Ghost in the Throne (Ghost Exile #7) Read Online Free PDF

choice. She had set out quite cold-bloodedly to seduce him, and she had succeeded. Kylon had fallen in love with her, and she with him. It had not been feigned – with their arcane abilities, they could not hide their emotions from each other. He had fallen in love with her, slowly at first, but faster, and she had become pregnant with his child and then…
    And then the Red Huntress had murdered her. 
    Kylon had never thought to take another lover after that. He had set out for Istarinmul, intending to find Malik Rolukhan and Cassander Nilas, to kill them in vengeance for Thalastre’s murder. Exiled and destitute, he had financed his way by fighting in gladiatorial games until he reached Istarinmul. 
    And then Caina had walked into his room and back into his life.
    He stared at her sleeping face.
    After the day of the golden dead, he had never thought to see her again. He had been glad to see her, of course. Her cunning, her brilliance, would help him avenge Thalastre. Then she had shown him that they were fighting for more than revenge, that Thalastre had been killed by the outer edge of the evil that Callatas had created in Istarinmul. He had seen Caina stagger out of the Tomb of Kharnaces, dying from the Great Necromancer’s poison, had stood guard over her as she sweated and raved through the poison’s hallucinations.
    He had seen her dying upon the Red Huntress’s sword. 
    He had seen her perish in the explosion of silver fire, his own heart turning to ashes within him as the Corsair’s Rest burned. 
    And then, in defiance of all logic, she had staggered from the explosion. He had waited over her as she lay unconscious in Drynemet. 
    Now she was alive and unharmed, lying in the bed they shared. She was Caina Amalas, the Ghost he had tried to kill in Marsis, the woman who had helped him save Thalastre from the necromancy of Caer Magia, and Kylon loved her with an intensity that had driven him to gamble his life and the lives of their friends (and maybe even the lives of the world, if Callatas had claimed the regalia) to save her life. 
    He had told her that it was his fate to see the women he loved die in front of him. His sister had died. His wife had died. 
    But Caina hadn’t died, had she? 
    Yet he still saw her dying upon the Huntress’s sword, saw the silver fire consuming the Corsair’s Rest, saw her mind burning in the wrath of Kharnaces’s will. 
    She would have died, if Kylon had not saved her. 
    No. More precisely, she would have died if the Knight of Wind and Air had not showed Kylon how to save her. 
    Why? 
    He could not understand it. He was grateful, but he did not understand, and that gnawed at him. 
    Suddenly he wanted to be alone with his thoughts. Kylon stood, the air cool against his skin, and tugged the blankets over Caina. She sighed and shifted, and one blue eye opened to look at him.
    “I’m going to stretch my legs,” he said in Kyracian. It was always a relief to speak Kyracian with her. Kylon doubted anyone else for a hundred miles spoke it as fluently. “I’ll be back soon.” 
    He kissed her forehead, and Caina murmured something and fell asleep. Kylon looked down at her for a moment, and then dressed in a shirt and trousers, slinging the valikon in its sheath over his shoulder. He hesitated, remembering that awful night when he had left Caina alone in her room at the Corsair’s Rest, only to return to find the red-masked Huntress standing over her. Still, he supposed Caina was safe enough. There was nowhere in the room the Huntress could have hidden, and the doors of Strabane’s hall were thick. Even the Huntress, wielding the sword of the nagataaru, could not get through the doors without making a racket that would wake half the village. 
    Kylon slipped into the corridor and closed the door behind him, laughing a little at himself. He had become the sort of man who jumped at shadows…but he knew what lurked in those shadows. 
    But that was just as