Player's Ruse by Hilari Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

pressed onward, and soon I seized the floating wood—the corner of a hatch—groped my way around it, and looked.
    She was dead. I’d seen it often enough in the last hour to be certain even before I touched her icy skin, but I still scraped her sodden hair off her throat to feel for a pulse. I’ve heard tales of men who were certain someone was dead and proved to be quite wrong.
    I found no pulse, and nothing but the rush of a sudden wave disturbed the damp spikes of her lashes. There were no bubbles in the water when it ran across her mouth. I had been right, alas.
    But even so I couldn’t leave her here.
    The hatch cover she clung to was bigger than it looked from a distance, for much of it floated beneath the surface. But it did float, and rather than entangle myself with the girl’s drifting skirts, I grabbed the corner and started swimming for the shore. The rough wood scraped my hands and wrists as the sea fought to keep its prize, but already others were swimming out to help me.
    Three of us hauled the poor lass’s raft to the shore. Fisk wasn’t among those waiting in the shallows, for he cannot swim, or so he claims, and so had chosen to remain dry.
    I half forgave him when he held out my cloak, which I had evidently dropped before going into the water. The cool breeze cut through my wet clothes as if they weren’t even there. The other half of forgiveness came when I saw the sorrow on his face as he took in the expression on mine.
    “Dead? Not surprising in this cold. You’d better wrap up, or you’re likely to follow her. I wonder if there’s anything left of the signal fire.”
    My first thought was that I’d rather freeze than warm myself at so villainous a fire, but that would be foolish. My teeth were beginning to chatter, and my fellow swimmers must be as cold as I, though one of them was alert and concerned enough to capture my hand as I pulled my cloak tighter.
    “Here, you’re bleeding. Let me—”
    Had it not happened so fast, I’d not have let him. In my own defense I should say that my cuff buttons do not come off, for Fisk stitches them on with a heavy thread, and checks them for looseness whenever he washes my shirts. And at that point I was so numb with cold that I’d not realized that my sleeve had torn, and that blood from the scrape beneath it stained the pale fabric. And my mind still dwelled on the dead girl. So I think there’s some excuse, whatever Fisk says, for me to be just a second too slow when the deputy took my hand and pulled the torn cloth aside to see the cut. Of course, that wasn’t all he saw.
    To my bizarrely enhanced sight, the two broken circles on my wrist glowed with eerie silver fire. They use magica ink so the tattoos cannot be scraped or burned away. The deputy would see only the thick, black lines, but that was enough. His grip clamped tight—tight enough to hurt. I met his eyes steadily, despite the shock and disgust that showed there, for I’ve had practice with this, too.
    Indeed, I couldn’t blame him. The most usual reason for a common man to bear the mark of a broken debt to the law is that he had killed someone and there were sufficient extenuating circumstances that the judicars didn’t want to hang him. Since murder is a debt that can be paid only in life or blood, he goes “unredeemed,” his debt forever unpaid.
    The most common reason for a noble to bear those marks is that his family’s power or money influenced the judicars on his behalf. The irony of that always hurt, for ’twas not to influence anyone in my favor that my father’s power and wealth had gone. To do him justice, he truly believed that the life he’d tried to force me into was what was best for me. ’Tis seldom my father’s plans fail, and as usual, the satisfaction of that thought lent me strength enough to stand, silent, in the deputy’s grip.
    “Sheriff! I think you’d better see this.”
    Todd had been examining the dead girl, but soon he stood before me,