Star's Reach Read Online Free PDF

around campfires at night. Nobody knew what it was about,
and I don’t think more than one or two of us had any notion why she
spent all her time on it. Melumi was six hundred kloms northwest of
us by the shortest road. Some of the misters had been there, but
unless they felt like talking, all we had to go on was the stories
that traveling folk told, and that wasn’t much. So we wondered, and
made things up, silly or scary as the mood struck us. I don’t
recall any of the prentices suggesting that the book might be about
Star’s Reach, but that must have been the only thing nobody thought
to mention.
    One day during the first season Mam Kelsey
was at the Shanuga ruins, though, a few of us managed to get a look
at her book. It was a hot sluggish day toward the end of summer,
and most of us had been set loose for the afternoon, because part
of the old tower Gray Garman was salvaging had gotten unstable and
needed to be blasted down. That’s work for misters and their senior
prentices, and it’s dangerous, since the big kegs of powder we get
from the gunsmiths don’t always go off right. So the rest of us
were left to sit around in camp or scavenge wire in safe areas
while Garman and his two oldest prentices set the charges.
    Three of us were playing toss-the-bones over
on the side of camp by Mam Kelsey’s tent. There was me and Conn,
and another boy name of Shem sunna Janny, who died the next year
when a couple of floors in a building we were stripping flapjacked
on top of him. We’d gotten halfway through the game when we saw one
of Mister Jonus’ prentices pelting across the field toward Mam
Kelsey’s tent at a run. We couldn’t hear what he said to her when
he got there, but it wasn’t hard to guess: Jonus’ people must have
found something written in the part of the ruins he was working,
and needed her help to figure out what it meant. After a moment,
she pushed her notes aside, got up, and followed the prentice back
across the field toward the ruins.
    I think all three of us thought of her book
at the same moment. We looked at each other, and grinned, and once
she was out of sight got up and pocketed the knucklebones we’d been
playng with and went oh so casually over to her tent.
    I was the only one of us who could read, and
I won’t say I was that good at it, even with the practice I got
reading Conn the letters from his family. Still, the other two
pushed me over to the book, saying “What does it say?” almost at
the same moment, so the words tumbled over each other. The book was
open, lying there on Mam Kelsey’s table. I know I looked at it, and
I know I tried to read it aloud, but that’s about as much as I
recall of it at this point.
    There were a lot of long words, I remember
that, and I slid to a halt after beating them up so bad that their
own mothers wouldn’t have known them. I don’t imagine Conn or Shar
got any more out of what I’d read than I did, but we’d looked at
the book, which was the point of the exercise. After a moment Conn
said, “I bet she’ll be back soon,” and we hurried back over to
where we’d been playing and started the game where we’d left off.
It wasn’t more than a few minutes later that we heard the big
rolling boom of the blast, and only a few minutes after that people
came running from the ruins to get us. The keg of powder had gone
off too soon. Gray Garman was unhurt, and we managed to dig one of
his prentices out from the rubble with no worse than a broken leg,
but we never found the other one. The priestess said the words for
him and recited the litany on top of a mess of broken concrete, and
we had to call that good.
    I’m pretty sure that Mam Kelsey found out
that we stole a look at her book, probably from someone else in
camp who caught sight of us over at her tent. She never said a word
about it, but I always got the sense when she looked my way that
something in the back of her mind was whispering, “That’s the boy
who looked at my book.”