Blood Charged (Dragon Blood, Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

crack or pull away from the wall. He hoped the two men inside were too engrossed in the conversation—about Sardelle, damn!—to notice branches shivering in the utter lack of wind.
    Ridge stopped before his head drew level with the bottom of the window. Besides, the trunk had dwindled in thickness from three inches to two, and it was starting to slump. His boots were pressed into the plant below him, but they kept slipping. Dry wood and cold snow pricked at his fingers. He should have put on his gloves before jumping onto the vine. His efforts were rewarded, though, for he could hear more than chirping birds this time.
    “—told me,” Therrik was saying. “The officers in my old unit don’t miss much.”
    “I suppose it’ll be all over the city before long.” The king sighed.
    “I can’t understand why you let her into the city in the first place, Sire. Why wasn’t she shot as soon as someone figured it out?”
    Ridge gritted his teeth, in part because a piece of the vine had snapped away from its anchor on a post above his head, and in part because he wanted to lunge through the window and strangle Therrik.
    “I believe she was shot any number of times during the battle with the Cofah,” the king said dryly. “A sorceress isn’t easy to kill.”
    Sorceress. He hadn’t called her a witch. Could the king know everything? Intel must have interviewed that research-happy Captain Heriton from Magroth.
    “Not when she’s awake, likely not,” Therrik said. “We have snipers. One of our men could take her out in her sleep.”
    If Ridge had disliked the colonel before, he was ready to hurl the man into a volcano now. His shoulders flexed, and he caught himself climbing another foot on the vine with an image in his mind of leaping through the window, repercussions be damned. But another limb snapped away from the wall overhead, and he found his perch sagging a couple of inches away from the window. He gritted his teeth and eyed the ledge. He might be able to make the lunge…
    “That would be a poor reward for Zirkander’s years of loyalty,” the king said, his tone still dry.
    Therrik snorted. “If you want to reward the man, give him a medal, not a witch. Sire, do we even know he’s voluntarily housing her? She could be using him— controlling him—without him even knowing it.”
    Not that idiotic argument again. Everyone seemed sure Ridge had a mind feebler than that of an eighty-year-old amnesiac.
    “I’ve read her record,” the king said. “If she had been one of the rogues from her century, she would already be dead. She was a healer who worked with the army.”
    Huh, the king’s research had been even more thorough than Heriton’s, it seemed.
    “Her… century, Sire?” Therrik asked.
    “Never mind.”
    “Please, hear me, Sire. I don’t think Zirkander’s a suitable guard dog for a witch, especially not if he’s sleeping with her. Besides, he’s not even here half the time, and she’s free to roam at will.”
    “I have people watching her. If it becomes a problem… I’ll reassess the situation.”
    People watching her? Ridge swallowed. And here he had joked at Sardelle’s assertion that she didn’t feel safe doing her work on base. Maybe the grandmother next door was keeping an eye on her.
    “This is a bomb waiting to detonate, Sire. If you don’t do anything about her, you can trust that someone will. A lot of people are very afraid of magic.”
    “I’m aware of that, Colonel,” the king said, his tone cooler now.
    Sardelle is in trouble! The words and an image of the old archives building in town blasted into Ridge’s mind like a foghorn, startling him so that he lost his grip.
    He tried to catch himself, his fingers wrapping around a branch, and he thought he might have saved himself, but the brittle limb snapped. He plummeted to the ground. He bent his knees, trying to soften the landing and keep himself from making a lot of noise, but one of his heels struck something