Daughter of Prophecy Read Online Free PDF

jolt bounced her on the hard seat. The carriage was well made but unadorned. It had no sides or top, and the wind had a bite that made Lakenna glad for the wool blanket she had wrapped around her legs and feet. Two bench seats faced each other. She sat behind the driver, directly across from Mererid. A grizzled warrior handled the reins of the pair of horses that pulled the carriage along at a fast clip. Two warriors rode ahead and two behind, all mounted on shaggy-haired, sturdy horses. Each rider had a broadsword strapped behind his back and a strung bow and quiver of arrows in leather sheaths hanging from the saddle. A pack mule tied to the rear of the carriage carried Lakenna’s bags and her precious hoard of hand-copied sections of Holy Writ carefully wrapped in waxed parchment.
    Lakenna Wen was twenty-five, slender, with an angular face dominated by a bold nose between eyes recessed in their sockets. Her dark hair was in a bun and covered by a scarf that the gusts kept trying to rip off. Her skirt was farmer brown wool, her blouse a crisp white linen with a double row of pleats. A gray cloak that was too thin for the chilly highland spring barely kept her teeth from chattering.
    Squinting at the rocky hillsides through wind that made her eyes water, Lakenna tried not to question her reason for being here. Lord Tellan’s letter inquiring into her services had been well written, his offer of payment in coin adequate, and the proposed duties he outlined reasonable.
    But there was the difference in faith. The conservative Dinari clan was well known to be a stronghold of the most orthodox of Keeper monks. The Kepploch Monastery was the most famous in the Land and was close to Rogoth lands. The Keepers of the Covenant were enemies with her own breakaway sect of believers, called Albanes, their differences longstanding and irreconcilable.
    And she was single, only months removed from burying the man she had been days away from marrying. Another pang rippled through her stomach. Mercifully, the lung fever outbreak had been a mild one, with Loane only one of a double handful succumbing to the disease before the outbreak ended as mysteriously as it begun.
    Lakenna shifted on the hard seat and glanced out at the countryside without seeing it, hands clenched tightly in her lap. Most Albane maidens were married by fifteen or sixteen. Being single at twenty-five was beyond the point of embarrassment. It bordered on hopeless.
    Loane had been three years her junior, and many had considered him no prize: under average height and beanpole thin, with a face that was all misplaced parts—a mouth too small for his teeth, potato nose, and long, pointed chin. But he loved her, and she had grown to love him.
    When Lord Tellan’s letter came, she tried to dismiss it—and found that she could not. She had been unable to commune with the Eternal since Loane’s death. Even more so since . . . the other. So when the letter arrived, she had not been able to pray and seek guidance about such a major change. Albane teachers of doctrine proclaimed that the Eternal’s forgiveness was available to all, and Lakenna knew they spoke truth. Still . . . her guilt kept her from accepting this truth for herself.
    Even so, something kept prodding her to accept Lord Tellan’s offer. She had met with Lady Mererid yesterday in the large trading center of Inbur on the border of Dinari lands. The interview had gone well, and Lakenna had agreed to one year of service tutoring the three Rogoth children plus no more than five others from Lord Rogoth’s retainers.
    â€œTell me more about my charges,” she said. Noble children could be difficult.
    Mererid smiled a mother’s smile. “Of the three, Phelan is the best student. He is the youngest and has been a sickly child. On two different occasions the Healer feared the poor boy would not survive the latest bout of fever and advised us to call a monk to prepare for the