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favors from all over: the EU, our government, people who you
don't want to know about."
"What are you talking about?" Mason demanded. He was
angry and confused. I didn't blame him for that, since
betrayal was always painful, no matter how one learned about
it.
Logan gave one more gasp, and then his head rolled back.
"You can take you hands off of him now," I told Mason
gently.
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He just continued to stare at Logan until I started to pull a
spare piece of canvas over the body. I then carefully helped
Mason up and over to a bucket where he could wash his
hands.
"You weren't lying to him, were you?" Mason asked.
"I will burn incense for his spirit," I promised. "He has
redeemed himself from whatever plot the Trustees had him
involved in."
Wolf, thankfully, was taking care of sailing the ship, and
Keno was with him. I knew that Logan would be sent into the
sea as soon as possible, since there was no place to keep him
here. I glanced over at Keno and wasn't surprised to see he
was taking care of McGann, who also seemed to be in some
sort of shock.
"You don't seem too surprised," Mason muttered.
I shrugged. "I simply didn't believe Mrs. Adams's offer.
And no, it isn't nice to know that I was wrong. But Collins was
someone who one didn't want to make an enemy of. He also
was a wealth of information when Samojirou, Yatsufusa, and I
questioned him. He was most wroth that a dog was
interrogating him. It was almost amusing to see."
"What did he tell you?" I smiled and shook my head.
Mason looked angry for a minute and then realized this wasn't
the time to talk about such things. "Later," he told me in the
same quiet tone of voice, but I heard the fury in it. Even if he
had been expecting it, the information about Collins shook
him almost as much as Logan's death. "And I have no fucking
clue how I'm going to tell Wolf about this."
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"Then don't," I suggested. "Not now. Not when he can't do
anything with this information. And not when we seem to
have companions here that we cannot or should not trust.
You can talk with him about this when we get to land."
* * * *
Keno
Getting the ship sailing wasn't as difficult as I thought it
would be. Wolf and Tholf did something with the sails and the
rudder that got us out to sea. I hoped we just had to worry
about the other ship chasing us. Disabling it wasn't an option,
because those raiders would just take their anger out on the
people there if we did that, if we'd even had time to do so. I
just hoped that someone survived what had happened. I felt
guilty that we didn't stay and fight, but my first duty was to
get Tamazusa to safety. That meant I had to not help those
people, even if it felt wrong to me, no matter how rude they
had been to the two of us.
It was a long, narrow ship filled with hard wooden
benches. It didn't look anything like the ships of Nippon, even
our warships. It smelled badly, and I hoped we had supplies
of some sort aboard, water at least. There were oars, and I
wondered if we would have to row.
"Where are we off to?" Tholf shouted in English. He was by
what I thought was the steering thing, and I wondered why,
until I realized Wolf had his hands full trying to get the sail
up. As soon as we had gotten into deep water, Wolf had let
Tholf take charge. That surprised me, but I didn't think he
had a choice with a man down.
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I went over to Tholf and wasn't surprised to see that he
grinned down at me. The only thing allowing me to see was
that it was a clear night with a full moon. I knew that
Tamazusa and Samojirou had no trouble seeing at night, so
Tholf was probably the same way.
"Head to the barrier," I said. "We are going to Nippon."
He looked at me and then at McGann, who had wandered
over here too. I guessed that she didn't deal with blood too
well. And there must have been a lot of it from the way
Mason was swearing.
"We are?" he asked.
I bit back a snarl. He was annoying me, because he
wouldn't listen to me. But I could see his point. Wolf was the
one in charge, and he'd listen to his wife before one of the
strangers Wolf had picked up. But McGann was still looking
"off," and I didn't think she had recovered from whatever had
made her pass out earlier.
"You better sit down," I said. "You don't look very good."
"I'll be fine," she answered. She looked at Tholf. "We are
going to Nippon to return our friends to their family."
Tholf nodded. "The current will be easier to fight closer to
Iceland. Right now we'd have to row, and we don't have the
manpower to do that, even if you women rowed. Then we can
cut across the seas and hope that the serpent doesn't drown
us crossing the barrier. I've done it once, and that was
enough. We needed a shaman for that, though."
"We will worry about that later," McGann said. She
frowned. "I have to check something out."
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