Inheritance Read Online Free PDF Page A

incredible.”
    “It was certainly a p-p-performance,” Olio said in a hushed tone.
    “Did you know our mother could do that?” Lynan asked him.
    Olio shook his head. “Well, in theory, of course, b-b-but I’ve never seen the Keys used b-b-before, except as decoration around the queen’s throat.” His brow furrowed in thought. “I wonder what the other Keys m—m-might be capable of.”
    “How is Ager?” Lynan asked Kumul.
    “His breathing is almost normal,” Kumul said with obvious relief. “And see, the bleeding has stopped altogether.”
    “It is a wondrous thing the queen has done,” Edaytor said.
    “The queen would do anything for Kumul,” Lynan said.
    “Which shows how little you know about your own mother,” Kumul replied sharply.
Chapter 3
    Kumul woke with a start, almost falling off his stool. He had fallen asleep with his head resting at an odd angle against the wall and now had a painful crick in his neck. Standing up, he went to Ager’s bed. The man was still asleep, but it seemed to be the sleep of the peaceful and not of the dying. The crookback’s face seemed very old and careworn for someone who could not have been older than forty years of age, and his long hair, mostly gray, was lanky and thin.
    Although the fire in the hearth had long gone out and the room was cool, Kumul felt the need for fresh air. He went to the room’s only window and eased open the wooden shutters. The city of Kendra slept in the darkness. A faint light broached its eastern walls. He could make out on the water just beyond the harbor entrance the phosphorescent glimmer of the wakes of fishing boats returning to the city’s wharves, although the boats themselves, and even their sails, were still lost against the black expanse of sea.
    He returned to Ager and, once again, carefully studied the man’s face, trying to remember what it had been like all those years ago when they were both comparatively young, filled with an energy that had long since been dissipated by war and injury and the loss of their beloved general.
    Kumul had not seen Ager for over fifteen years and had assumed he was dead; but last night, against all expectation, they had met again, only for Ager almost to die in his arms. He felt bitter at that last twist of fate.
    The sharpness of his feelings surprised him. He had lost friends before, and his friendship with Ager during the Slaver War largely had been largely professional, not personal. Yet now it seemed to him that the friendship, stretched across a war with as many defeats as victories, had inherited the weight of years of vacant peace during which Kumul had slowly learned he had few real friends left in this world.
    A sound rose from the great courtyard outside, the clattering of hooves on cobblestone, the challenge of the guards. He heard the sentries stamp to attention, something they only did for members of the royal family. It must be Berayma, Usharna’s eldest child, returning from his mission to Queen Charion of Hume, one of Usharna’s less predictable and more outspoken subjects. The mission had been a sensitive one, and Kumul prayed that Berayma, severe as a winter wind, had been up to it.
    Kumul looked again at Ager’s face, calm in sleep but carrying with it all the scars of war earned in the service of Queen Usharna. He had a premonition then, a warning of some danger, distant but closing in. He tried to wish it away, but it hung at the back of his mind, formless and brooding.
    Gasping, Areava broke away from the shreds of her sleep. She looked around wildly, pulling the sheets about her. It took her a few seconds to recognize her own chambers, and when she did, she collapsed back against the bedhead, shivering in the predawn stillness.
    The black wings of the nightmare that had roused her still beat in her memory. She had dreamed of the sea rising up over Kendra and the peninsula it was built upon, washing over the great defensive walls, flooding through its narrow