Sorcery Rising Read Online Free PDF Page B

outlive the heroes. Like her brothers she’d always thought it cautious nonsense; but it was possible in this particular case that they had a point.
    Saro Vingo emerged, blinking, from his family pavilion into the light of a day still making its mind up whether to rain or shine. His head hurt as if someone had trampled on it in the night. For some reason his father had decided that Saro’s first visit to the Allfair should be marked by a major araque-binge, and his uncle and cousins and older brother, Tanto, had all conspired to line up glass after glass of the vile smoky stuff for him and watched him down each one in a single swallow until every flask was dry. They had matched him glass for glass; but they had had a lot more practice. He had left them all sleeping it off, tumbled on the floor amid the dogs and the vomit; collapsed upon silk-strewn couches, snoring their heads off in the pile of rich tapestries and shawls they’d brought as a gift for the northern King at this, his first Allfair. Though why the people of the Empire should bother to flatter a barbarian, he could not imagine. Falla knew what he’d make of the gorgeous Istrian fabrics, now reeking of araque and bile. Still, the Eyrans were known to be very unsophisticated people: he’d probably think it had something to do with the dye-process.
    Saro was curious to set eyes upon the women of the north. All the lads whose first Fair this was were equally fascinated; it had been their major topic of conversation on the journey here from the southern valleys. King Ravn Asharson was coming to the Allfair, it was said, to choose himself a bride; so the Eyran nobles would surely be bringing their daughters and sisters in the hopes of making a royal match. As far as Saro was concerned, it was the focal point of the Fair: not for him the dull complications of deal-making and point-scoring with a load of fat old merchants who knew exactly what game they were playing with one another and made him feel a complete fool for not being a party to their subtly coded rules and haggling. The women of Eyra were rumoured to be amongst the most beautiful women on Elda, and that was interesting. Although he would be the first to admit that he had no real idea of what a woman looked like; let alone how to assess her beauty. At home, the women were hidden away for most of the time: since the time he’d turned fifteen and had been initiated into the sexual world, he had barely even seen his mother.
    He thought of her now; how, swathed from head to foot in a fabulously-coloured sabatka, she would flutter silently from room to room, with only her hands and mouth showing, like some wonderful, exotic butterfly.
    A moment later, and he was remembering the encounter that had brought him to manhood: how his father had paid for him to enter that darkened room in the backstreets of Altea; the smell of the woman inside it – musky and rank; the feeling of her cool hands and hot lips upon him; his uncontrollable climax, and the shame that followed.
    Yet it was rumoured that not only did the men of the northern isles allow their women to wander freely, but also that they showed off not just their hands and mouths, but their entire faces, and occasionally even their limbs and chests. The thought of such sacrilege made Saro’s heart palpate. And not just his heart.
    His fair cheeks were still flushed from these unclean thoughts when he heard a shout. Turning around he saw in the near distance how two of the Istrian elders who sat upon Istria’s ruling council of city states – Greving Dystra and his brother, Hesto – were laboriously climbing the stairs to the summit of Falla’s Rock. They seemed to be waving their arms around and calling out. Intrigued, Sara made his way between the pavilions grouped below the rock, and, shading his eyes, stared up. Atop the rock sat what appeared to be a young man dressed in a homely brown tunic and long boots, who even now had scrambled to his feet,