Dancer's Lament: Path to Ascendancy Book 1 Read Online Free PDF

are welcome. You needn’t go.’
    ‘I might be found.’
    ‘No you won’t. No one else ever comes here.’
    ‘What, then, is this place?’
    ‘The upper garret of our business. We are stablers. Father allows me to keep my birds here – they help keep down the pests.’
    He watched while one of the larger predators, a long-tailed hawk, glided away out of an open gable. ‘Keep down the local dog and cat population too, I should think,’ he murmured. ‘Those are big birds.’
    ‘That’s true,’ she allowed. ‘It’s the owls that really do most of the work.’ She studied him anew, unblinking, tilting her head. Her unkempt mass of auburn hair was a matted dirty halo about her head. ‘You, too, are a night-hunter.’
    Dorin gave a small nod.
    ‘You should sleep, then. I will wake you later.’ He frowned at what sounded like a peremptory command. Noting his expression, she explained, ‘You need to recover your strength for what is to come.’
    Now he frowned even more deeply, his brows crimping. ‘And what is that?’
    She cocked her head, chin in her fists, eyeing him almost dreamily. ‘Your hunting, of course.’
    Later that day, though his head hurt abominably, he did manage to sleep, if poorly, starting awake a number of times, uncertain of his surroundings, his heart hammering.
    The girl returned after dusk. She brought more table-scraps and a stoneware mug full of fresh rainwater taken from their cistern. The scraps, Dorin knew, couldn’t have been intended for the birds, and so he surmised that even now hungry dogs watched a certain back door with sad, yet hopeful, gazes.
    He thanked her again – which was indeed unusual behaviour for him, who so rarely had cause to thank anyone for anything – then slipped out of the open gable and climbed down to the alley below.
    Standing at the open window, Ullara watched him go, then turned and hooted twice into the now darkened attic space. A gust of displaced air fluttered her tunic and layered skirts and a dark shape as tall as her hips perched next to her. Wood cracked as it sank its knife-like talons into the sill. Bending, she whispered into a great, wide, tufted ear. Large night-black eyes blinked twice, and the horned owl spread its wings, shaking them, and launched itself into the shadows.
    She sat then on the still-warm shingles of the roof just outside the window. She drew her skirts tight about her knees and hugged them to her chest. She rested her pointed chin upon them and rocked herself while dreaming of straight black hair that peaked over a pale forehead and the sharp nose and thin lips of a very predatory profile. Most of all, however, she dwelt on the memory of eyes snapping open and the thrill of having found herself captured by the savage gaze of a raptor.
    * * *
    Rafalljara Undath’al Brunn, known on the streets of Li Heng by his nickname Rafall, should have been a happy man. The simple waylaying of that youth a week ago had netted him more than fifty gold Quon rounds. An amount worth four times its number in Hengan rounds. One of his larger hauls. All sewn into the lad’s belts and baldrics. And the weapons – very fine indeed. Worth perhaps another twenty rounds.
    But this troubled him.
    The lad had asked after an assassins’ brotherhood, or guild, such as existed in some cities; and the hoard he carried was just the sort one might net from such employment. Which meant he may have stolen from a killer.
    And left him alive.
    In his second-storey office, next to a window overlooking the cloth market square in the Outer Round, Rafall played with one of the foreigner’s fine throwing knives, turning it round and round in his fingers. From below came the raucous calls and laughter of his own lads and lasses of the streets, eating, joking, and teasing one another.
    But how was he to have known? Still, nothing to be done for it. What was done was done as the gods willed. It was simply his nature not to kill – if it could be helped. The