Shadowed Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Even I, with my fledgling powers, can hear the land crying out. For Father, it is much worse, of course. He is ill and has constant headaches. Even Aran feels it.”
    They could feel the disasters and the land in crisis? Literally? These strangers who were her family, her legacy? She bit one side of her lower lip, a habit she could trace back to long afternoons in her father’s study. Not yet. Not enough information yet, she realized, turning her full attention back to a diary that was becoming as interesting as it was depressing.
     
    Late Summer, 3rd day, 6019
    West Village, Durrivant
     
    Durrivant has fallen, Jason is dead, and even now they hunt us.
    We escaped while the fortress burned around us. It is a testament to the fire-priest’s power, that they can damage the cold metal of Fortress Durrivant. Jason died holding them off; no matter how much I hated him, he did give us that chance. I don’t remember much beyond that, beyond waking, injured, in this small house near the border.
    Even now Taran stands guard. We have been in this cottage for three days. She says if I cannot walk tomorrow, she will carry me across the border on her back. After all that has happened, Annwyn’s wards are active again. The fire-priests cannot cross. No one can cross who is not of our nation, who does not have either our blessing or our blood. Perhaps that is why they want me so badly. They would use me to cross, or even break, our wards.
    The fire priests hold Fortress Durrivant. Kazek himself sits the throne. Kazek, the first and worst of them. The Emperor of Fire. We must get back to warn them, to find a way to stop them from devouring Annwyn too. But mostly, I just want to go home. My family needs me, and I need them. The land needs me, and I need the safety of its protective wards.
     
    -Callista
     
    “They would use me to cross, or even break, our wards,” Chloe read aloud. Her aunt had been hunted, just like her. And they had gotten her at last. It had taken almost twenty years and two worlds, but they had finally gotten her.
    The diary dropped from numb fingers.
    Chloe knew she was next.

Chapter Five: The Folkways
    Eliot found her crying in the middle of his room, the diary flung halfway across the beige carpet. He rubbed his damp rough hands across the sides of his jeans, not sure how to approach her. Her not-quite curly dark hair hung down a heaving back. His ratty purple Save the Whales, Eat a Dolphin t-shirt hung off her, at least two sizes too big.
    She curled into herself when she cried. Even her fingers curled into fists, locked around her knees as she hunched over them, her shoulders shaking with a force that outdid her quiet sobs. She sounds like a sad kitten, he thought. Some other time, he might have laughed at the overall mix of cute and heartbroken. But he knew at least some of what was in that diary. He had lived it, and been told the rest. He found himself wondering if it was worse to know the truth all his life, eventually making a kind of tortured peace with it, or to have it thrust on her all at once, in the middle of the worst week of her life.
    Suddenly it didn’t matter. There was no one but the two of them. He didn’t quite know how she wound up in his lap, crying into his sandy wet t-shirt, but there she was. He didn’t know how his hands found her hair and knew to stroke it, or to rock her gently, or to make soothing sounds. He instinctively found their bond and shoved every safe and calming emotion he could feel at her. He wasn’t even grossed out when she wiped her nose and face on his shoulder.
    Chloe flung an accusatory arm at the diary. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever read,” she sniffled out. “And the most maddening. How could my parents not tell me? They only got married to have me, I just know it, Eliot. I’ve been some kind of insurance, or consolation prize, all my life, without even knowing it.” She choked on a fresh sob.
    Her fingers were claws through his thin