Death Comes To All (Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

amount of gear with them,
far less than he would have expected for people who obviously planned
on traveling at a moments notice.
    Perhaps
the packs they used were magicked to carry more than they appeared
to , he thought. Such things were very expensive, but not
impossible to acquire for those who had the coin to pay for them.
    In
the bright morning sunlight Drom could see sparkling emeralds along
the crosspiece of the thin blade the woman cleaned, and a large ruby
sat at the very base of the pummel. He knew almost nothing about
swords, though he had seen a few amongst the traders that came
through the farm. From what little he knew of such blades he would
have thought that such a large jewel would have upset the balance of
the light weapon.
    It
must have cost her a small fortune , Drom thought to himself.
    The
dragonling, who had alternated between sitting on Garan's shoulder
and flying above them in the trees while they had traveled, flew off
his master's shoulder to land on the branch of a tree nearby and
began cleaning its scales, as if it were a bird preening its
feathers.
    Drom
had been picked on all of his life by the sorvinians around him. He
knew when he was being baited, and wasn't going to let it get to him
now. He knew that the man could tell that he was already an adult,
and yet he purposefully continued to call him boy.
    "I
am not a child. I will never grow horns, because only my father was
sorvinian. My mother was a human woman named Katrina. I never got
along much with the sorvinians around me. I looked too different. I
didn't belong there, so I decided to leave. Maybe I'll find a place
where I do belong, or at the very least a place where I don't feel so
out of place as I had there."
    Garan
paused, looking hard at Drom's face, though what he was looking for
was anyone's guess. "Any one of the port towns or the trade
cities would take you in," Garan said after a moment. "Outside
of those cities you'll find that the different races pretty much keep
to themselves. They won't chase you off or anything, at least not
most places, but you'll never really fit in. What you need isn't a
place where you belong, but a lifestyle you can fit into. Can you use
magic?"
    It
was a question Drom had not really considered much since his
childhood. His mother had a only small amount of magic. Most humans
did. Outside of human kin though, very few of the races had any
magic. For those races that did have magic it was very weak, and was
generally specific to that race alone. Certainly no sorvinian that
Drom had ever heard of had magic.
    "Not
as far as I know," he answered finally. "My mother only had
a little bit of magic. She almost never used it. I always assumed
that my father's blood would prevent me from having any. When I was a
kid my mother always told me that I would never have any. I would
think that if I had magic I would have seen some evidence of it by
now."
    "That's
fine. Few of the races have it after all. There are still plenty of
things you can do without magic." Garan absently pulled an apple
out of the pack he carried and threw it to Drom before pulling one
out for himself. "You already know that you don't want to be a
farmer, but have you given any thought to what you do want to do?"
    "Not
really," Drom answered, taking a large bite out of the apple. He
had only finished half his meal the evening before, and had already
been hungry then. "I just sort of figured I would find a job
once I reached the port. I hadn't really thought about what job that
would be. I'm young and strong. I'll find some sort of work for now,
and can decide on a career sometime later. There's plenty of time.
Isn't your friend hungry?"
    The
woman glanced his way, knowing somehow that she had become part of
the conversation. Drom would have thought that she had been too
intent on her cleaning and too far from the two men to have heard his
inquiry, but perhaps he was wrong. He heard her chuckle, and could
see her amber colored eyes shining out