Barrenlands (The Changespell Saga) Read Online Free PDF Page A

upright, nearly smacking his head on the bottom of the wagon, and let himself flop back to the ground again, dazed. Laine unclenched his fist, flattened it on top of his stomach and the phantom pain there. No blood. No.
    A mule snorted on the other side of the wagon, a wet and unhappy sound. For a moment Laine stared at the darkness of the wagon slats overhead, his hand resting on his dry, whole torso, listening to the uneven patterns of gusty rain overhead.
    Shette, her voice tinged with sisterly disgust, said, "You and your dreams. Between that and the rain, I don't know how we're supposed to get any sleep."
    Laine's thoughts were far away, picking at the details of the death scene he'd just witnessed— sacred Hell, been a part of . Out loud, he merely said a mild, "At least we trenched uphill." If they'd skipped it as Shette had wanted to, they'd be on wet ground right now.
    When she spoke again, her voice had changed, grown tentative. "What do you see, Laine, in those dreams of yours? Mum and Da thought you'd outgrown them."
    "And you're to tell them no differently," he said, abruptly rolling over to face her in the darkness.
    "But what do you see ?"
    He hesitated. "I see them , sometimes. I see them when they ran away together, and how frightening it must have been— and exciting, and happy. Sometimes I see them building our home, or the first time Papa found the way to the village." He wasn't sure what he'd seen this time. When Shette poked him awake like that, sometimes he lost it all.
    "Dreams," she said, sleepy again.
     No. Not like a dream at all. True Dreams, they were. "Yes," he said. "Dreams." He shifted to his back again, looking for a comfortable arrangement of his body on the subtle dips and hollows of the ground.
    "They don't sound all that bad to me," she said, pulling her blanket in close. "Not worth so much fuss and bother."
    "Sometimes they change into nightmares," Laine said shortly. "Now go to sleep. It's not me that's keeping us awake now."
    Shette murmured, "Bossy older brother," and was apparently content to leave it at that. Her breathing lapsed into light snoring, a gentle sound that he could barely hear above the rain as he stared into darkness and tried to remember just when the Dreams had changed. Whose death was he feeling, night after night? Whose eyes was he trapped behind— and would he ever get the chance to turn and face his betrayer?
     
     

CHAPTER TWO
     
     
    Parry in fourth position, rotate wrist... riposte. Parry in first, riposte to flank; a little awkward, that move always was, so do it twice for every one of the others. Parry three, riposte, and there goes your head, sir . Quickly, easily, never the same sequence in a row, Ehren ran through the standard parry positions and their direct ripostes. With his arm relaxed, his mind relaxed, his moves fast and controlled...
    The practice dummy was doomed.
    His saber was a heavier weapon than the ones popular in the new Guards; theirs were basket-hilted creations with complex quillons and numerous counterguards, fine blades with barely enough width for a good fuller. Their movements, in practice, were just as fine; they pitted themselves against one another in bouts that were punctuated by triumphant yells and dramatic shouts of attack.
    Herib, the Guard's master, had died with Benlan. Most of the Guard who hadn't died had left the service in the year Ehren had been gone. And the remainder were like Ehren, serving the king in new ways— ways that took them from the suddenly too-familiar grounds of the palace and the ghosts that walked them. The current master came imported from Loraka, and had brought his own styles, his weapons. These young men and women— they were pretty enough, they moved well enough. And they were brash and proud, and probably as loyal as any king could ask for. But...
    Ehren remembered fights when the ground beneath his feet was uneven and slippery, sometimes with his own blood. He remembered grunts of pain,