Page 90 of Thief of Hearts

That was enough to quiet me. Dracanians were the monsters of my childhood. I had been told so many stories about the horrors they inflicted on others.

One of their worst crimes was slavery. They raided villages, captured innocents, and sold them as slaves to far-off lands. I’d heard about more than one Thracian who was never heard of again after dealing with the Dracanians.

They served the goddess of discord. Only the worst kind of people worshipped her.

I felt him slide a ring onto one of my fingers. “What are you doing?”

“It hides your tattoos.”

I looked at my legs and watched as the blue tattoos seemed to swirl . . . until they were gone. Where had he gotten this magic?

“Thracian women don’t get sold as slaves,” he said, going to work on my ropes.

“What do they do . . .” My voice trailed off as my stomach sank down to my toes. I knew exactly what the Dracanians did to Thracian women.

“I’m going to untie you,” he said in my ear. “I know your instinct is going to be to kill me, but don’t. We are going to have to work together.”

“Give me my sword. We’ll fight our way out.”

He tugged at one of the ropes. “I see ten of them. Which means there are at least forty hidden out of sight. We can’t fight. We’ll be dead in seconds.”

“If you don’t want to fight, then leave it to me.”

“We’re not fighting.” He removed the rope from my wrists and ankles and handed it to me. I wrapped it around my waist, like a belt.

He ran over to his horse and began removing things from his bags, putting them in hidden pockets in his outfit. How had I never noticed those before?

“I want my sword. I would rather leave this world fighting and taking as many Dracanians with me as I can,” I said, standing up. My ankles and wrists were sore, my limbs tired.

“We need to talk our way out of this,” he said. “Think of it this way, Basileia. You can’t enact your revenge on me if we’re both dead.”

That made me pause.

“Greetings!” A man’s voice came from outside the rocks, and then he entered the area we were in, sliding between two of the large piles. “You are awfully far from home, Queen Thalia.”

Was he speaking to me? I nearly looked over my shoulder to see if Lia had somehow shown up.

“Queen Thalia is far from home,” Zain agreed with the man. “Are you here to escort us back?”

The man laughed and looked at the other Dracanians who had joined us. “We are not here to take you to Ilion. We are here to take the queen to Epirius. King Actos has requested her presence.”

“As kind as that is, we are actually on our way to—”

“We sent the request to your palace to come to Calydon to deal with an ‘emergency.’ We had heard of your arrival from Ilion and expected to find you there, but you set out quickly and we lost you in the Wastelands. We discovered you in Sagaris but then you slipped away from us again. We offered a sacrifice and then the goddess showed us where to find you.”

That was why the message from Calydon had gone out and why the archon didn’t know anything about it. This seemed a rather elaborate plan for the Dracanians, who were primarily a “smash and grab” type of people. They had intended to lure Lia out of Troas. Why?

And a sacrifice? What had they killed? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

The man took a step forward. “It is not a request. You will come with us.”

“Of course,” Zain said, and it took everything in me not to punch him for agreeing.

“Who is this?” the man asked me. “Is he your . . .” Then he said a word in a language I didn’t understand and his men laughed. “Your, uh, manservant?”

For just one brief moment, a dark impulse urged me to tell them that Zain was my captor and let them take him.

But no one should be enslaved, not even him. “Yes, this is—”