Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 Galvin, Aaron (classic fiction txt) 📖

Sydney sagged in her chair. Garrett is gone? She wondered. Like, really gone? She looked to Owens again in his cage for confirmation of her question. When her former classmate hung his head, she knew that it was true. But why? She fought against the welling in her eyes. Why would he leave us behind, Owens? Where would Garrett even go? She wondered, remembering their scattered talks on the swim to New Pearlaya after the attack on Crayfish Cavern and all that Garrett had encountered there at the hands of Selkie slavers. How different he had seemed. No longer the carefree, jokester she had known ashore, but a moodier and lonely shade of himself. Sydney rubbed her arms to warm them at the thought of Garrett swimming away from the city she had been so eager to see. He’d be alone all over again . . .

At the trial’s center, Rupert was rounding on Makeda. “We would, of course, love to speak more with this Recruit Weaver, and to determine the truth or no of this situation. Any idea where he might be now, pod mother?”

“No . . .”

“You will not hazard a simple guess?” Rupert asked. “No idea at all?”

“No.” Makeda growled. “I watched Recruit Weaver blow the horn, and two others in his pod after him. Then, a traitorous instructor and my brother’s spy, Sergeant Luther, led all three former recruits out with a pair of other Violovar scum in his charge. I’ve not seen any of them since.”

“Indeed,” said Rupert. “That is because Sergeant Luther and all those who ventured forth with him are dead. All of them murdered in a most gruesome fashion outside the gates of this city.”

Sydney gasped with the crowd, her chest tightening for every moment that Rupert allowed the whispers and outcries to continue. Garrett is dead? She choked, tears warming her cheeks as they fell. Th-they killed him?

Rupert raised his hand to quiet the crowd. “All dead . . . all murdered and accounted for,” he said quietly as he could for the others to still hear him speak. “All but Garrett Weaver.”

He’s alive! Sydney wept at the admission.

Her momentary joy was stolen when noticing Owens in his cage. Where life had returned to her at the announcement, all the fight in her other high school friend was vanquished. Where Sydney had been elated by the news of Garrett’s survival, she recognized those upon Owens’s cheeks for the type she had cried not moments ago. Who did you lose, Owens? She wondered then, her own grief giving rise to the realization why a moment a later, her thoughts turning to Yvla once more. Which other friend of yours did the Orcs take away from you?

Again, Sydney wished that she could reach out and speak to her former classmate. The gap lingered between them, Sydney knowing she could not provide Owens any sort of comfort as Rupert continued his questioning of Makeda.

“Aye, all our brave Orcinians and their shamed recruits accounted for. All, with the exception of Garrett Weaver,” Rupert was saying to the former pod mother and the crowd. “And, when Sergeant Luther and his other soldiers did not return from their escort of the banished recruits, a second patrol of Painted Guard was dispatched to learn the reason why . . . but this second group did not return either.” Again, Rupert allowed the crowd their momentary reaction before he quieted them once more. “Finally, a third and larger party of the Painted Guard was sent out to learn what befell the others,” he grimaced. “And what they discovered was a grislier sight than any common murder, or act of warfare.”

Common murder? Is that such a thing? Sydney scoffed at the notion and the fact that she had ever considered Rupert a friend. The idea she had spent so much time with him drew ire in her now, watching him enjoy the sport of dragging out his questioning, his playing with the crowd’s reactions as if he had no inclination of what they might do or think with the answers he led Makeda to give him.

“What they found,” Rupert went on. “Was a sight to make even the strongest stomach wrench. Butchery, my people,” he turned once more to play to the crowd. “Two patrols of good Orcs, loyal and true to the crown, and all of them slain. Aye, all of them butchered first . . . and then their remains feasted upon, I shudder to say, by the very same savage Nomads that slew them.”

Sydney’s eyebrows raised. Feasted? She thought, her face paling as she looked to the king beside her and found him steely-eyed and grim as a new outcry came from the people of New Pearlaya. Does he mean eaten? Like cannibals?

Rupert attempted to quell the crowd once more, but it took him several attempts before he was able to proceed again. “All of those fine soldiers from your pod butchered and defiled by savages, Makeda,” he said. “And all but the former recruit Garrett Weaver accounted for? Why?”

“How should I know?” Makeda asked. “You have admitted already that I was in chains at that moment. Aye, and put there by the very souls you claim to mourn over now. Do not come to me seeking pity for the lives of traitors. Let you weep instead for the brave recruits who made their stand against the injustice they saw being served out and then proved willing enough to endure the consequences.” She motioned toward the Orc cage holding Owens, his father, and still more former Painted Guard as well. “Aye, and let you weep for that which these true soldiers suffer even now in defiance of true tyranny and continued lies.”

Again, Rupert allowed the crowd their momentary boos and curses before waving them to silence once more. “But I do mourn, Pod Mother,” he said, low enough to showcase a small sign of empathy, yet loud enough to beg