The Pirate and the Amber Cat 34

Chapter 34

The game board resets.

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Cortleno stood scowling at the Lita Nysse's bow the next evening, watching Elgin and Laris wade through the port's thick traffic. They were alone, as the other four crewmen had been when they returned from tracking the slave trails from the Lusson mine. As they grew nearer, his hope soured into a vengeance that wasn't entirely a result of Joshan's absence.

When they met him it was the same story. The trail had ended at an old Shaenen mine and, after careful bribery, they learned Joshan Ve D'Arkaise was not among the boys chained together. Only two more crewmen were due to return. They had followed the most worn trail heading south.

To Ibereth, Cortleno suspected. He had little confidence Shaenen would allow Joshan to be transported to a mine that the pirate knew well. Surely Juriz was not that foolish. And he knew if Joshan was not found at any of the mines, it was because he was dead.

Cortleno gave the two loyal men a bag of silver pieces each and they set back out into town to seek other comforts. He watched them go, but had no wish to indulge himself as they did.

He sat on the quarterdeck's short stair, looking out over the village without seeing it. For four months he had tried and failed to achieve his brother's release. The time was coming for a more direct approach.

In all honesty, he had to admit he hardly knew his younger sibling. Joshan was born while he had been enslaved in the belly of the Ibereth mine, and the boy was nearly three years old the first time he did lay eyes on him.

But what he recalled most, with unwavering clarity, was his mother's ceaseless grief when she told him her suspicions about Joshan's disappearance six months ago. Only too well her words echoed in his head at night since then.

He smiled as he recalled his widowed mother's delight at his own return. After four years in the mines and another three sailing with Captain Dell, she had given him up for dead. When Cortleno docked late that sunny afternoon in Trislen and walked through the modest town he had once called home, she spotted him immediately from the herb garden. He remembered it so well because she had let her youngest son fall as her arms opened wide to welcome him. She had actually dropped poor Joshan. Her thins arms had come around Cortleno's neck with a suffocating strength as he stooped to pick up the whimpering toddler. Her body had seemed so frail, so twig-like to emit such an embrace.

His face hardened as his thoughts returned to the present. He wanted to see that distant reunion again, from a different angle.