Dolor and Shadow Read Online Free PDF

you bedded her?” Rune asked.
    Bergen flashed Rune a somber look, drawing Rune’s eye. “I didn’t bed her. Not this one.” Bergen returned his attention to the road. “No one did.”
    Rune took an extra-long step over a bare root.
    “Râ-Kedet has always…attracted…a lot of attention ever since trade was established centuries ago,” Bergen continued. “War is always on the horizon there with the rising Western threat that the Gutar brought with them across Danu’s River.”
    “The Gutar?” Rune asked. “They were there?”
    Bergen nodded. A shadow had fallen over his face.
    “They destroyed the Great Temple not three winters before my arrival.”
    Rune stopped and grabbed Bergen’s arm, nearly pulling him to the ground. His face had fallen white. “The Great Temple?”
    Bergen nodded. “Destroyed.”
    There was a pause while Bergen waited for Rune to find his feet again.
    “Tension on the trade routes was high,” Bergen said once they started again down the road. “Still is. Two years after my arrival, the Empire in the South invaded Râ-Kedet. It ransacked the city and set the Academia on fire. We managed to put out the flames, but the library was beyond repair.”
    The sudden stench of camel flooded back to Bergen, bringing back every detail of that night. His stomach felt like it would fall out of him as he recalled the brush of Zabbai’s breast on his arm when he hoisted his Lady— not my Lady, never my Lady —onto her camel. The high moon seemed to have filled her black eyes. She was still flushed red from the wine and tipsy when they started out across the endless dunes to the Ufratu River. It was there on the banks of the Ufratu that they departed. There, that she gave him the egg, and there he gave his promise.
    It was there that he left her for dead.
    Fire nipped the tip of Bergen’s nose as he tightened his jaw and swallowed the bitter bite in the back of his throat. There was too much he wasn’t saying, too much he couldn’t say.
    “When it was over, I gathered up the last of the surviving scriveners and we moved what was left to the new library,” Bergen forced out the end of his story.
    “And your manuscripts?” Rune asked.
    “Lost in the fire,” Bergen said.
    There was a moment of silence as if grieving the loss of his works.
    “What happened to your queen?” Rune asked.
    A disquieted look blanketed Bergen’s face. “The last time I saw her, the emperor had her walk the streets of the Imperial City.”
    Wearing nothing but chains of gold , Bergen couldn’t bring himself to say and instead fell silent as he recalled the shimmering gold in the desert sun and her dark, bronze skin. Her hair had fallen down her back like black rain that barely covered her rounded backside.
    She held her head high even then, he recalled.
    “And so you stayed,” Rune finished for Bergen, pulling him out of the withdrawn daze he had drifted into.
    Bergen nodded. “To care for what little was left.”
    There was another prolonged silence as they made their way deeper into the wood.
    “What aren’t you telling me, Brother?” Rune asked.
    Indifference blanketed Bergen’s eyes, but Rune didn’t seem to notice.
    “There was another fire.”
    Rune kicked his own foot and stumbled, then regained his balanced.
    “It’s why I came home,” Bergen said coldly. “The emperor got to it. There’s nothing left.”
    A breeze swept their path, giving Bergen a chance to breathe in the fresh Nordic winds he had spent five years missing.
    “I got to see the Lighthouse of Râ-Kedet,” Bergen said.
    “How was it?”
    Bergen shrugged. “Big.”
    Rune dropped his shoulders. “Oh, is that all?”
    “Almost as big as the pyramid I saw in the Black Land across the River.”
    Rune made a sound that combined a loathsome grunt and an impressed scoff.
    Bergen fell silent again.
    “What does it look like?” Rune asked.
    Bergen scratched the unshaven, black bristles on his face.
    “Wet.”
    “Not the