Marri's Approach (Brackish Bay) Read Online Free Page B

for me, so I didn't actually have much time. I climbed higher, trying to get a better view of the river. There was the first outpost behind me. I was in between two of them. The next one was smaller, and while I could see the buildings in the center of the town and the market, I couldn't tell where the hunts mistress’s home would be. Would it be near civilization, or would it be more in the forest?
    If it were me, Fortuna, I'd be in the middle of the forest. I scanned further. There! The smallest wisp of smoke in the distance. That must be her homestead. I grinned. That was quite a bit farther from the riverbank than I thought it would be, which gave me a good idea of how to estimate the size of her territory. I breathed deeply. Damn. I would have to skirt a huge chunk of land to stay out of her way. And if she went hunting with dogs, I might not be able to avoid her.
    That gave me an idea. I'd heard the story of how Katherine's mother, Jacqueline, had trekked from wherever her good-for-nothing parents and supposed beau had left her to here. Alone. Whoring along the way. There had to be a road somewhere, the one she'd traveled. I scanned to my left, westward. Was that it? It was hard to tell with the way the trees had grown up where there used to be roads and great clearings and vast buildings far beyond our current skill, along with poles and wires that carried leashed lightning. That was all gone now.
    There was a bombardment. My great-great-grandmother was a child when it happened. Something pulsed across the land, destroying all their technology, loosing the lightning from the wires it lay trapped in, releasing invisible death across the world. Not to mention the bombs. No one actually knew anymore if it was bombs or meteors, natural disaster or manmade. But it had flattened and melted huge sections of the land, turning spaces that had once held thousands and thousands of people into blackened slag and glassy ruin. Many, many roads were left crumbling, with hulking wreckage of ancient technology rusting like an orange pox on gray ribbons. The rest of the ground was swampy and saturated. Frozen water—such a strange concept, and something I'd never seen, nor had any of us for generations—had melted and flooded the land. So many of what used to be the coastal cities were completely drowned now, underwater.
    My great-great-grandmother had survived, thanks to an older brother, and I had survived thanks to my mother when men intent on taking her and me had killed my father. We were not taken. Instead, my mother had escaped to a city where she could support herself and me by loaning out the pleasure of her company. It was a particularly boring existence for me once I'd had my fill of tame city boys, so I'd joined the army.
    Armies did not belong to city-states, not all the time, not anymore. Amanda Tell's was one such army for hire, for war, for the defense of a city, or the destruction of it. I had helped in the destruction of many armies and cities. I was good at what I did. Spying was easier when you were a woman and when you allowed men to act out their darkest fantasies on your flesh. I grinned to myself as I remembered the time I'd been mistaken for a guard-groupie and been fucked in front of a whole barrack full of men. It was too bad I'd had to get the information back to General Tell. I hadn't had time to fuck more than one. Of course, I was pretty bad at obedience and discipline, so I'd been sold. Madame Bon bought me, taught me, and then loosed her darkest clientele on me. I ran fingers over my thighs. Whips and chains, belts and paddles, teeth and claws, all had marked me at one point or another, much to my delight. The part that wasn't delightful was Aleksei.
    I thought we were in love, Fortuna. Surely that was the meaning of it all, the times I slept with him, both of us exhausted by our respective clients, both of us reveling in the scent of each other, the sweetness and savagery in our union. But Fortuna