Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) Read Online Free PDF Page A

he felt better after a few sips. He’d needed food after all.
    He fell asleep for a time, but memories kept jolting him awake, like electric shocks.
    The driver tuned the radio to a talk station. Several commentators hotly debated restoring the death penalty for murder. After a while, Mist found himself asking softly, “Do you believe in the death penalty?”
    “Oh, aye,” said the driver. “Hang the bastards! Cut down on the prison population. Me, I’d have ’em taken out the courtroom and shot.”
    “How many crimes, though? How many last chances do you give them?”
    “What? One’s enough. One strike and you’re out, eh?”
    “But when it’s been going on so long, you’ve lost count … and you’re dealing with someone who can’t die … What’s the worst crime? Wiping out a whole civilization? Or a single, cruel killing, for the hell of it?”
    “Och, I don’t know. That’s what war crimes tribunals are for. However many murders he’s committed, you can only hang the bastard once.”
    “Rufus didn’t mean me to die. I don’t think he meant Helena to die, either, but he didn’t care .” As Mist’s thoughts unspooled, he barely realized he was saying them out loud. “Yes, he drove himself mad with guilt for centuries, trying to bring me back to life again. But I didn’t want to come back. It’s because he didn’t care about her that I can’t forgive him. She was human, truly dead forever. And Rufus never got it.”
    The driver turned up the radio, an unsubtle hint that Mist’s rambling was interfering with his concentration.
    Mist murmured on, “I meant to stay in elemental form, so that Rufus could never touch me again. But I came back as a human—I don’t know how, strange things happen to us that we can’t control—and for years I thought I was a man called Adam Montague. Adam had two sisters who loved him. He wanted to be a priest, but instead he got sent to the trenches and witnessed all his friends killed in the mud around him … and he was never well again. Then Rufus came, and saw Adam, and kidnapped him. He inflicted ninety years of torture, as he tried to wake up poor Adam and turn him back into me .”
    Mist sighed, rubbed his forehead. “He couldn’t do it. Only the sea could do it. What Adam’s disappearance did to his family—that’s another story. But Rufus enjoyed their pain. How can you reason with someone like that?”
    Mist was half-aware that the driver was giving him alarmed sideways looks. “Hey, why don’t you take a wee doze? Long road yet, and you’re nae making a lotta sense. Tired and cold will do that.”
    “What would you do,” he asked, undeterred, “if this monster, this war criminal and murderer, was your brother?”
    “Ma brother?”
    “Would you give him up to the police? Would you still want him taken out and shot?”
    “Man, that’s deep. Family’s different.”
    “Is it? So would you protect him? You know he’s a lost cause, but part of you still loves him … but if he’s hurt people you love?”
    “Well, that’d be different. Say if he’d hurt ma wife or bairns, I’d kill him with ma bare hands.”
    “So if you knew he was guilty, but the courts let him go free and he vanished—would you let him go, or hunt him down?”
    “This conversation’s doing my head in, pal. Reach behind your seat; there’s an old jacket and boots. They’re a wee bit skanky, but you take ’em. Better than walking around in rags.”
    Mist found the items; the jacket, once green, was grey and oil-stained, the boots stiff with age, yet to him they were a priceless gift. “Thank you.”
    “All the thanks I want is for you to shut up, because I’ve zero patience with hitchhikers’ weird life stories. Okay?”
    Mist stared out into the sleet. The road grew broader, traffic increasing. In the distance, city lights sparkled like a lake of stars cupped within bleak surrounding hills. Weird? No, the driver misunderstood because he didn’t know