Shadowheart Read Online Free PDF

expression that did not quite reach compassion. “Is it painful, then, child?”
    “Yes.” It was hard to think. “No, not painful. But it . . . I think it is too much for me. That soon it will . . . drown me ...”
    She took a few steps toward him, her head tilted a little to one side as if she listened. “I cannot feel you the way I could always feel him—but nevertheless, you are there. How strange! You are truly shih-shen’aq .” It was a thought that did not become a word in his language, but still blew toward him with its meaning trailing— flowered, enbloomed, blossomhearted : it meant to blaze with the inner complexity and responsibility of the Fireflower.
    “But what does that mean?” he begged her. “Is there no way my thoughts can be quieted? I’ll go mad. The noise, it’s getting . . . stronger!” And had been since Ynnir had passed it to him, a fever in his blood just as terrible and mortal as the illness that had nearly killed him back in Southmarch, but a fever without heat, something altogether different than any earthly malady. “Please . . . Saqri . . . help me.”
    Something moved in her face. “But there is nothing I can do, manchild. It is like asking me to save you from your blood or your own bones. It is in you now—the Fireflower is you.” She turned away to look toward the ocean. “And it is more than that. It is all of my family—all we have learned and all that we are. One half of it is in you. It may kill you.” She lifted her hands in a deceptively small gesture, whose meanings rippled out in every direction— Defeat is Ours was one meaning, a strange mixture of resignation, terror, and pride. “And the other half is in me and will certainly die with me.” She looked up, and for the first time he thought he saw something like pity in her hard, perfect face. “Take courage, mortal. The ocean has beat at this black shore since the gods lived and fought here, but it has not devoured the land. Someday it will, but that day has not yet come.”
    Everything she said set off ripples in Barrick’s head like stones cast into a pond, each ripple intersecting with a dozen more and filling him with half-glimpsed memories and ideas for which the language of his thoughts had no proper words.
    Black shore . . .
    The first ships foundered here, but the second fleet survived.
    The ones who sing beneath the waves . . . Listen!
    It was like standing in a temple bell tower while the great bronze bells thundered the call to prayer. The voices seemed to shake him to his bones—but at the same time the attack was as silent as a subtle poison. “Oh, gods. I can’t . . . stand it.”
    “But why did she do it?” Saqri scarcely seemed to hear him, looking up to the cloud-painted sky as if the answer might be swirling there. “I can understand Ynnir giving the Fireflower to a mortal, mad as it is—my husband would have taken any gamble, no matter the danger, to try to craft peace. But why would Yasammez mock him with that which she herself holds most dear? Why would she send you to him in the first instance?”
    Her great age, voices suggested. Even the mightiest can decay . . .
    Hatred, said others, full of anger themselves. Yasammez has built her great house on the rock of her hatred . . .
    Barrick couldn’t understand why none of them, not Saqri, not the even the Fireflower voices, suggested that which was so obvious to him. Did they really understand so little of despair, these people who should have understood it better than any—who saw their lives as an inevitable defeat lasting thousands of years?
    “She wasn’t . . . mocking the king,” he said, struggling to make words out of the cacophony of his thoughts and senses. “She was mocking . . . herself.”
    Saqri whirled to stare at him. For a moment, by the weird, stony look on her face, Barrick thought she would strike him, or call her Ice Ettins to take off his head. Instead, she tilted her head back and laughed, a throaty