Ship of Destiny by Hobb Robin Read Free Book Online

their valuables. When Ronica replied that they had none, the ruffians pushed her down and ransacked her bag of clothing before flinging her belongings contemptuously into the dusty road. Other refugees hurried past them, eyes averted. No one intervened. The highwaymen threatened Rache, but the slave woman endured it stoically. The bandits had finally left to pursue wealthier prey, a man with two servants and a heavily laden handcart. The two servants had fled the robbers, leaving the man to plead and shout as the thieves ransacked his cart. Rache had tugged frantically at Ronica’s arm and dragged her away. “There is nothing we can do. We must save our own lives.”
    Her words were not true. The next morning proved that. They came upon the bodies of the teashop woman and her daughter. Other fleeing folk were stepping around the bodies as they hurried past. Ronica could not. She paused to look into the woman’s distorted face. She did not know her name, but recalled her tea stall in the Great Market. Her daughter had always served Ronica smilingly. They had not been Traders, Old or New, but humble folk who had come to the gleaming trade city and become a small part of Bingtown’s diversity. Now they were dead. Chalcedeans had not killed these women; Bingtown folk had.
    That was the moment when Ronica turned around and returned to Bingtown. She could not explain it to Rache, and had even encouraged the woman to go on to Inglesby without her. Even now, Ronica could not rationalize the decision. Perhaps it was that nothing worse could happen to her than what had already happened. She returned to find her own home vandalized and ransacked. Even the discovery that someone had scratched TRAITORS across the wall of Ephron’s study could stir no greater depth of distress in her. Bingtown as she knew it was gone, never to return. If it was all going to perish, perhaps it was best to end with it.
    Yet, she was not a woman who simply surrendered. In the days to come, she and Rache set up housekeeping in the gardener’s hut. Their life was oddly normal in a detached way. Fighting continued in the city below them. From the upper story of the main house, Ronica could just glimpse the harbor and the city. Twice the Chalcedeans tried to take it. Both times, they were repulsed. Night winds often carried the sounds of fighting and the smell of smoke. None of it seemed to involve her anymore.
    The small hut was easy to keep warm and clean, and its humble appearance made it less of a target for roving looters. The last of the kitchen garden, the neglected orchard and the remaining chickens supplied their limited needs. They scavenged the beach for driftwood that burned with green and blue flames in their small hearth. When winter closed in, Ronica was not sure what she would do. Perish, she supposed. But not gracefully, or willingly. No. She would go down fighting.
    That same stubbornness now made her tread carefully down the hallway in pursuit of the intruder. She grasped her cudgel in both hands. She had no clear plan for what she would do if or when she confronted the man. She simply wanted to know what motivated this lone opportunist who moved so secretively through her abandoned home.
    Already the manor was acquiring the dusty smell of disuse. The Vestrit family’s finest possessions had been sold earlier in the summer, to finance a rescue effort for their pirated liveship. The treasures that remained had been those with more sentimental than monetary value: the trinkets and curiosities that were souvenirs of Ephron’s sailing days, an old vase that had been her mother’s, a wall hanging that she and Ephron had chosen together when they were newly wed. . . . Ronica turned her mind away from that inventory. They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down.
    She tiptoed past doors that had been