Colors of Chaos Read Online Free PDF Page A

heard the door. Like as he won't be long, lady mage. Your words are kind ..."
    "Just remember. .." Leyladin straightened from her conversation with the young messenger.
    Gostar was no longer one of the duty guards and had been replaced by a White Guard Cerryl didn't know, a man with an angular face and a short-trimmed beard.
    "Shall we go?" the blonde healer asked. "I'm hungry."
    "So am I."
    Leyladin turned and bestowed a parting smile on the messenger, getting a shy and faint one in return.
    "You've made another friend." Cerryl glanced across the entry foyer of the front Hall as they descended the steps side by side.
    "Most of them are lonely."
    Cerryl wondered. The children of the mages in the creche had each other. He'd never even really talked to another child near his own age until he'd been apprenticed to Dylert. Erhana had been snobbish, but she'd helped him learn his letters, and without that, he never would have become Tellis's apprentice-or been accepted into the Guild. Faltar had befriended Cerryl and become his first real friend, when Cerryl had first come to the Halls. That had been before Faltar had been seduced by Anya, but Faltar remained his friend. Friends were too hard to come by.
    "You're quiet." Leyladin glanced at him. "Your childhood was lonelier, I know, but they're still lonely."
    Cerryl almost stopped as he stepped off the last riser of the staircase and onto the polished stone floor tiles of the foyer floor but managed not to miss the step.
    "That bothered you. Why?"
    After a moment, he answered, "I just hadn't thought of it quite that way."
    "I suppose I've had the luxury of being able to look at things without struggling for coins and food." The blonde shivered as they went down the steps to the walk beside the Avenue. "It's gotten colder."
    "It has. Faltar said spring was coming."
    In the early evening, darker than usual with the overhanging clouds, the Avenue was near-empty, with a sole rider plodding northward and away from the Wizards' Square. Cerryl fastened his white leather jacket halfway up as snowflakes drifted past them. He glanced over at Leyladin, wrapped in a dark green woolen cloak. Snowflakes-Cerryl didn't expect such in spring. Then, it was early spring, and the new leaves had barely budded, while the old leaves had barely begun to turn from gray to green. He could feel the slight headache that came with storms, not so severe as with a driving rainstorm, more like the twinge of a light rain.
    "Storms affect you, don't they?"
    "How did you know?"
    "You told me, remember?"
    Had he? He wasn't certain he had, but his life had changed so much, and so quickly, he sometimes felt he was just struggling to take in everything-like Kinowin's continuing lectures on trade and now more insistence on improving his skills.
    The two walked quietly through the scattered flakes until they were less than a block from the south side of the Market Square.
    "This way." Leyladin inclined her head to the left.
    Another block found them turning north again.
    "Here we are." She gestured.
    Leyladin's house was not on the front row of homes on the Avenue below the Market Square, but in the slightly smaller dwellings one block behind those of Muneat and the more affluent factors. Instead of a dozen real glass windows across the front of the dwelling, there were merely four large arched windows on each side of the ornately carved red oak double doors, but each of the windows held several dozen small diamond-shaped glass panes set in lead. Each window sparkled from the lamps within the house.
    The front of the house extended a good fifty cubits from side to side, and deeper than that, Cerryl suspected as Leyladin led him up the granite walk, a walk flanked just by winter-browned grass.
    "The gardens are in the back," Leyladin answered his unspoken question. "Father said they were for us, not to display to passersby." The blonde mage opened the front door. "Soaris! Father! We're here."
    She stepped into a bare