Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF

at the bright Ring overhead in the sky, boiling with the same resentment that had been building up inside him since they passed through the Wall. Umbo was honest enough to recognize that while the feeling was the same, it was no longer directed against Rigg. Now it was directed against Ram and Vadesh. But was it them that he really resented? Was it anybody, really, that was making him feel this way? Or did he simply have these feelings and searched for someone outside himself to blame them on?
    I’m angry and bitter and despairing but Rigg doesn’t deserve it, and Ram and Vadesh are nothing but machines and . . .
    Umbo rolled up onto his arm and looked at the others where they lay sleeping. Loaf—there was no reason to resent him . He had been nothing but generous and protective, and he , at least, had cared about Umbo and remembered him when no one else did.
    Olivenko? Umbo barely knew him. Only Rigg knew him, and Rigg seemed to value him because Olivenko had watched Knosso die. Yet Olivenko had worked hard and abided by the group’s decisions—which meant Rigg’s decisions—and there was no reason for Umbo to resent him, either.
    And there was Rigg. Umbo knew that Rigg was his true friend, and if people deferred to him it was only natural, because Ram had trained him to be ready for anything, to know something about practically everything.
    Param was almost the opposite. Same bloodline as Rigg—you could see it in how much they looked like each other—but she had spent so many hours of her life invisible in her sliced-up slowed-down timeflow that as she lay there sleeping in the lee of Loaf’s large body, she seemed almost younger than Rigg. Which made sense, though she was his older sister by two years; she hadn’t actually lived through all the years since she was born, for when she was in her sectioned-up timeflow, she lived through only one second for every three or four or more seconds that passed for everyone else.
    She’s younger than me , thought Umbo.
    And with that thought, he felt himself filled with such rage and despair and . . . and longing that he wanted to cry out from the power of it; it could not be contained, yet he had to contain it . . .
    By all the Saints, thought Umbo, the first princess I meet, and I fall in love with her.
    So this is love, he said to himself, trying to examine his own overwhelming feelings with the rational fragment of his mind. This is the powerful, horrible longing that made Mother marry that miserable tyrant I had to call Father. How many unbelievably stupid heroes in stories did insanely dangerous things because they were in love ?
    More to the point, how many insane things am I going to do because of it?
    Now all of Umbo’s feelings made sense to him. Yes, Rigg had made too many decisions, but the main reason Umbo resented him was the easy, comfortable way Param behaved with him. They had been together in the same house for months, and they were brother and sister and they had planned their escape together and had saved each other’s lives and . . .
    I saved her life too! And she mine!
    But only the once, only this morning as they leapt from the rock. She had taken Umbo by the hand and pulled him to his feet and then jumped off the rock with him. Then, holding his hand, she had taken him across the Wall.
    He could still feel her hand in his. Or, rather, the tingle of the memory of her hand. She isn’t two years older than me and Rigg, not really. She’s my age, more or less, and who cares if she was born a princess? Her mother the queen tried to kill her over and over—if that doesn’t constitute getting fired as princess, what does? She’s a commoner like me, now. It’s not impossible.
    A commoner by law, but still royal by breeding. She mustthink I’m a filthy ignorant unmannered low-speaking vulgar privick, while Rigg knows how to talk just like her, with all that high, fine language. Rigg has lived in her house, has eaten at table with her,