Endurance Read Online Free PDF Page B

streets?” He laughed, though the sound of it was airless and frightening. “You have made the city your own, and the city has made you into its own.”
    â€œNo,” I told him, kissing his grave with every word. “Your people stole me away. I gave myself back to myself.”
    â€œYou will learn. All you have worked for is in the balance once again.”
    â€œAll I have worked for is ever in the balance,” I protested. “There is no going back, no setting things to rights. Not the way people play at politics. I will not be the fulcrum on which the fate of Copper Downs rests.” It occurred to me to wonder why I was arguing this point with a ghost.
    â€œYou do not carry the seeds of choice.”
    No, I carry another seed. How deeply did this ghost-Erio see? How deeply did he spar with me? “The choices are always mine.”
    His tone grew more plaintive. “Go. Please. I speak as a king of old begging one of the queens of latter days. Return and see what they are making in your absence. Set things to rights. I fear for our city.”
    My blood curdled. “I am no queen, and never would be one.”
    â€œGo.” Now his voice was hollow, lost, more like the whispers I’d learned to ignore while walking among the graves. “Go, go, go, go…”
    A cold silence followed.
    â€œErio is the strongest of them,” Mistress Danae finally said, though it took me a moment to recognize that it was she who had spoken.
    I sat up slowly and looked toward her shadowed face. “Is that why you live here?”
    â€œI would rather borrow his purpose than have none at all.”
    Those words wrenched at my heart, but I had nothing else to offer her, so I rose and stepped back into the world of daylight.
    All the way down through the meadow the graves called to me, some pleading, others crying, as if Erio’s spirit yet clung to me and drew them forth in their broken numbers. Mistress Danae was no different from these, except for the accident of breath still in her lungs.
    I prayed that when I died the Wheel would swiftly take me up and pass me onward. Their fate seemed immeasurably sad.
    *   *   *
    Scrambling down the cliff from Lady Ingard’s Hill, I fell almost two body lengths. I knew how to take such a drop, and managed to protect the baby, though I wrenched my left shoulder doing it, and surely collected some bruises. I might not yet be showing much of my pregnancy to the casual eye, but my balance was clumsier than ever it had been. Ilona had already let out my leathers once, which embarrassed me to no end, even just between the two of us.
    The Dancing Mistress would have known what to do. For a moment I mourned my absent teacher and friend; then I limped down through the woods and into the apple orchard, careful as always to make no path where I could help it.
    Approaching Ilona’s cottage, I heard adult voices. Living voices. That put me very much in mind of Corinthia Anastasia’s report of someone searching for me down at Briarpool. I crouched lower, moving now as I might have running with Mother Shesturi’s handle. Blade training was never far from my mind; though I had been lazy enough in my months up here, I still maintained my form. Even with my poor balance and aching shoulder.
    I drifted into a stand of brambles that would afford me a view of the house. A dark-haired man stood in the open doorway, his back to me. I could hear Ilona’s voice from within. Her tone did not sound panicked or afraid, though the rise and fall of argument was clear enough. And the visitor’s accent held the familiar rhythms of Seliu. The searcher from Briarpool was here! Carefully I scanned for guards, for watchers, for reinforcements.
    Had this one come alone?
    From the tenor of the conversation, their contention seemed likely to continue, so I slipped to my left and carefully circled the house from about a dozen rods into the