Origin Curse (Dynasty Codes Book 1) by Sarah Kate Ishii

Author:Sarah Kate Ishii [Ishii, Sarah Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ocean Reeve Publishing
Published: 2023-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

29

A Fever

Yoshiko chatted to Haruki and Nubia as much as she could over the following days, whispering to them and trying to avoid being caught by the guards. Mostly, she worked alongside fellow Hiéns, completing back-breaking work and collapsing by the river at the end of the day to wash the sweat and mud from her ragged clothes. They didn’t see Nubia often; the Qeclan people had been given slightly better roles—if not by much—since their uprising.

‘Yes, but we are merely indentured servants—there is no difference,’ Nubia said when Yoshiko spoke to her about her role. ‘These people would enslave anyone, given a chance, and they even treat people in their own country with a hierarchy—if you’re low in the hierarchy, you’re pretty much a slave.’

When Yoshiko quizzed Nubia further on this, the tall woman frowned and pursed her lips, and Haruki helped her translate.

‘Even long before they took my people and me, they enslaved their own. But somehow, the lower Acreins refused and managed to work their way out of it. That is why they came to take us from our home. They realised taking from another country would solve their own people demanding to be treated correctly and paid. So they just took other people and made it so they had no choice.’ Nubia then clapped her hand over her eyes. ‘And yet, when we tried to free ourselves and fight for rights of our own, they merely repeated history. They went to take yet more people from yet another country—one from far away so no-one could do anything about it.’

She looked guiltily at Yoshiko and Haruki.

Yoshiko sighed. So if she freed her people now, the Acrein captors would just go onto yet another country and take more people?

These words rang in her head each day, and her body moved by instinct in the house or the fields, but her mind ran things over. She watched her people lose hope—even so quickly in the days they’d been there, imagining this was it forever—and their eyes glazed over. People cried at night and whispered for their loved ones, or blankly stared at nothingness. But Yoshiko’s brain shifted through flames and tried to figure out how to save her people, and perhaps truly free Nubia’s, without subjecting more people to this fate.

And all the while, something burned inside her body. She’d never shaken that fever from the ship. Her skin felt close to burning, and her head heated and felt it would burst. Yoshiko longed for some fresh, cool water and a natural spring bath to soothe her. Yet the river would have to do. And, disgustingly, the people here used it for everything.

Almost immediately, Yoshiko had become friends with the tall Qeclan woman, and she relished that friendship as much as the one she had with Haruki. Both these women offered Yoshiko freedom from the loneliness she’d felt growing up in the keep, a loneliness she was determined to erase and that had been melting away since meeting Haruki and then Gora.

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