Book One – Chapter 19

Whatever it was, the borman made no attempt to go fetch him — Maybe because he did not care for the selder, or the krynn, for that matter, or maybe because he simply knew better than to cross the kitchen threshold, after Bubs had so obviously banned him from the sick bay. Still, he could have asked Yu to do it instead. But no, all the borman said, in that thick, gravelled voice, was: “Thank you,” and then, after a pause, “I have a spoon. Please.”

So then Yu.

Had to do.

Another back and forth.

For The One. Single.  Borman.

IN. THE. WORLD.

Who pretended he did not eat straight-up snout to bowl.

Yu had, of course, also forgotten the spoon for the krynn — though with a justifiable reason; because he had not needed to bring any with the earlier bowls either. So now he fetched two: a random one for the krynn, and for the borman the largest spoon he could find in his half-hearted search. His full heart would never be in it. Not in serving a borman.

He told himself that he only did it to avoid suspicion. The borman did not know that Yu was from the settlements. He could have come from anywhere. After all, only a few fina lived in the Northlands, while the great flocks migrated back and forth between the southern Midlands and the South. Atop that, the borman could not know whether Yu had been at the guild for a day or a decade, or for his whole miserable life — unless, of course, he had been here before, or someone had told him. If not, Yu’s attitude should not make him wary. For Yu to better investigate and hinder the borman’s intentions with the human, the brute must not suspect him. There must be no hint that Yu knew how the Barnstream habitat operated, or what the forged papers implied.

This borman clearly did not. He could not be from the settlements. No borman from there would have been dumb enough to use the Barnstream Habitat itself to counterfeit human papers. Selling humans to bormen had been outlawed for six years. To forge Tria’s name, of all names, for a crime she had personally outlawed, was beyond stupidity, regardless of how close the forged signature came to Tria’s original.