Fallowblade Read Online Free PDF Page B

light-hearted indifference.
    Uncharacteristically, the wight seemed to repent. He looked away. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That is true.’
    After an uncomfortable silence the weathermage said, ‘If you would care to know what I was truly thinking of before you showed yourself, I was musing about something that occurred several days ago.’
    ‘What might that be?’
    ‘There was a most curious stirring in the atmosphere, the like of which is rarely manifested. So strong it was, so antagonistic to natural law . . . ’twas evident that there had been some powerful wielding of the brí, somewhere in the southern regions. Weathermasters were at work in no small way. Yet no messenger brought tidings of anything untoward. It will be long ere the patterns return to normal, yet I have no notion of what caused the disturbance. My grandfather would have sent word, were it of consequence, yet I have heard no ill news from him. It is strange. I feel uneasy.’
    ‘You, with your faculties that grasp the nature of the elements!’ said the urisk. ‘There is much you comprehend that is beyond the reach of commonkind.’ Glancing at the pyre of rubies in the hearth as if he saw through them to some remote, incomprehensible place or state of being, he added softly, ‘Much, too, that you have no inkling of.’
    ‘Of course there is,’ Asr ă thiel said, experiencing a sudden rush of fondness for her intermittent and tetchy but intriguingly unpredictable companion. ‘However, you have taught me things I could never have learned from books or human scholars.’
    During their conversations of the past season, the urisk had told her truths about the world that she had never known, had answered questions she had never dreamed of asking, despite the fact that at Rowan Green she had been well tutored in the lore accumulated by humankind over the centuries.
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘Such as stories about the outer rim of the heavens.’ The wight had often spoken of the stars; it seemed he was as attuned to astronomy as brí-wielders were cognisant of weather; linked to the stars by something more than mere observation and study, as if he were, in some way, related by blood to celestial phenomena. ‘You sense the slowing of the world’s spin,’ said Asr ă thiel, ‘caused by the drag of the tides. You tell of the five hundred and thirty-two year lunar-solar cycle, the exact orbit of the moon, the existence of black holes in the sky beyond the sky, the births and deaths of stars, the equations governing time; incredibly, you even measure the speed of light.’
    ‘Ah,’ said the eldritch savant, ‘and well might I speak of the stars. For we are all fashioned from star-dust.’
    All fashioned from star-dust. It was an extraordinary assertion, one that he had made before, but which Asr ă thiel held like treasure in the storehouse of her mind. She considered the concept strangely comforting; it was as if she too were related by blood to the entire universe. It occurred to her, then, that she had not yet tapped the wight’s store of knowledge for answers to a more recent mystery. ‘Wight, do you know aught of the unseelie killings in the north?’ Before she had finished speaking, a lurid glare abruptly licked up the opposite wall. The leaded panes of the windows flared to a bloody radiance. ‘What’s astir?’ Asr ă thiel sprang up, ran to the casements and peered out. Through the windows she perceived a small sun rising on the distant heights. ‘The watchmen have kindled the beacon fires! What can it mean?’
    No sooner had she asked the question than someone rapped urgently at the parlour door.
    ‘Enter!’ she cried.
    Her butler, Giles, appeared and bowed. ‘My lady, pray forgive me for this interruption. A post rider has just now arrived from the palace.’
    ‘Usher him to me forthwith!’ Asr ă thiel’s heart thudded. Beacons or no beacons, she hoped, desperately, that the messenger would be bringing a long-overdue communication from