A Guile of Dragons Read Online Free PDF

frightened Nimue more than anyone she had met in the Wardlands.
    â€œMaijarra, my dear—” Jordel began.
    â€œI’m not your dear.”
    â€œThain Maijarra, then. We want to return these thains for the money back, please. They were quite useless.”
    Maijarra’s yellow eyes scanned the abashed thains. “Oh?”
    â€œYes. Fortunately, Nimue came along quietly. Otherwise Illion and I would have had to subdue her with bare fisticuffs.”
    â€œWhat’s a fisticuff?”
    â€œHow should I know, and me being a man of peace?”
    â€œI’ll talk to them. The others are inside.”
    The thains stayed behind and spoke with Maijarra in low voices while Nimue and the vocates mounted the gray steps to the door of the red dome.
    The others, many others, were indeed there. The barrel of the dome was ringed with windows and there was plenty of light, but still Nimue felt a darkness and a chill in that chamber. There was a round table on a dais, and standing at the table were many red-cloaked figures: the vocates of the Graith of Guardians.
    Earno was not standing with them. He stood at the foot of the dais along with Merlin, whose wrists were bound with golden cords. Earno was speaking passionately about something. The First Decree, or monarchy, or freedom, or something. But he was thinking about slaughtering season on his family’s farm, how he used to run and hide, how they always dragged him there to watch the killing and, on one nightmarish occasion, to actually kill a beast: an old ram with scraggly wool. In Earno’s mind, Merlin was that ram, which Nimue thought was quite amusing. She was less amused to realize that her face was on one of the dead beasts in Earno’s submerged, distorted memory—one of the beasts whose death he had watched and had been unable to prevent.
    He turned and looked at her. “Here is my witness,” he said, looking at her but still speaking to the Graith. “She will tell you of Merlin’s deeds in this other world. Then you, my peers, will speak his fate.”
    Earno stepped forward and took her by the hand. He walked her over to a gray marbled chunk of rock in an apse of the chamber. He said no word to her, nor needed to: she knew this was the Witness Stone, and what he would do. He put her hand on the stone and she was suddenly not herself.
    Not only herself, anyway. She was still there, floating in the center of her own awareness, but now circling her in every dimension were these other minds, briefly hers and forever not-hers, joined for this moment in the rapport of the stone.
    They remembered her memories and understood them in ways she never had. For instance: when she assisted Merlin in moving the Giants’ Walk from Ireland to Britain. It was the feat of making she was most proud of. They had anchored the stones so securely in the green plain of Salisbury that they seemed to have grown there. As the vocates remembered her memories, she slowly realized it was even more marvelous than that. Merlin had used a power-focus that anchored the stones in time as well as space, rewriting the history of the world so that the stones had been there for ages, had never been in Ireland at all. This the vocates understood, and so she understood it. That was interesting to her.
    But not as interesting as their memories. While they were riffling through her fragmented selfhood, she found herself free to explore theirs. This one, named Vineion, lived in a tower with a hundred dogs. He thought rather like a dog, mulling over feeding times and runs along the river and games and loyalty and fear. Jordel was remembering a time when Merlin had sewn up a wound in his side, but was regretfully deciding that the old man would have to be exiled. Callion the Proud, a tall marble-faced vocate, was detached from the inquiry, having already made up his mind. He was watching Noreê with cool patient longing.
    Noreê herself was the strangest