Harbinger: Fate's Forsaken: Book One Read Online Free PDF Page A

cooked — raw, their
juices had a poison in them that settled in the throat and spread to other
victims through coughs. Amos called it thistlethroat, and the remedy was one of
the most unpleasant tonics in his cabinet.
    Kael knew he’d
been right to choose a different pot.
    Just beyond the
coughing women was a man who looked like he’d tangled with a beehive: the skin
on his face was red and taut, stretched across the sharp lumps of his swollen
cheeks. He moaned unintelligibly through his puffy lips, and Kael stopped to
put more ointment on the stings. He’d read that in other regions, the bees
actually lost their barbs. But in the mountains they could go on stinging a man
until he crushed them ... or died.
    He finally
discovered Amos in the back of the room, tending to a boy with a large cut on
the top of his arm. Though his hair was gray, Amos’s brown eyes were still
plenty sharp. Hardly a thing went on in his hospital without him knowing about
it.
    “Don’t pick at
those stitches, young man! Do you want it to turn black and rot off?” he
snapped.
    The boy jerked
his hand away from the wound and his eyes filled with tears.
    “I didn’t think
so.” Amos wrapped the boy’s arm in a clean white bandage and then gave him a
serious look. “No more climbing on rotten trees, all right?”
    The boy nodded
stiffly. And as he left, he held his arm far to the side — as if it might
fall off at any moment.
    “Don’t forget:
you’re to come see me again in one week. Tell your parents,” Amos called after
him.
    No sooner was
the boy gone than a fisherman stumbled over to take his place. He grimaced and
leaned heavily on his companions — who supported him on either side.
    Amos looked him
over. “What happened here? A bruised knee, a twisted ankle?”
    “No. Thorns,”
the fisherman grunted. “I was standing on a rock and when I threw my line, my
boots slipped out from under me. Fell flat into a patch of brambles, I did.”
His friends turned him around, revealing the dozens of thorns that peppered his
back. They poked through his shirt and left little rings of blood around each
one.
    It made Kael’s
skin itch to look at it, but Amos just rolled his eyes. “Oh for mercy’s sake.
You look like an oversized hedgepig.” He led them to the nearest table and
spread a clean sheet over it. “Lay him out here — no, on his stomach , boys! I shouldn’t have to pull
them out through his lungs.”
    When they had
him situated, Amos forced a cup of sharp-smelling tonic down the fisherman’s
throat. He was soon snoring peacefully.
    “This shouldn’t
take long. I’ll send him home when we’re done,” Amos said, shooing his
companions out the door. When they were gone, he walked past Kael and said
without looking: “Bring me those tweezers, will you?”
    He’d worked with
Amos long enough to know exactly which tweezers he meant. They were a pair with
grooves cut out of them: perfect for gripping onto the smooth surface of a
thorn.
    “I’m going to
pull these out, and I want you to dab the blood dry as soon as they’re free,
all right?” Amos said.
    Kael got a clean
cloth and held it next to the first thorn. Amos’s hands shook a little as he
latched the tweezers onto it. But he furrowed his brows in stubborn concentration,
and his hands became still. “Ready?” he said, and Kael nodded.
    With one sharp
tug, Amos wrenched the thorn free and Kael pushed the cloth over the wound. He
thought there was an awful lot of blood, and he heard Amos mutter a curse under
his breath.
    “Hooknettle,” he
grouched, holding the thorn up for Kael to see.
    Hooknettle was
one of the nastier mountain brambles. Its thorns were shaped like a fisherman’s
hook: with one barb at the tip and another on the side. The barb at the tip dug
into flesh while the other latched on, making it nearly impossible to pull free
without taking a sizable chunk of skin with it.
    “I don’t have
time for this.” Amos dropped the thorn into a bowl,