Kaustubh Dudhane’s Reviews > The Bone Shard Daughter > Status Update

I’d never thought this would be my end: confined on all four sides by wood and stone. I’d always thought my end would come to me on the open ocean, by a storm, the arrows of Imperial soldiers or a knife between the shoulder-blades from the Ioph Carn. But I suppose death, like life, often doesn’t meet expectations.

One of the parents had told the Empire, and the Empire had set a trap for me. I was oddly flattered – they’d never tried to set a trap for me when I’d been a smuggler, which was probably why I’d been able to get away with that shipment of witstone.

Drink was an easy way to make friends, and I wasn’t looking to make permanent or loyal friends of them. Just afternoon friends. Friends enough to pick their minds clean and leave them with the thought, “He was a nice fellow.” Enough to dissuade them from finding any Imperial soldiers stationed here as soon as I left.

Mephi crept over to me. He placed both paws on my knee, his whiskered face solemn, blood marring the fur beneath his mouth. “Not good,” he said in a squeaky, guttural voice. He patted my leg. “Not.”

A beating at the hands of the Ioph Carn I could handle. Being chased out of the harbor and losing the last of my witstone – that too it appeared was not beyond my abilities. But this?

One more life saved. It was a pittance, unutterably small against the scale of the lives lost. But it was there. And one life certainly made a difference to the one living it.