Shadowed By Wings Read Online Free PDF

your part of the bargain.
    I hesitated, envisioning a life of fruitlessly wandering Clutch Re in search of my long-dead sister.
    The buzzard clacked its beak at me. You won’t throw your life away over a madman’s vision! No. A mere fantasy, that is, one you scarcely believe yourself.
    It rankled, that she could so swiftly, so facilely, pinpoint my weakness and doubt. As is the case with all daughters of the age I was then—seventeen, and immensely world-wise, or so I believed—I was immediately determined to deny the truth of my mother’s words, just because she had had the gall to notice the obvious about me.
    “I believe what I saw in his eyes!” I cried. “I can do it. I must, I will!”
    To follow the dragonmaster is to set yourself on a course of slow suicide.
    “And what would you instead have me do? Throw my life away seeking a sister most likely dead.”
    Cheat! Liar!
    “No! I’ll keep my word; I’ll leave here.” I took a quavering breath. “But not now. You didn’t stipulate when I should leave, and I’m not ready to leave yet. I’m good with dragons; maybe I can do this thing that I saw in the dragonmaster’s eyes.”
    The buzzard shrieked at me, both wings widespread.
    I clapped my hands over my ears, though that didn’t prevent the bird’s angry cries from ricocheting around the inside of my head.
    Never again! You won’t ever receive one of my feathers again.
    “Leave me, then. Begone!”
    With one last angry squawk, the enraged bird sprang into the air, flapped ponderously into the sky, and disappeared over the stable rooftops. Trembling, I sank back into the shade of the silo.
    I had sorely angered the haunt. What repercussions might I suffer?
    I did not know, and the not knowing worried me.
    Exacerbating the worry was a twinge of guilt at my use of sly trickery to obtain the healing feather from the creature that had been, in another form, my mother. After all, was not that very lack of compassion exactly what goaded the haunt into its relentless, deplorable stalking of me? Re prevent me from turning blind to empathy and grace in my quest to obtain that which I desired. Re prevent me from turning into a mirror-image of my mother as she was in her last mad years of life.
    But what was it that I desired most now?
    Muddled not by pain and fever but by twisting thought only, I dozed.
     
    Susurration laced my sleep, much the way the lapping of waves against the hull of a boat insinuates itself into your slumber without really rousing you. The noises I heard provoked no instinct to bolt upright, no desire to run, hide, or pray for deliverance.
    Womb noises, they were. The sound of industry, of others hard at honest work. Rasp of rake, chink of pitchfork upon stone. Burble of water, trundle of wheel, squeak of axle. Bantering voices, answering voices, voices directing and organizing. Soothing sounds. Combined with the heat of the day and whatever magics imparted by the feather that had dissolved into my skin, those sounds cradled me in convalescent sleep.
    Magics. Yes.
    Make no mistake, something unearthly occurred when that luminescing feather exploded into mist and lit upon my skin, for when I woke at twilight, neither hungry nor thirsting, neither stiff nor sore, the bloody ribbons on my back were the slightest of weals, itching fiercely from the healing process.
    I dared roll my back carefully against the silo behind me: No flare of pain, no agony when my skin connected with the silo’s sun-warmed wood.
    A chortle, though.
    My head snapped round to where the dragonmaster was crouched in shadow, precisely where the buzzard had stood many hours before at noon. He rubbed his hands together and his eyes gleamed in the dusk.
    “Clever little rishi whelp, hey-o?” he cackled. “Well done.”
    The unnatural healing of my body felt tainted, then, sullied by his pleasure in it.
    “Where do I piss?” I snapped.
    His smug leer vanished, replaced with a scowl. He rose. “That’s not my