Читать книгу Rebel, Pawn, King - Morgan Rice - Страница 7

Thanos felt a pit in his stomach as the ship rocked its way across the sea, each passing current taking him farther and farther from home. There had been no land in sight for days now. He stood at the prow of the boat, looking out at the water, waiting for the moment when he would finally spy something. Only the thought of what might lie ahead, who might lie ahead, kept him from ordering the captain to turn the ship around.

Ceres.

She was out there somewhere, and he would find her.

“You sure about this?” the captain asked, coming up beside him. “No one I know wants to take a trip to the Isle of Prisoners.”

What could Thanos say to that? That he didn’t know? That he felt a bit like the boat, pushed forward by its oars even as the wind tried to push it back?

The need to find Ceres, though, surpassed everything else. It drove Thanos, filling him with excitement at the prospect of finding her. He’d been so sure that she was gone, that he would never see her again. When he’d heard that she might be alive, the relief had flooded him, had made him feel as though he might collapse.

Yet he could not deny that thoughts of Stephania were there too, making him glance back, and even, for a flash, think about going back. She was his wife, after all, and he’d abandoned her. She was carrying his child, and he’d walked away. He’d left her there on the docks. What kind of man did that?

“She tried to kill me,” Thanos reminded himself.

“What’s that?” the captain asked, and Thanos realized he’d said it aloud.

“Nothing,” Thanos said. He sighed. “The truth is that I don’t know. I’m looking for someone, and the Isle of Prisoners is the only place she might have gone.”

He knew Ceres’s ship had sunk on the way to the island. If she’d survived, then it made sense that she might have made it there, didn’t it? That explained why Thanos hadn’t seen anything of her since, too. If she’d been able to get back to him, Thanos had to believe that she would have.

“Seems an awfully big risk to take for not knowing,” the captain said.

“She’s worth it,” Thanos assured him.

“She must be something special to be better than Lady Stephania,” the smuggler said with a leer that made Thanos want to punch him.

“That’s my wife you’re talking about,” Thanos said, and even he recognized the obvious problem with that. He couldn’t defend her when he was the one who had left her behind, and when she’d been the one to order his death. She probably deserved everything anyone said about her.

Now, if only he could convince himself of that. If only his thoughts of Ceres didn’t continue to be punctuated by thoughts of Stephania, as she’d been with him at the castle feasts, as she’d been in quiet moments, as she’d looked on the morning after their wedding night…

“Are you sure you can get me onto the Isle of Prisoners safely?” Thanos asked. He’d never been there, but the whole island was meant to be a well-guarded fortress of a place, inescapable for those who were brought there.

“Oh, that’s easy enough,” the captain assured him. “We go by there sometimes. The guards sell some of the prisoners they’ve broken as slaves. String them up on poles on the shore for us to see as we get close.”

Thanos had long since decided that he hated this man. He hid it, though, because right then the smuggler was the only chance he had to get to the island and find Ceres.

“I don’t exactly want to run into the guards,” he pointed out.

The other man shrugged. “That’s easy enough. We get close, drop you in a small boat, and keep going like it’s a normal visit. Then we’ll wait off the coast for you. Not long, mind you. Wait too long, and they might think we’re doing something suspicious.”

Thanos had no doubt that the smuggler would abandon him given any threat to his ship. Only the prospect of profit had brought him this far. A man like this wouldn’t understand love. For him, it was probably something you hired on the docks by the hour. But he’d gotten Thanos this far. That was what mattered.

“You realize that even if you find this woman on the Isle of Prisoners,” the captain said, “she might not be the way you remember.”

“Ceres will always be Ceres,” Thanos insisted.

He heard the other man snort. “Easy enough to say, but you don’t know the things they do there. Some of the ones they sell us as slaves, there’s barely enough of them left to do anything for themselves unless we tell them.”

“And I’m sure you’re happy to,” Thanos snapped back.

“Don’t like me much, do you?” the captain asked.

Thanos ignored the question, staring out to sea. They both knew the answer, and right then, he had better things to think about. He had to find a way to locate Ceres, whatever that —

“Is that land?” he asked, pointing.

It was no more than a dot on the horizon at first, but even like that, it looked bleak, surrounded by clouds and with roiling waves. As it grew closer, Thanos could feel a sense of brooding dread growing in him.

The island rose up in a series of gray granite spikes like the teeth of some great beast. A bastion sat on the topmost point of the island, a lighthouse above it burning constantly, as if to warn away all who might come there. Thanos could see trees on one side of the island, but most of it seemed to be bare.

As they came closer still, he could see windows that seemed to be carved straight into the rock of the island, as if the whole place had been hollowed out to make the prison bigger. He saw shale beaches too, with bleached white bones sticking out against them. Thanos heard shrieks, and he paled at the realization that he couldn’t tell if they were sea birds or people.

Thanos slid his small boat up the shale of the beach, wincing with disgust at the sight of manacles set there below the tide line. His imagination told him immediately what they were for: torturing or executing prisoners using the incoming waves. A set of abandoned bones on the shore told their own story.

The captain of the smuggling boat turned to him and smiled.

“Welcome to the Isle of Prisoners.”