Enchanter's Echo Read Online Free PDF

cohesive and cooperative. When the entire group has common expectations of behavior, fewer misunderstandings occur. For instance, the rules of this house. One in particular comes to mind. Dangerous items confiscated from criminals are housed in the basement armory and are not removed until the convening.”
    Edmund shook his head, hands in pockets. “I’ve not heard that rule before.” He looked at Vin. “You?”
    “Nope. Haven’t heard that one.”
    Truth. It had never been specifically verbalized as a rule.
    “Edmund!” His mother actually stomped her foot. “The unnatural eye is missing! Imagine my surprise, my utter embarrassment.” Her vibes skewed slightly with the last words, jerking in the air.
    The vibes of lies always reminded him of crickets chirping.
    “I opened the deadening box to find it empty. Empty! In front of the entire judicial panel.” Crickets again.
    He’d known this was coming. “Mother.” He shook his head, disappointed. “You might have opened the box, but it wasn’t in front of the judicial panel. The hearing for that violation was erased from the convening’s agenda scrolls. I cast the spell to erase it myself. The man who bore the eye is dead. There’s no point in convicting him of a crime.”
    She shook her manicured finger in the air. “That eye was strewn with power. Utterly drenched in it. Who knows what that man was capable of seeing with it? In my life I’ve seen many cases of unnatural physique up close and personal. Never have I encountered the power that reeked from that sphere.”
    It hadn’t reeked. It had sung with power, despite the fact that it had been in the skull of one of the darkest mages in existence.
    His mother took a breath. “Someone made that eye. Someone needs to pay. The entire Republic abhors unnatural physique.”
    She was right. The vibes of unnatural physique made it impossible for a ruling family to bind a mage and ensure his loyalty, leaving the mage a renegade with uncontrolled energy. That was reason enough for the founding families to despise it. But it wasn’t just the descendants of the Mayflower mages who hated it. The uprisings of ’93 and ’02 that started in the south and spread to the northern territories would never have happened if the radical political groups hadn’t had access to unnatural physique. Artificial muscles had powered the rebels beyond human strength. Enhanced skin had repelled defensive spells and let them charge through the army’s barricades. Thousands of innocent mages had been caught in the crossfire and died.
    What had Aurora been thinking to create such a monstrosity? That eye had severed the metallist mage from his Rallis ties and might even have contributed to his insanity.
    But there was no point bringing that up that now. The eye was gone forever. Wiped from existence.
    “We can all guess who the criminal was. It was a metal eye worn by a metallist mage, who is now dead. Making this public knowledge will only reflect poorly on Rallis.” And endanger his enchantress. He stepped forward and placed his hands on his mother’s shoulders. “I understand your feelings on unnatural physique, but for the sake of the territory, we need to keep this within the family. I’ve taken care of it. I also took care of mailing our census this afternoon.” His change of subject probably wouldn’t distract her, but it was worth a try.
    Before he’d driven to the junkyard, he’d slipped the papers into the new mailbox at the corner of Goodale Park. Reporters from the city’s three major papers had captured the moment, Edmund’s attempt to help the city heal. No one would ever forget the little boy who’d opened the mailbox on the corner of Park Street and Buttles Avenue, excited to be tall enough to reach all by himself, only to be brutally murdered, along with twenty-eight other mages, the terrorists’ bomb triggering when he’d opened the mailbox.
    Five months gone and the park had yet to be repaired. Its