Kingmaker's Sword (Rune Blades of Celi) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mouse.”
    One red-gold eyebrow rose in surprise. Or amusement. “Mouse?” he repeated. “What kind of a name is that?”
    Mouse shrugged. “A slave name,” he said bitterly.
    “Well, it surely is no name for a free man and one of Cullin dav Medroch’s merchant train guards. I’ll give you my grandfather’s name. He’s not needing it anymore.”
    He picked up the bounty hunter’s sword with his left hand and tossed it to Mouse. Mouse reached up automatically and grabbed the hilt before it hit him in the face. For the first time, he saw that it was truly a wondrous sword. The blade shone with a silvery gleam in the dim light of the torch. Runes he could not quite read spilled down the centre of the blade, glittering like facets of a hundred gems. When he tried to look closely at them, they blurred and ran together, as if seen through a thin curtain of moving water. The plain, leather-bound hilt was long enough to be used two-handed. An echo of his dreams reverberated faintly through him as he hefted the sword and found it balanced perfectly in his left hand. When he switched to an experimental two-handed grip, the balance shifted subtly so that again, it was perfect.
    “From now on, you’re Kian,” Cullin dav Medroch said. “You’ll have to earn a last name. But Kian’s a good name. A name with pride on it.” He smiled grimly. “And don’t you ever forget that.”
    Kian straightened his shoulders and shed the slave name as a man might shrug off an ill-fitting cloak. “I won’t,” he said fervently. “By all the gods, I won’t.”
    Cullin grinned. “Then get your horse, Kian, and come wi’ me. What we both need is a good night’s sleep in a decent inn. We’ll talk again in the morning over our fast-breaking.”

Part Two — Kian
III
    I cannot look back, now, on that time before I met Cullin dav Medroch dav Kian, without feeling that it all happened to someone else. That boy named Mouse was someone I knew, perhaps, but I cannot feel that he was really me. His time is as blurred in my memory as the first seven or eight years of his life were blurred in his. What I have become—who I have become—since then has turned Mouse into a faded painting on a crumbling wall. I can feel nothing of the pain he endured, only pity for him and admiration that he survived. There is an odd detachment in my mind when I try to think of him, a separation as sharp, as keen as the blade of a dagger. Sometimes, it is strange to think that nearly ten years of my life were spent as someone else, but it is something I do not allow myself to dwell on. There is enough in my life now to compensate. I am content to let Mouse be who he was, and let me be myself.
    ***
    I hardly remember the long, hard ride to the inn across the Isgardian border. Exhaustion, reaction and relief combined to send me into a daze where moving was like wading through a pond of thick pitch. I nearly tumbled from the sorrel when we finally stopped. I think it must have been sometime near dawn. Cullin used more of the silvers from his purse to buy a small room on the second level of the inn. I was hardly aware of anything but the clean smell of the bed the innkeeper led me to. I was asleep almost before I toppled into it.
    The late morning sun streaming through the window like warm honey finally woke me. I lay naked in a soft bed, covered by a quilt of such fine quality it felt like silk against my skin. Confused and disoriented, I sat up abruptly, spilling the bedclothes over the edge of the. The clothes I had worn lay across a chair near the bed, neatly folded, cleaned and brushed, the boots, polished to a glowing sheen, tucked under the chair. A longsword lay across the folded cloak, catching the sun like burnished silver. I stared at it blankly and tried to sort out where I was, how I got there and why I was there.
    Someone knocked softly. I snatched the quilt off the floor and pulled it up over my hips as the door opened and a serving girl entered