Sorcerer's Legacy Read Online Free PDF

The woman on the other side had met despair with mulish defiance. Elienne invaded her consciousness with flat distaste, stunned by a startling discovery; the master pattem that had so long gone unsatisfied at last had found its match. A closer look at the woman who had met the Timesplicer’s qualifications shocked her anew. She faced her own self.
    Elienne felt herself hurled headlong into a scene similar to one she had lived only hours earlier in the darkness of Trathmere’s dungeons, but in her dream she was present also as observer. Dirty, tear-streaked, and possessed by grief and wild anger, her former self stood braced against the prison’s barred door. At her feet knelt a Sorcerer magnificently clad in blue. He had cut through the stuff of Time with what she now saw revealed to be a focused projection of his living soul. It shone like a winter star, hard, brilliant, and blue-white. He took the severed strand of Time into his hands, and in growing horror the dreaming Elienne became aware he intended to make a loop; join it back into itself at an earlier point in its own past.
    “No!” she cried, momentarily set adrift by revelation; the path just followed had been a Sorcerer’s condensed perception of five thousand years’ search for a Prince’s bride. “You must not!” Newly wise to the laws of Time, she was aware crossing a Time-track back into itself would cause death to its wielder.
    The Sorcerer, recognizable as Ielond, glanced up, his face pale with weariness. Yet beneath lay a will too strong for mortal interference.
    “I must,” he said simply. “By the time I had unraveled the mysteries of Time and learned to alter its sequence, Darion had already stood before the Grand Council and been condemned. If he is to be saved, the past must be changed.”
    Elienne shook her head, blinded by swelling tears. Her throat squeezed shut, trapping her protest unspoken, and the soul brilliance that drifted over Ielond’s hands distorted into starred slivers as her eyelids spilled their salty burden down her cheeks.
    Ielond rose from the cell floor. The lining of his cloak echoed the red of Cinndel’s wounds as he stood before her, immovable as chiseled stone. “Elienne, you musn’t weep,” he said gently. “It is the Prince’s life or mine. I make the choice with peace in my heart.”
    The words were spoken aloud, and their sound woke Elienne from sleep. Disgruntled and shaken, it was a moment before she realized that she had passed the night in Ielond’s arms. Over his shoulder, an orange sun topped the mountains at the edge of the icefield’s bleak expanse.
    Elienne felt rested. Yet the dream’s impact remained irrevocably inscribed into waking memory. All she had been forced to witness through the night was sharp as direct experience, and the tears on her face were real. Elienne stared up at the sliver of light that drifted always in Ielond’s presence. No Guild Sorcerer from her own land could have disciplined self-will to a focus so precise that soul became manifest, a visible pinpoint of force.
    Conscious of the Sorcerer’s gaze upon her, Elienne spoke, embarrassed to find her voice shaky with the effect of her tears. “I understand, I think. You splice Time. That is what gives you power over Destiny.”
    Ielond shifted his grip and gently lowered Elienne to the ground. “I can influence all destiny but my own,” he said carefully. “It makes little difference. I have built my lifework around Darion‘s future. If he dies, my efforts have been wasted. Since I will not be alive to see them through to completion, I rely on the resources of the woman I send to Pendaire as his bride. Lady, if you fail, there can be no other after you. Are you prepared to devote your life to a man who is a stranger?”
    Elienne stared at her feet, reminded by the unfamiliar jeweled slippers which covered them that Ielond’s words carried the weight of finality. A long minute passed before she answered.
    “I