House of Blades (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the captive children. One of the raiders noticed her and shouted, but before anyone else could react she was at the rope, hacking and sawing with her sword. The soldier holding the rope reached out to grab her, but one of the boys from Myria knocked him to the ground. The other raiders spun their horses around and headed for Leah, but before they reached her the rope was cut. Its severed ends slid through loops in half a dozen collars, and the children bolted.
    At first, Simon expected them to run straight for the gate, but they didn’t; they scattered in every other direction. After a second, he realized that most of the nearby raiders were clustered between the captives and the gate itself. The children were just running anywhere they could see that wasn’t towards a raider.
    Including, unfortunately, directly towards Simon.
    A girl of about eleven or twelve dashed past Simon’s cart, her bare feet kicking up bursts of sand. A few seconds later, a steel-shod horse followed her.
    Simon rested a hand on the hilt of his sword. This was the time. If he was ever going to make a difference, if his time practicing was going to mean anything, he should go out now and make a stand. Maybe he would die fighting, like his father, but at least he could make a difference.
    Simon’s mother started to squirm in his arms. “Where’s my blanket?” she said. Her voice, thankfully, came out as a weak croak.  
    “Hush, Mother. I’ll go back and get your blanket in just a minute. You need to be quiet right now.”
    “I don’t want to be quiet, I want my blanket.” She was trying to make her voice louder, but it just came out scratchier.  
    Simon leaned close to her ear and pleaded, “Mother, please, we need to be quiet. We don’t want them to find us. After we get away, I’ll come back for your blanket, I promise.”
    His mother mumbled something in response, but he only understood the word “promise.”
    No, he couldn’t help the other villagers. His mother needed him.
    After another minute, the dust cleared enough that he could see the way to the gate. It was clear, except for a few bundles lying on the sandy ground. He started to wonder who those bundles had been, but his mind shied away from the thought and focused on more immediate matters. The raiders were gone, but they could return at any time. And there were surely more of them.
    He had to move now.
    Simon slid out on his belly, sticking his head warily up to check for danger. Nothing moved. Moving with the quick, jerky motions of fear, he reached back and pulled his mother up and out from under the cart.
    Picking her up again, and stumbling under the sudden weight, Simon began to jog towards the gate. He kept his ears sharp and tuned to any close sound. As he hurried past the bodies, he couldn’t help but glance down to see if either one had belonged to Leah.
    He almost breathed a sigh of relief when he passed them. Almost, except that he had known the two children in the dust for their entire lives. One of them was a nine-year-old boy.
    A new feeling rose up through his fear: determination. Since he was a boy, Simon had cared for his mother. He had worked for anyone who would take him, for as long as they would let him, barely earning enough supplies to scrape by. He was driven by a resolution, a stone-solid certainty: he would do whatever it took to keep his mother alive. If he had to crawl through the flames in the blackest pits of Naraka to do it, by the Maker, Simon and his mother were going to make it out alive. He owed his father no less.
    Simon kept his resolve clutched close to his chest, like a blanket in the dead of winter. It warmed him, gave him the strength to keep running when all he wanted was to collapse and let the wind blow him away like so much sand.
    ***
    Leah had never run so hard in her life.
    She dashed over dirt and hard-packed sand, slipping through the broken remnants of the village gate, which had been shattered when Malachi’s