Chapter fourteen
Into the Coup BlagFive minutes later I was on my way out of the maze of the Coup Blag.
Under my arm a kicking, wrestling, screaming bundle of trouble tried to trip me up, to bite me, to do anything to stop me from carrying it outside.
Brown curls writhing as though they were Medusa’s snakes, Ortyg Thingol jackknifed up and down under my arm. Stolidly, I marched out into the last of the suns light.
“Why can’t I go? Why? Why?”
Drak, willful as he always had been, had never reacted in quite this way. I remembered him climbing the trees in the walled garden of Esser Rarioch.
I said, “When I say a thing, I mean it. But, Ortyg, there is another reason. A most important reason, and a secret.”
He gasped as I dumped him down on his feet. “What reason, Jak? What secret?”
I l
