Breath and Bone (Lighthouse Duet) Read Online Free PDF Page B

what he makes of it. Our plans may have to change. Come, we’d best get back.”
    “Brother Valen!” As if in echo of Gram’s conclusion, Nemesio’s call bounced urgently through the passage. “Get out here now!”
    “So you go back to Osriel?” said Gram as we hurried toward the light.
    “I would rather do anything else. But I must honor my word or else—Well, I don’t know what would happen, but my word is the only thing I’ve ever held to. I promise you, I’ll be no good to him.”
    He stopped me as we approached the mouth of the passage. “You said something similar back at Mellune. What do you mean?”
    No need for him to know what my nivat-starved perversion was like to make of me. I pulled my arm from his hand. “Be well, Gram. Give the thane and his daughter my regards.”
    “ Teneamus , Valen,” he said.
    We preserve —the Aurellian code word of the lighthouse cabal. Gram’s invocation of it expressed the sincerity of his concern for me. I had no answer for his kindness. “We’d best go before Nemesio bursts.”
    It was as well I chose not to further compromise my vow of submission. When Gram and I stepped from the cleft into the open air, Nemesio and the donkey waited with Gram’s gray mare. Beside them stood Voushanti.

Chapter 3
    N o argument of mine could persuade Voushanti that I’d no intent to run. “His Grace will decide your punishment,” he said as he bound my hands to the donkey’s harness. “And you will be there to heed it.”
    Though pale and quivering, Nemesio bore Voushanti’s impossible arrival with a straight spine and unbowed head. I should have warned the prior about Prince Osriel’s favored commander. I had seen Voushanti recover from terrible wounds in a matter of hours. I had witnessed his resiliency as we tramped day and night through the winter nightmare of Mellune Forest. More than once I had looked into the red core of his eyes and suspected he did not sleep. What common sleeping draft would affect such a man, if man he was?
    At least the mardane showed no interest in exploring the cleft. Whether or not Prince Osriel was Sila Diaglou’s rival in the pursuit of chaos, the last thing I wanted to do was teach him a way to interfere with the Danae.
    When we reached the flats, Voushanti dismissed Gram with a promise to report his interference both to Thane Stearc and Stearc’s liege lord Prince Osriel. The last I saw of the secretary, he was vanishing at a gallop into the frozen haze that had settled in the valley. Voushanti, the prior, the ass, and I slogged toward the abbey afoot.
    With no silken cords binding my hands to stay the flow of magic, I could have unlocked the chain that linked my wrists to the donkey even with my limited skills. But in truth I could not summon the wits to work a spell. A storm of blue light filled my head—the image of the Dané as he danced out his grief. I had never imagined such expressive power in mere movement, as if his body formed words and music I could not hear. My own feet dragged like brutish anvils through the snow. My arms felt stiff as posts. Compared to his, my body was no more living than a wall of brick.
    Remnants of our exchange swirled in my thoughts like water through a sluice. He’d said that I had cleansed the Well, as if it were some marvel. Yet I’d done naught but remove the dead boy, hardly difficult for a man of his strength.
    Kol, the son of the Danae archon who had sheltered King Caedmon’s infant son more than a century ago…My mind balked at the imagining. My grandfather, a cartographer with a sorcerer’s bent, had discovered Caedmon’s heir living in the realm of the Danae—the realm of angels, legend called it. Life spent differently in Danae lands, for a century and a half after his royal father’s death, Eodward had just been passing from youth to manhood. A Karish hierarch and a high priest of the elder gods had persuaded the young man to return to Navronne and revive the wreckage of his