Raven's Ladder Read Online Free PDF

comfort. “Someday. But you’re not ready yet.”
    Wynn had propped the shovel against the feeding trough and tiptoed after the king as he left. Turning a corner, he found the corridor empty and the stone wall rippling back into a solid barrier again.
    He’s planning to leave
.
    Wynn had scrambled back to the stable, climbed inside an empty feed bag, hopped to the edge of the narrow dung chute, and slid down, straight out through the cliff wall into the night. Gagging on the stench, he clambered out of the filthy sack into the cloud of rejoicing dungflies.
    Behind an abandoned harvest wagon with a bad wheel, he spied a riderless vawn steaming, panting, and digging the ground with clawed hind feet.
    The king stood with a boulder raised in the air. He reminded Wynn of a bittlebug he’d once watched carry a hunk of biscuit. Cal-raven bent his knees, then shoved the boulder skyward.
    The stone rose, then descended to alight on the fingertip of a man Wynn hadn’t noticed—a short, broad-shouldered fellow. The stranger pushed back the hood of his green cowl, laughing. The boulder spun on his fingertip. As it did, it took different shapes—a dragon with its wings spread, a raging three-horned limbaw, a woman of exaggerated shapeliness.
    Then the man had pointed at the sky, and the stone reshaped itself as a spinning top that ascended into the air and moved toward Cal-raven in a slow, smooth glide. The king laughed, waiting for it to come within reach, then jumped and smashed it into a shower of sand.
    The stranger was Scharr ben Fray. Wynn had no doubt.
    He’d heard his father, Joss, and his mother, Juney, talk about this stone-mastering mage. The story of his exile from Abascar was legend: Queen Jaralaine had banished him for teaching Cal-raven stories of the Keeper as if they were truth.
    Wynn held still, breathing dung reek and spitting out flies. A few words caught his ear:
Go north. Ladder of Ravens. Mawrnash
. Mawrnash, a place his parents had carefully avoided on the merchant routes near the Cragavar forest’s northwestern edge.
    Scharr ben Fray embraced Cal-raven as a father embraces his son, then climbed into the saddle and leaned over to offer one last exhortation.
Eleven days
, Wynn heard. Then the mage was borne away in swift, silent strides, the vawn’s tail lifted high to keep from stirring up dust or noise.
    Cal-raven had walked to the wall, put his hands against it, and paused.
    “Wynn,” he had said, “have you heard? The guards have seen viscorcats prowling around here. They’re hungry, for there’s nothing to hunt. Promise you won’t breathe a word of what you’ve heard. Or I’ll leave you for the cats.”
    “My lord,” Wynn choked.
    Back inside, night after night, he had endured the burden of brooms, shovels, and filth, gnawing on his resentment, counting down the days until Cal-raven’s departure. Abascar’s people were generous. But they were not Wynn’s people. The merchants’ life had taught him to live unencumbered by commitments. And he scolded his little sister, Cortie, when she shadowed a kindhearted woman called Merya and began to call her Mum.
    He wanted to shout at them, just as his father had berated him between strikes of the lash.
Think you know better than me? I’ve crossed the Expanse. I’ve lived in the wild
.
    Bang!
The horse kicked at the stall gate, jolting Wynn from his thoughts.
    “We’ll follow the king, you and me,” Wynn whispered toward the animal’s ears, “but we’ll make it look so easy, he’ll end up following us.”
    He was familiar with this feeling—the fits of fright and zeal before a secretive escape.
    Once, along the merchant roads, he had drawn in a deep breath of night and tiptoed a vawn through curtains of rain, closer and closer to freedom. When the storm muffled the bullfrog of his father’s snore, he kicked the vawn to a gallop.
    But concern for Cortie had caught him on the Throanscall’s banks, a hook at the end of a far-cast line. She