Shadow Over Kiriath Read Online Free PDF

the crowd, the trumpeters snapped to attention, their long brass horns held lengthwise before their bodies. The roar grew louder and her heart flew into her throat.
    He’s here!

CHAPTER
    3
    As Abramm rode into the people-packed square outside the ancient Hall of Kings at the northwest end of the Mall of Government, the crowd’s roar buffeted him like a flock of birds, wings beating at him from all sides. The moist low-hanging clouds reflected their cheers so loudly his ears rang and his insides quivered. Warbanner pranced and sidled beneath him, shaking his head and snorting at the fluttering hats and kerchiefs and homemade shield-and-dragon banners. A roped cordon had kept spectators at bay until now, but here the crowd had squeezed passage down to the bare minimum.
    A coach would have kept them back and eliminated the worry of someone being injured by the temperamental warhorse, but Abramm wouldn’t have changed it for anything. Riding Warbanner was the best thing he could have done. His left arm might not be able to button a doublet or clasp an orb, or even hold a dagger firm against the incoming thrust of a sword, but he could still ride, could still control the fiery young stallion with ease. That, coming after Haldon’s challenge and the words of the dry mental voice whose origin he wasn’t quite sure of, had done much to right his thinking and restore his confidence—if not in himself, then at least in Eidon. For Eidon was the one who had brought him to this day, and he knew that, whether anyone else did or not.
    He followed the path through the surging crowd, winding around a central statue clogged with onlookers and on to the bank of stairs ascending to the portico of the Hall of Kings. There he dismounted, bemused to find himself wishing he could ride into the building and all the way to the stage. As if a dumb beast can help me where the sovereign God of creation cannot. . . .
    Once inside he stopped midway across the Hall’s narrow antechamber so his attendants could remove his fur-lined outer cloak and pull out the train of scarlet velvet that had been pinned up for his ride, the whisper of their movements echoing in the well of its empty, high-ceilinged space. Directly ahead of him stood the velvet-hung corridor beneath the temporary balconies, framing a glimpse of the Hall itself. The audience there would receive him far more critically than the one he’d just passed through, many of them still angry about the marriage treaty.
    His train in place, Abramm’s attendants stepped back and the men at the door looked to him expectantly. Dread shivered through him. Then, drawing a deep breath, he straightened his shoulders, lifted his chin, and strode forward. The men ahead turned to signal others, and as he stepped through the opening at the end of the balcony passway, the trumpets blared and the entire audience in that vast hall stood and turned toward him.
    A sea of wide-eyed faces stared at him beneath descending ranks of long white banners, and suddenly he could hardly breathe. The steeply sloping central aisle seemed half a league long, the Receiving Throne on its stepped pyramidal dais at the end of it shrunken with distance. Having to march with agonizing slowness to keep time with the orchestra’s majestic processional, he saw over and over the dropped jaws and the widened eyes of surprise, and with every step grew increasingly aware of his uneven gait and the way his arm kept curling up at his side. His scars burned so fiercely he thought they must be glowing.
    It was daunting and suffocating and overwhelming . . . and yet there were moments when his awareness shifted off of himself and the people reacting to him and onto the hall in which he walked and the fact he was here to be crowned king of the land in the full glory of Kiriathan tradition. Something as unthinkable as this had seemed impossible not even a year ago. Eidon had brought him here, no question of that.
    Finally the end of the long