Son of Ereubus Read Online Free PDF Page B

them?
    “Was this what you were waiting for?” She wailed. “To see me fall apart?” Her resolve weakened and the ground rushed to meet her knees. Tears rolled down her cheeks and sobs choked her words of clarity. “Why didn’t you come back sooner? Finish us off before we had a chance to recover?” She rested her cheek against the soil as she wept.
    At first she thought she felt his breath, the Ereubinian’s — that he had returned to revel in his win — but she realized the very idea that he would have knelt down to lie on the ground beside her was lunacy.
    “Koen,” she moaned. Grabbing the dog by his nape, she pulled him to her and buried her face in his matted fur. “You left me, you useless coward.”
    Her brief joy was sobered as she fought another round of tears, this one stronger than the first. Keeping one hand on Koen, she lowered her head into the other hand and tried to slow her breathing as her father had once taught her.
    I can’t do this now. I can’t let this paralyze me. She didn’t trust the Ereubinian to keep his unspoken promise of respite. She waited another minute before trying her legs. Once she was secure on her feet, she limped back to the edge of the woods, where she stood for a moment, peering into the darkness of the Netherwoods. A wind whipped through the boughs of the trees above her, bringing a chill to her skin. She moved to pull her cloak tighter to her when she realized whose cloak she wore.
    Ripping it off, she held back a string of curses that would have made a seaman blanch, but couldn’t bring herself to drop it to the ground.
    It doesn’t matter whose it is, it will still keep me warm.
    She swallowed a healthy measure of disgust before grudgingly wrapping it around her shoulders again. Koen seemed to look at her with approval.
    “I don’t want to hear it from you,” she sounded ill, but was more than pleased he’d run from the fight. She’d seen nothing but what appeared to be charred carcasses of both man and beast. No doubt Koen wouldn’t have made it.
    He looked up at her and sneezed, as was his tradition when she spoke to him as if he had the ability to answer.
    “Not that you would have been able to do much anyhow,” she murmured. Though she played a one-sided conversation, her mind was already elsewhere. Father, where are you?
    She’d heard for three years counting that Palingard was the last stronghold and it had been at least nine years or more since they’d stopped trading with the city of Ruiari. Could we really be the last? Her intuition told her that somewhere there had to be smaller camps of those, like herself, who’d managed to evade capture.
    Surely Father is somewhere among them, maybe without sense or memory of where he is from. As much as she avoided others and feigned little interest in what Palingard called society, she now found herself wishing for the world of Sara’s parents to be real, for Ruiari to be intact, for anyone to be out there in the darkness other than those who’d taken her life from her.
    She imagined as she trod along that she would find the University still stood, and that maybe the village leaders in Palingard had been misinformed. They were hard-headed, ill-read and it wouldn’t have been entirely out of the question for them to take the words of one mistaken messenger to heart. Had they even bothered to see for themselves? Given the extent of their preparations, they couldn’t have. Then she recalled hearing something herself from Sara. It had fallen. She was being ridiculous. Even Jonathan, whose family was as lofty as Sara’s in what had once been Ruiari’s royal court, had spoken of its fall.
    She traveled for several hours, until the depth of foliage hid the light from the moon. Only when she could no longer see did she stop and take refuge beneath the overhang of what appeared to be a large rock formation. Finally, she was left with no choice but to contend with thoughts of Sara and Bella that she’d