Riders of the Storm Read Online Free PDF

angling downslope as well, to where the ravine walls weren’t as rugged. At this rate, she thought ruefully, they might meet Enris after all.
    The sun was a pale dot she could look at without pain, powerless against the cold that assailed her the instant she stopped moving. Her breath steamed from her mouth; the novelty had worn off. What interested Aryl lay ahead. She balanced the balls of her feet on the thin edge of rock and tried to make sense of the land before her.
    Like the ravines cutting its sides, the valley itself narrowed and deepened as they moved toward its source, or rather the mountain ridge that was its far wall surged skyward here. Just as well they hadn’t been forced along its jagged, shadowed face. No further sign of the disturbance caused by the Oud—a relief—but the valley’s floor wasn’t as smooth as where its mouth opened to the Lay Swamp. Traces of snow clung to the leesides of low, even hills, emphasizing the smallest wrinkle of ground.
    No wonder Haxel had kept going. There was no shelter here.
    Puzzled by a broad depression that wound its way up the middle of the valley, Aryl let her gaze follow its irregular edge. It looked like a giant version of the annoying small rivers they’d crossed, but held no gleam of water, only drifts of snow. Perhaps the Oud had made it. It curled out of sight behind the ridge.
    At that curve, she spotted a cluster of straight and crisscrossed lines, stark against the muted brown-gray and whites of the landscape. Aryl’s heart quickened. Only one thing she knew made that shape.
    Nekis!
    Too small to be the familiar giants that soared above all other growth in the groves. She refused to be disappointed. Possibly these were another kind of plant, or nekis stunted by the cold so high in the mountains. It didn’t matter. Yena could work with wood of any kind.
    Aryl shivered. Or burn it for heat.
    Haxel would have found that grove, she told herself as she descended after the others, her steps eager and sure. Rather than retrace where the rest had climbed, she moved farther down the ravine to catch up, a more direct path. They’d be busy erecting a shelter for them…there was nothing Yena couldn’t do with wood.
    Distracted, Aryl almost stepped into a trap.
    Almost. At the last instant, she glimpsed half-buried metal and flung herself away. She slid precipitously, grasping for handholds she’d marked as she jumped, missing the first…the second…There.
    Hanging by one hand, Aryl froze in place, her feet suspended in midair. Pebbles continued to fall without her, pinging as they bounced off one another and the rock face. Before the last ping, she’d found a good hold for her other hand, a brace for one knee. A quick squirm and she was on her feet again.
    She considered the piece of metal from a cautious distance, absently wiping blood and pebbles from her scraped palm on her coat. They needed to know the hazards here. Gingerly, ready to spring back, she crouched to brush snow, then dirt and small stones from around it, for the piece was set into a pile of such loose material. Some kind of snare, like those Yena hunters braided from wing threads. No. Something else.
    Though the metal piece, a strap, did connect with others farther down, the whole was too fine and delicate to hold any prey worth catching.
    Her fingers contacted something long and smooth to one side of the metal. She pulled it free, impatient for an answer.
    Bone.
    She laid it along her forearm, confirming her suspicion.
    An Om’ray had died here.
    â€œSome poor unChosen on Passage,” she decided aloud, but didn’t rise at once. The hem of her long coat collected snow as she reached for the piece of metal.
    It resisted. Determined, she used the arm bone as a tool, first to loosen the dirt, then to pry at the metal. With a sudden pop and spray of stone, up it came, complete with skull.
    Aryl rocked back on her heels. “Not