Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

he knows all the right manners. While I have journeyed with her, lit fires for her at night, but mostly I’ve behaved like a menial. As if I were Rigg’s manservant. And not some lofty valet who knows all the correct manners—no, I’m like a boy Rigg hired for the afternoon, to help do the work of their journey from the city to the Wall.
    No, thought Umbo. I can’t let myself go back to resenting everybody. I’m in love, and so, as the Wandering Man—no, Ram —once explained, I have the instinct to fight any potential rivals for the woman I covet. Not that Rigg is a rival, exactly—he’s her brother, not her lover—but he has her trust, her affection. She talks to him, little secrets and asides, all the things I want her to have with me. Only with me.
    What made Umbo so angry was the knowledge that she must despise him, that she was out of his reach no matter what he did. And yet he knew that he didn’t know that, couldn’t know it. They were both so young, what did he expect ?
    This is insane, he told himself. I’ve got to get my mind off her, now that I know that she’s what’s been on my mind.
    He reached into his pocket and took out the thing he had picked up when he came into the grove of trees.
    It was a stone. Specifically, a jewel. Even more specifically, a jewel that looked exactly like the one that Rigg had tried to sell in O, and which was now in the possession of a bank in Aressa Sessamo. The stone that Umbo and Loaf had tried repeatedlyto steal back, so that Rigg’s collection of nineteen stones would be complete.
    That was what he had seen at a glance, when he was picking it up from among the fallen leaves. But since it could not possibly be that stone, Umbo tried to make sense of it another way. He drew it from where he had tucked it into the waistband of his trousers and tried to study it by ringlight.
    It wasn’t the sight of it that mattered anyway, except to confirm that it was indeed the right size and color to be the missing jewel, which he’d realized the moment he saw it. Now he examined it by heft and texture. It was as hard as any of the jewels, as smoothly polished, and its weight felt right.
    He tucked it into his trousers and rolled over onto his back. He recalled the moment of finding it. The jewel was not so much amid last year’s fallen leaves as atop them. Resting right on the surface, as if it had been left in order to be noticed and found.
    But who could have left it? Rigg sounded absolutely certain when he said no human had come near this grove in a long, long time. The jewel could not have been sitting there so long—it would have been buried under leaves and probably deep within the soil.
    The lack of paths suggested that the jewel must have been left by an expendable like Vadesh and Ram. They left no path that Rigg could see. But why would Vadesh leave it lying there, when he could just as easily have handed it to Rigg?
    Maybe it was some kind of test, to see what Umbo would do with it. But no one could have known in advance which of them, if any, would enter the grove exactly where Umbo did. And when could Vadesh have done it? Wouldn’t they have seen him? There was no place to conceal himself between the empty city and this grove. There were no footprints or other woodsy signs of his passing—the leaves on which the jewel rested looked completely undisturbed, exactly like all the leaves surrounding them.
    And why this jewel? Even though it could hardly be the very one that Rigg had once carried and tried to sell, it was certainly just like it in appearance. Suppose Vadesh had an identical set of nineteen here in this wallfold? How did he know to pick the one jewel that was missing from their set? Rigg had laid out the eighteen for him to see, but when had Vadesh had a single moment in which to fetch his own jewels to replace the missing one?
    “You awake?”
    The whisper came from just above his head. Umbo didn’t flinch or startle, but his heart raced.