Pillars of Six by St Clare Kelly

Author:St Clare, Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Ebba pressed her face between two of the bars of her cage and blew a white dread off of her cheek. “These things don’t have much space.”

They’d been escorted back down to the town and shoved into human-sized birdcages. Now, Ebba was suspended above a sludgy brown canal filled with writhing crocodiles. The canal looked man-made, lined with stone walls, and about two hundred feet wide—probably purpose-built for the cages and to add more of a fear factor for those contained within. Why anyone would want a stinking pit of water in the middle of their town was a mystery to her, though the jeering Exosians below didn’t seem to mind.

“Ye be the smallest and the youngest. Ye don’t get to complain,” Peg-leg grumbled in the cage next to her. They were strung out in a line and hanging from the stone parapet above, Ebba in the middle. Most of her fathers were watching the leering and booing crowd on the far side of the murky water, but Barrels had his back turned to them, lost in his own thoughts. The throng of Exosian townspeople had dwindled in the last hour as the sun set, and hopefully once they were all gone, Barrels would come out of his funk.

Honestly, after hearing the terrors of how pirates were tortured on Exosia, she didn’t find the cages so bad. Ebba supposed after a week of no water, she’d change her tune, but they might not even make it that long, with the boiling oil tomorrow. That seemed kind of . . . final.

Her plan to free everyone had failed well and truly. Now they didn’t even have Sally. She should have sent the sprite to Caspian straightaway, instead of waiting to arrive at the prison. Sod it, hindsight was a fat load of use.

She swallowed, suddenly realizing her life expectancy might have been greatly reduced by recent events. “Do ye think Sally will be okay?” she asked.

“Aye, Ebba-Viva,” Grubby said, smiling at her. He seemed the least worried of her fathers, and Ebba wondered if he fully grasped the situation.

“Cosmo will take right good care o’ her,” he added, leaning back against the rusted bars of his cage.

“I be more concerned about the look in Montcroix’s eye when he saw the purgium and the dynami,” Stubby said.

“Ye think he knew what they were?” Locks asked.

“He knew enough to rush forward to try to intervene when Caspian gripped the purgium,” Plank replied. “I guess that could be coinc’dence; the healing tube had just dropped that navy man.” He pushed at his raven black curls.

“Ye don’t sound convinced o’ that,” Ebba noted. “How would Montcroix be knowin’ what they are?”

“I don’t rightly know,” Stubby said. “But I didn’t like the gleam in his eye one bit.”

“Aye, he was a mean one, all right,” she agreed. “How is Caspian so nice-like with that for a father?”

Peg-leg stretched his peg out of the cage with a loud groan. “Not everyone be as lucky as ye. From the look o’ it, Montcroix has been caught up in revenge for a long time.

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