Magesong Read Online Free PDF

able to go to my house and take care of the
stranger until I return?"
    "I'm done here now," Kestrin said hastily, the
glint of intrigue in her eyes.  "I'll go there right away."
    "No need to hurry."
    Syliva left the Monjors and walked along the axis of the
village to Celvake's house, gladdened to have a reason not to bring Kestrin,
for she wanted to go to the pond.  After looking at the carpenter's hand in
bright sunlight and finding no insect bites, no lumps, no swelling, reddening,
or bruising, she gave him extract of iollaheat and said a farewell, leaving
Lorendal by the path to Hyerkin.
    She soon turned away from the trail, walking north by west
across what was once and would be again a pasture of tall wild grasses, now a
dry patch of dirt and straw-colored stubble.  Above the bare poplars bordering
the field and the blue firs beyond, the Skialfanmir rose from a heavily-wooded
ridge, a seamless tower of grey and gold stone soaring two thousand feet above
the sea.  It was the highest of all the pinnacles running northward along the
coast, and the Poem of Ancient Truths made some mention that it was the home of
the spirit of the valley, the spot where the land touched the sky being an
in-between place.
    The poplars looked sickly, the firs dull at the end of
winter.  She passed them, entering the woodland and following an unmarked way
through the maze of evergreens.  The twist of this pine or the lean of that fir
served as pilots, and she knew that if she missed them she would never find the
grove of willows, for she had tried many times to get to the pond by other ways
and had always got lost.  The forest is strangely hushed, she thought as she
listened to her own soft footfalls on the floor of dried pine needles. 
Something was missing.  There were no birds.
    She came to a thick copse of willow trees cradling a natural
well of clear cold water.  This was her place.  She had found it on her own. 
No one in the valley knew of it, and if her own teacher had known she had never
told.  Syliva never planned to keep it forever secret, but she wasn't yet ready
to give up the one part of herself she did not share with anyone.
    The water always lay still there, even when a gusty breeze
shook the tops of the willows.  It was a quiet place.
    She let out a breath as she passed under the bare branches
and into the sun-splashed clearing.  Out of the earth, between the outcroppings
of lichen-covered rock, a few dry shoots of last year's foxtail peered upward
at her.  She circled the silent spring with twenty quick steps looking for
signs of sprouting spindlewort among the foxtails and the beginnings of furry
catkins on the tips of the willow branches.  She saw none.  And she finally
knew that the land had been truly blighted.  If there were any place in the
valley where things would be growing it would be here.
    She sat at the edge of the pool and looked at herself in its
stillness.  She wasn't afraid.  The folk must keep faith with the spirits of
earth and sea and sky.  Winter was hard and unforgiving, but not cruel.  People
could be cruel, but not the world.  And certainly the spirits of people
couldn't be stronger than the spirits of the world.  Certainly not, she
thought, trying to look into the depths of the well.  But an old dry twig fell
from a willow branch into the spring, sending a ripple across the water.

1st INTERLUDE:  An Object of Desire
     
    The compulsion to touch it was overwhelming.  He ran his
fingers lightly along its inward-curving side, his breath coming more quickly
now.  Silk.  That was what it felt like, silk, not wood.
    He wondered if he should remove it from the trophy room and
place it closer to his own.
    Libac looked at his other trophies.  The emerald serpent —
virtually priceless, the gold yeti-mask from Baskillia, the shaman's staff from
the Silekai Isles, the jade bowl from Tassa — a lucky find, he had bought it in
the marketplace for only thirty silver kandars.  But