Blood of Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

several more tomes, including
The
Rise and Fall of Amún
,
The God Kings: Holy Tyrants of the
South
, and
Blood Ritual in the City States of Moringarth—
Myth or Magic?
However, as interesting as some of them were, none contained anything about gate artifacts.
    At last, head aching and eyes bleary, she shoved aside the books. How many tomes had she read these last weeks? A hundred? Whatever the number, it was only a fraction of what lined the precisely organized shelves that were the antithesis of Falken’s description of the Library of Briel. There was so much knowledge here—there had to be something that would help them. They just needed a better system for finding it.
    “I wish Durge were here,” she said, not realizing she had spoken aloud until Beltan looked up.
    “It’s all right, Grace.” He reached across the table, covering her hand with his. It was large and marked with white scars. “We’ll find them somehow.”
    Grace smiled, and amazingly the expression wasn’t forced. The knight’s strength these last weeks had been a crutch all of them had leaned upon. Beltan loved Travis; the knight should have been a wreck. Only somehow he wasn’t.
    After they returned to Eldh, after the fairy healed him, Beltan had been empty and broken, consumed by the shadow of his past, whatever it was. She knew only that it had to do with someone the knight said he had slain; although, as a warrior, certainly he had been forced to kill many in battle. Yet ever since they faced the demon in the Etherion, it seemed Beltan had left his shadow behind him just as Grace had. Now the knight was as bright and full of humor as she remembered him, as if Travis’s vanishing had not caused despair, but instead had granted him new life and purpose.
    What knight doesn’t need a quest, Grace? And now he has
one: to find Travis, no matter what it takes.
    No matter the reason for his transformation, it was good to have the old Beltan back. Although, whether it was the strange blood that now ran in his veins or something else he had gained along the way, there were changes in the knight. Sometimes she could glimpse the hidden light of his face even when he wasn’t smiling, and there was a depth to his green eyes she had never seen before.
    He cocked his head, and only then did she realize she had been staring.
    “What is it, Grace?”
    She fumbled for words. “It’s nothing. I was just—”
    “You can see it, can’t you?” His words were soft. “But I suppose it makes sense. After all, you saw it in me before, on the road to Spardis. My shadow.”
    She shook her head. “Beltan, you don’t have to—”
    “No, it’s all right, Grace. The past doesn’t own us. That’s what we learned in the Etherion, isn’t it? And I think I’ve wanted to tell someone for a while now. I think maybe I have to.”
    Grace couldn’t move. The knight tightened his grip on her hand. He didn’t look at her as he spoke, but instead at a half circle of cobalt sky outside a high window.
    “For so many years, I searched for the man who murdered my father, King Beldreas. I suppose I thought if I avenged his death, I might somehow finally win his approval. Vathris knows, I never could seem to get it when he was alive, as much as I longed for it. Only then, in Spardis, I learned the truth. I had known my father’s murderer all along. You see, it was me.”
    For several hushed minutes, Grace listened, frozen, as the knight described what the Necromancer Dakarreth had revealed to him in the baths beneath Castle Spardis: how the Pale King had ordered Dakarreth to go forth and sow strife in the Dominions; how Dakarreth had stolen into Beltan’s dreams, compelling the knight to take up a knife and drive it into his father’s back; and how, as he reopened Beltan’s old wound, the Necromancer had at last let Beltan relive the terrible moment in his memories.
    The knight fell silent, and Grace found the power to move, laying her other hand atop his. “Oh,