Prince of Storms Read Online Free PDF Page A

regret ? Is I regret too obvious, too direct?” She stared at her scroll, frowning, although when she finished it, how would she send it to the Jinda ceb?
    â€œYou know their ways, my love.” He had his own worries, worries he’d hoped to put aside so late in the ebb. With Anzi preoccupied, he considered the bizarre meeting with Geng De, and the boy navitar’s threats. To weave the world. Could it be done? The future altered by design? Zhiya had warned him; her own mother swore it was true. But Jin Yi was half mad, like all navitars.
    â€œBut how to say it?” Anzi persisted, still worrying her verbs.
    â€œI would say unintended consequences . If there were any.” Anzi had told him that she didn’t know if her manner of departing the Jinda ceb had caused offense. She guessed that it had. She wanted to cement relations with the Jinda ceb when they arrived. It would not be helpful if she had offended them.
    Over the last days he had been learning about Anzi’s exile among the Jinda ceb Horat. They had saved her life by retrieving her from the void. But time passed differently in their universe, and she had endured a long and poignant separation from her world and from him. The story of her time among them had spooled out over the days since their reunion. For himself, the lapsed time was almost impossible to imagine—fourteen years. How much worse it must be for her…but she accepted it bravely. She would have perished, otherwise, like Su Bei.
    There had hardly been enough time to let all this sink in. There were other adjustments, too: his wounds, healing slowly and perhaps imperfectly; holding the Tarig at bay. And always on his mind these last weeks, his brother’s death, reported by Anzi. Killed by a man who was like an uncle to him. Lamar…God, how deeply the world had changed.
    â€œCome to bed, Anzi.”
    â€œYes.” She continued to write.
    And then there was the Rose and its politics, and the near impossibility of communicating with them. Unless the Jinda ceb, when they came, could help him. And if he could communicate with Earth, what could be said in a message, and to whom should it be directed? It seemed no matter how he tried to sort it that he was on his own.
    â€œAnzi, leave off. Come to bed.”
    â€œIn a moment.” With her back to him, her emerald green silk robe brought out the startling white of her arms and neck. He watched her as she bowed her head over her work, exposing the nape of her neck. Anzi’s hair was very short now, a concession she’d made to fit in better with the Jinda ceb among whom she had lived so long. It made her look especially beautiful, in the way of a handsome forty- or fifty-year-old woman. But time-in-years meant little. The Entire had no years, and who knew how to calculate the passage of time in the universe of the Jinda ceb?
    â€œIf one could do over what cannot be undone,” Anzi murmured, biting the tip of her stylus. She bent to her writing.
    It was too much. He sprang from the bed. “No. You did it for the Rose.” They had been over and over what happened with her Jinda ceb teacher just before they sent her home. Who knew how the Jinda ceb really felt? “They’re asking too much.”
    Still seated, she looked up at him, stylus in hand. “They haven’t asked anything of me. We haven’t spoken. This is just in case.”
    The thought came to him that by this late ebb letter she was avoiding being with him. She felt inadequate. Though he’d said you are beautiful to me a hundred times, she sometimes pointedly turned her face from him.
    She turned back to the desk. He snapped up her scroll, holding it away from her.
    Anger flashed in her eyes, he noted with satisfaction. At last a real emotion. The polite dance of what could be said, what could be trusted—it made him crazy. You haven’t changed in my sight. But, as with the letter, was that too