Neveryona Read Online Free PDF

with twisted vines – which held her thoughts. She picked up a stick from the highway’s shoulder and scratched her name in its dust, new capital and eliding mark. She put the stick down. Again she read over her name, which seemed so new and wondrous and right.
    Then she walked on.
    An hour later a dead branch, blown out on the road by a mountain gust, obscured it beyond reading.

Of Roads, Real Cities, Streets, and Strangers
     
    A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it … if a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear … But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and sidewalks.
    This task is totally unlike any service that sidewalks and streets in little towns are called upon to do. Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities, by definition, are full of strangers.
    –J ANE J ACOBS
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
     
    This is how, after seven nights’ unchanging stars, eclipsed only by passing clouds or moon glare, Pryn came to be standing on a roadway atop a hill one dark dawn, looking down at port Kolhari.
    Fog lay on the city, obscuring detail. But that hulking edifice to the west had to be the High Court of Eagles. East, regular roofs suggested some wide street between – Black Avenue, perhaps, or even New Pavé. She’d heard travelers in the Ellamon market talk of those wonder-ways –
    The sea!
    Pryn had been looking at the city itself at least that long before the foggy vastness beyond it closed with its rightname. It
had
to be the sea! A mountain girl, she’d never seen so much water – indeed, so much of
any
thing before! Mists lay here and there on gray-flecked black. Obscuring much of the watery horizon, mists became one with gray sky. Well, it was quite as impressive as she’d heard it was. At the shore, like pine needles sticking up through the fog, she saw what must be ships’ masts along the famous Kolhari waterfront. Nearer, roofs of sizable houses lay apart from one another – perhaps wealthy merchants’ homes in the suburb of Sallese or maybe mansions of hereditary nobles in Neveryóna. My fortune, Pryn thought, may hide down there. A memory of her greataunt returned, in which the old woman wrung her hands. ‘if your father could only see you …’
    When Pryn was a baby, her father had died in the army somewhere to the south – of a sudden peacetime fever outbreak rather than wartime wounds. Her mother, when she visited from where she now lived, several towns away, had several times told Pryn the story of the black soldier who had come through Ellamon with the news, much as Pryn’s aunt told the story of the long-dead barbarian. Still, as a child, Pryn had kept some faint fancy of finding that vanished phantom parent.
    Down there?
    She answered her own dark morning question, as she had answered it many times before, now on a solitary dawn walk through sunny mountain pines, now standing at evening on some shaly scarp, now at a bright trout pool spilling through noon between high, hot rocks: No. (One thing about riding dragons, Pryn reflected; such childish expectations could be, in the momentary wonder of flight, forgotten – not just put aside by active effort.) Her father was dead.
    Pryn? That was her own name; and her mother’s – not her father’s gift. Her mother and father had not beenoverly married before her mother had become pregnant and her father, upon finding out, had gone