, stopping to return the bird’s stare. “Against Turgonians? It’s the Kyattese word for ape, isn’t it?”
Dak opened his mouth to respond, but the parrot spoke again. “Puntak, puntak!”
“Oh,” Yanko said. “I know that one.” Another racial label, it referred to Nurian slitted eyes. Yanko scratched his head, trying to imagine the old grandmother outside teaching the bird such words.
“Yes,” Dak said, “it’s particularly fond of me. The story I got is that Mela’s father was very against his granddaughter marrying a Turgonian and had a lot of impolite things to say about anyone who wasn’t Kyattese. And a lot of Kyattese too. This was his bird.”
“So, he passed on, but the parrot didn’t?” Yanko shared a soothing feeling with the bird. It was a male that was prancing around on its perch, an agitated ruffle to his feathers.
“Ten years ago. The family keeps leaving the doors and windows open, hoping the bird will return to the wild, but it was with the old man for thirty years. It seems content to continue living here.” Dak waved to a dining room as large as the great room. “You can sit at the table. The family has eaten, but Mela said she’ll bring us something. She’ll insist on it. Vehemently, if not violently.”
“You know these people.” Yanko headed for the table, not about to argue with food.
The bird had calmed down—and stopped calling them names.
“I’ve passed through Kyatt a couple of times,” Dak said.
“Isn’t it dangerous to bring us here then? What if our presence causes trouble for this family?” This family that was related to the Turgonian president’s family. All Yanko needed was for something to befall them because of him. Then he would have Turgonians hunting him, as well as Nurians.
“The twins have warded the grounds around the house and are capable of defending themselves from mages.”
The twins? The two teenagers on the porch? “They’re younger than I am. You’re going to pit them against mages and assassins? Don’t forget the mage hunter.”
“They’re precocious. This won’t be their first battle, and I’ll be around. But my understanding of the household’s defenses is that they should be intimidating enough to convince a wizard not to step foot on the property.”
“I didn’t notice anything when we were driving in.”
“I don’t think they were active. Or maybe it was because we came in the family’s runabout. I don’t pretend to understand magic that well.”
Lakeo and the grandmother—Mela, presumably—walked inside. The twins jogged after her, but only waved before charging for stairs at the back of the great room. They almost knocked over a blond man in his twenties, but grabbed his arm and swept him upstairs with them, a whirlwind collecting all in its path.
“They’re excited to plan upgrades to their defenses,” Mela said, speaking in Nurian this time, even as she propelled Lakeo toward a chair. “Sit, sit. There’s plenty of food left. Dak, you sit too. Too skinny.” She pinched his side again on her way back, clucked, and gave Lakeo a wink that startled Yanko.
Not sure how to interpret that, Yanko merely sat in one of the chairs.
“Do you want help—” Dak started to ask, but Mela hushed him to silence and disappeared into the kitchen.
“The, ah, neighbor isn’t invited to dinner?” Yanko asked.
“No,” Dak said, his glare quelling.
Yanko shrugged easily, but he was thinking that he might like to talk to this neighbor. Especially if Dak didn’t want him to. If Mee Nar had been living here as long as he had implied, might he have ferreted out some of the Kyattese people’s secrets? Maybe Yanko could sneak out of the house later and try to find him. Of course, he would have to get more details as to the “defenses” the twins were developing. And whose twins they were, for that matter. He had yet to see anyone of the age to be parents of teenagers. More important, dare he try to confide in them? If they were his age, they might be willing to have some secrets from the adults, a conspiracy of youth. But would they know Nurian? The grandmother spoke it wonderfully, as had that librarian. Maybe it was taught in the schools here.
“Here we are,” Mela said, carrying a tray almost as wide as she was tall into the dining room at the same time as Akstyr entered through a back door, toting an armload of books, which he plopped down on one end of the table.
“You live here?” Lakeo asked him.
“Until I am paying for a dwelling for me.” Akstyr gave a wistful look toward the stairs.
Mela set the tray down, jostling his arm in the process, and narrowing her eyes at him briefly before unloading plates and silverware and inviting them all to enjoy the food.
Yanko stood up and pressed his hands together for a bow. “Thank you, Honored Host. We appreciate your offering.”
Mela paused and blinked a few times at him. “You’re welcome, young man. Akstyr, that discussion we had on manners? This was it.” She pointed at Yanko, then headed into the kitchen.
Akstyr called something after her in Kyattese. If Yanko had to guess, he would translate it as Akstyr was pretending not to have understood.
After she left, Akstyr grabbed a chunk of pork off the platter, not bothering to take a plate, and flung open one of his books. But he only eyed the pages for a moment before glancing at the kitchen door and sighing. “She thinks I be too old.”
“To learn manners?” Yanko suggested.
“For the girl?” Lakeo guessed.
Akstyr looked toward the stairs again and said, “Koanani,” this time with a longer sigh.
“I thought you were on the hunt for Nurian women.”
“Only because Koanani is... does not... Mela said... It’s not wrong. I am nineteen. She is sixteen. And she is—” Akstyr lifted his hands in the air as if he might outline her attributes, but he caught Dak glaring at him and let them drop down again. “Mature. And sweet. And beautiful. Shiny. Voracious.”
“We need to work on your Nurian adjectives,” Lakeo said.
Yanko wasn’t that concerned about Akstyr’s female problems—even if he could empathize completely. He dug into the barbecued pork, pineapple rings, and a number of vegetables he did not recognize. Local varieties, presumably. Slathered in a savory white sauce, they were delicious, but he barely noticed the food after the first few bites. His mind was on the neighbor again and how to run out and find him. If he waited until everyone in the house went to bed, Mee Nar might be back in his home and in bed, as well.
The parrot squawked and started chanting a single word over and over.
Yanko touched his mind, trying to get a sense for what he wanted, but the answer soon came when the kitchen door opened, and Mela walked out, a small basket of chips in hand. Thanks to the bird, Yanko now knew the word for taro chips. He smiled, faintly amused at the idea of a parrot being his tutor. But as the bird chomped on its treat, a new idea jumped into his head. What if the bird could deliver a message for him?