Gravity's Revenge Read Online Free PDF

won’t freeze outside. Just so long as you promise to keep the place free of Feasters.”
    Beside her, Minna winced at the mention of the dangerous illusionists. The girl gazed up at the building above and mouthed, The Recurve Tower . The spire twisted about itself like a knotted serpent. It shadowed them, except for a patch of light between Hiresha and Janny from where the sun fitted between the structure’s coils.
    Janny elbowed her daughter and chuckled. “Told you so.”
    “Mother! Ew!” Minna turned to Hiresha and asked, “What’s the real reason they built it so wrapped around?”
    “For practical reasons, of course.” The enchantress would have winked then, had she ever learned the knack of it. “The Recurve Tower is the longest tower in the Lands of Loam, yet it couldn’t have been taller than the observatory. How then could the Minister of Orbiting Bodies observe the stars?”
    Minna asked, “Wouldn’t it have been easier to build the observatory higher up?”
    Fos swept a hand up to the Recurve Tower . “What? And have a plain old tower? Who’d want that?”
    Hiresha tapped her lips and smiled. A clever girl. The enchantress said, “Alyla, would you be so good as to show Minna around the Academy?”
    Alyla had hung behind her brother in her novice robes like a teal shadow. She murmured something.
    Minna tore her eyes from Fos. “What’d you say?”
    In a tiny voice, Alyla said, “I have a class now. I can’t—”
    “Minna may join you,” Hiresha said. The enchantress turned to Janny. “Are her quarters prepared?”
    “Already stowed her basket of personables on the owl’s floor,” Janny said. “She’s no lark. Never can seem to settle herself to sleep before the throbbing hours of the morning. Aww! Would you look at those two young things together?”
    Minna only came up to Alyla’s shoulder, but the taller woman walked stooped forward, arms held over her chest as if shielding herself from unseen aggressors. Hiresha hoped the two would become friends. The Opal Mind knows that Alyla needs one.
    Hiresha shivered, feeling a sheen of sweat freezing to her inner gown. Battered by shock and insult, she wanted to recover in her dream laboratory. There she could determine who the falling woman had been. If she truly had been. Fatigue made Hiresha’s face feel tight, and her eyelids twitched.
    “Fos, would you escort me to my chambers?”
    He extended an elbow. She clasped him under the thickness of his arm. The two strode toward the serpentine tower at the center of the Academy. Hiresha’s sense of unease redoubled. She felt unbalanced and vulnerable, as if the curving tower was tipping toward her in a collapse.
    With the next breath, the enchantress reassured herself the spire was stationary. Despite its twisting design, a mortar of magic held it stable. Yet the feeling remained that she must do something, soon.
    “Fos,” Hiresha asked, “while on patrol, you didn’t see an enchantress approach the edge did you?”
    “The cliff edge?”
    “Yes. A younger woman, wearing a green dress perhaps?” Hiresha had not recognized her, but Hiresha only taught advanced courses in Applied Enchantment. If the other enchantress had been more than a figment, she must have been a student of dream exploration.
    Fos stopped and faced her. “Should I have seen something?”
    I must be ailing. Hiresha prided herself on her logical thinking. She would not rile herself into a frenzy over something she may or may not have seen. And if the unfortunate woman was real, she is beyond my help now.
    Before Hiresha could speak further to Fos, the chancellor ambushed them with a cursory curtsey. “Provost Hiresha, you are required to teach Introduction to Magic Theory this afternoon. Enchantress Symera has made herself unavailable.”
    Hiresha frowned, and her fatigued mind dredged up Symera’s fine-featured face, not the same as the falling woman’s. Compared to her deadly fall, Hiresha reasoned that