First Rider's Call Read Online Free PDF

bound her to the messenger service, but whether she hid it deep in a drawer or tried burying it in the woods, she inevitably found herself wearing it by day’s end without memory of having pinned it on. Magical objects, she had once been told, often had minds of their own.
    As time wore on, her behavior grew more eccentric. The color green came to dominate her wardrobe by no intention of her own, and it led her father to the conclusion that she was inordinately fond of the color. The struggle also left her irritable. “What’s eating at you?” her father had asked in exasperation after she lost patience with a servant one day. She never yelled at servants. Normally.
    How could she explain to a man who, like so many other Sacoridians, held a deep aversion to magic, that magic was trying to rule her life?
    Instead, she had said, “You never let me accompany the barges or wagon trains.” She believed that getting out of Corsa and being on the road or a river beneath the open sky might ease the call gnawing at her soul. “It’s always, ‘Karigan, inventory storehouse five,’ or ‘Karigan, schedule next month’s routes and deliveries.’ ” She had breathed hard with the unexpected fury that had built up in her chest. “You always leave the dullest chores for me.”
    Her father had looked at her in astonishment, as if some stranger stood before him. “I thought you wanted to learn more about the business. It isn’t all traveling from town to town, or overseeing wares on fair days.”
    The portrait of Karigan’s mother loomed large on the wall behind her father. She knew he would never forgive himself for Kariny’s death, or for that of the unborn child she had been carrying at the time. It was he who had scheduled her to lead a wagon train to a fair that, unknown to him, was rife with fever.
    No, no matter Stevic G’ladheon’s innocence, he would never forgive himself.
    “You’re being overprotective,” Karigan said. She had not shouted, but she might as well have.
    Her father had followed her gaze to the portrait, then slowly turned his eyes back upon her. “You are my only child,” he said, “and I love you.”
    Karigan swallowed hard, remembering the hurt and grief in his eyes, but as if thrusting a sword into his heart had not been enough, she had twisted the blade by telling him he didn’t understand anything. Then she had stomped out of his office and slammed the door behind her for good measure. The memory of it still left an ache of guilt within her.
    Did she regret the Rider life? Over the past year she had come to accept it to a degree, and she even liked it well enough in some ways, but she believed she would always resent how it had utterly wrenched her out of the life she knew. And she would never forgive the call for the gulf it had opened between her and her father.
    “It’s not a call,” she murmured. “It’s a command.”
    At her quiet words, a devilish smile played on Bard’s lips.
    “Oh, please,” Karigan began, knowing exactly what he was thinking. “Please don’t bring up—”
    “Halfway to Sacor City in your nightgown!”
    “I was not! I only got as far as Darden!”
    “Two towns over. Gave the marketplace something to jabber about for weeks.”
    Karigan’s face heated, and it wasn’t because of the crackling fire before her. The night she had finally succumbed to the call, it had crashed over her like a storm wave that washed her away in a dreamlike undertow from which she was unable to awaken. She only snapped out of it the next morning when she reached Darden. In the middle of the market. In her nightgown. She groaned at the memory.
    “I can only use my imagination.” Bard shook with laughter. “My, but it makes an amusing picture—and tale.”
    “Don’t you dare!” She wouldn’t put it past Bard to make some outrageous ditty of it. His talent for fashioning absurd lyrics was going to drive the more conventional masters at Selium out of their