Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic Read Online Free PDF

and rather dirty hay pillow wadded behind him, his big arms folded, his one eyelid drooping low over the chill amber glitter of his eye. The winter storms were late already; the desert sandstorms had started weeks ago. In his bones, in the dim extended senses of wizardry and animal watchfulness, he could feel the weather, hear the moan of distant tempests whispering behind the wind as it shook the heavy window shutters. He studied them all—the thin brown man sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed in a messy welter of sleeve dags; the sturdy red-haired woman in the chair beside him, sipping her beer and watching his face anxiously; the Little Thurg, looking down at his blunt, folded hands; even the Hawk, seemingly absorbed in getting every card in the two halves of the divided pack to interleave exactly, one to one. He’d spent years with these people and knew them far better than any of the parade of lovely young concubines who had filed through his bed. He’d trained them to fight, crossed swords with them at the school he’d operated for so many years in Wrynde, and drunk with them after battles; he knew their flaws, their jokes, their loves, and the minutest timbres of their voices. The day before yesterday was far from the first time they’d saved his life, at the risk—and sometimes, as in Choirboy’s case, at the cost—of their own.
    For an instant everything was as it had been, and he understood that, as with Starhawk, he was still their commander in their hearts—and in his own.
    But there was magic now in his veins. And the man who could bring it forth, give him what his soul most craved, was in Vorsal, holding it against them.
    “You feel okay to sit a horse tomorrow?” Dogbreath went on, glancing up when the weight of the silence became oppressive. “It’s a week’s ride—five days if we push it . . . ”
    He was expecting the Wolf to say, as he would have a year ago, So let’s push it. The Wolf still felt weak and tired, but he’d fought battles in worse shape. It was all so familiar, so easy, that he nearly made that automatic response. But after all, he thought, and said nothing. After a moment he saw that nothing change the expression in his friend’s face.
    “Chief?”
    
     It hadn’t even occurred to him, Sun Wolf thought, that he might say no.
    Because they trusted him.
    
     Trusted that he’d be there for them, to the cold gates of hell and beyond, as they were for him.
    He sighed. “Yeah. I’ll be ready to go in the morning.”
    Relief sprang into Firecat’s face and Thurg’s, like children when they can convince themselves after an overheard fight that their parents still love one another, that nothing has changed. Only the doubt lingered in Dogbreath’s troubled glance, as they filed out of the room to investigate the smells of roast pig that floated ever more insistently up from the common room below. As for Starhawk, rising last to follow them out the door, it had always been difficult to read her enigmatic gray eyes.
    A wizard in Vorsal.
    As a child, Sun Wolf had crept by night from the loft he’d shared with the household stores to steal through freezing darkness to the house of Many Voices, shaman of the village. The shaman’s house had a door which looked out onto the moor; he would crouch in the lichenous shelter of a fallen menhir and watch that dapper little man sorting his herbs, experimenting with smokes and incense, or sketching the Circles of Power in the dirt of the floor. His father had caught him at it and beaten him, more than once. Many Voices was a charlatan, his father had said, a faker whose curses were worthless unless backed with poison. Finally the big warrior, who had wanted a warrior son, had paid Many Voices to ill-wish a neighbor’s goats, and had sat out with his son most of one rainy night until they’d caught the shaman red-handed, mixing jimson with the goats’ feed.
    Sun Wolf, who’d been seven at the time, had never forgotten the