Living With Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page B

Queen’s Own Cavalry, their horses groomed to a shine, their tabards emblazoned with the flaming eagle of Merafi’s d’Illandre kings. The blue and white feathers in their wide-brimmed hats curled lightly in the rain. Neither their boots nor the horses’ coats bore more than a light splatter of mud: they had not come far, then. Perhaps someone from the royal household had business with the city aldermen. Along with the rest of the crowd, Gracielis stopped to watch. In the center of the procession rode a smaller group, who had clearly traveled much farther. Their banners hung limp and soggy; their cloaks were rain-dark and bedraggled. Some of these came also from the royal cavalry, but perhaps twenty foreigners rode in their midst, clad in heavy gray cloaks edged in scarlet. Clansmen from the northern Lunedith, the land that had given birth, long ago, to Merafi’s royal d’Illandre dynasty. The d’Illandre kings had expanded south and west, carving out the kingdom of Gran’ Romagne, with its rolling hills, fertile plains, wide valleys, and rich rivers, and founded their new capital of Merafi, where their widest river met the sea. But Lunedith remained a dependency of its crown, ruled on behalf of Queen Firomelle by her ally, Prince Keris Orcandros, from the ancient city of Skarholm. The Lunedithin traded in sulfur and timber and pelts; a handful of merchants had settled in Merafi, but most chose to remain in their cold homeland, cleaving to customs and beliefs from before the birth of Gran’ Romagne and holding themselves aloof from their neighbors. Strange stories were told of the clans, that they were shapeshifters and hedge witches, though here in Merafi only children chose to believe them. Children, and a handful of scholars and priests, and those who had time for history. And Gracielis. In his Tarnaroqi homeland, legends were treated with caution. It was not unknown for them to have consequences that could, even now, harm you.
    Dead Valdarrien of the Far Blays had loved a Lunedithin woman and lost her. Somewhere in the back of Gracielis’ mind was a thundering, like the sound of water falling. He took an almost unconscious step forward. There in the party’s center rode a woman with level green eyes and braided hair that, when dry, would be a dusty ash blonde. Her strong archer’s wrists held her mount in check; her head turned toward the sharp-featured man beside her. Gracielis could taste lemon and dust. The air was heavy with the memory of falling water, with the crack of a gunshot at midnight.
    He had already reached for a sword he did not carry. His lips shaped a name that was not his to use. In the next instant, she would turn to him, see him, and . . .
    His fingers closed about his wrist, nails digging in. “I,” he said, aloud for the neighbor man to hear, “am myself and no other. I am Gracielis de Varnaq, and I hold to my own past.” The riders passed, vanishing toward the aristocrats’ quarter in the high city. His breathing was his own again, yet he remained motionless gazing after them, while the crowds began once again to move, until a street vendor cursed him for being in the way.
    Faces were his stock in trade. He knew that woman. Iareth Yscoithi, Valdarrien’s lover, who had left Merafi six long years before. Gracielis had seen her at the theater, never met her. There had to be some explanation, some unraveling of what had just passed within him. Such things should not be possible here in Merafi, where ghosts seldom walked. He was hedged in by the memory of Valdarrien d’Illandre, right down to the malicious spirit that haunted him. The lieutenant’s last act in life had been to kill Valdarrien. Gracielis had mourned neither of them. The lieutenant had been a bully and an abuser. He had no idea why the man’s ghost had attached itself to him. And as to Valdarrien . . . He had not known the late lord of the Far Blays, although he had seen him from a distance a time or two and had been a