The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t find him. The shop he had owned didn’t exist any more. It, and the rest of the street, had been burned to the ground, not an infrequent occurrence in a place where most buildings were built of wood and thatched with seaweed, and an unusually large number of the inhabitants were either crazed or habitually drunk, or both. No one could tell me what had happened to the shopkeeper. Gorthan Spit was like that: people came and went, they died or disappeared, and no one cared.
    I stopped in a nearby fish-and-swillie bar, all seafood again, of course. This time I settled for a cheap dish of seaweed and rayfish. Staying at The Drunken Plaice was an extravagance; I had to economise somewhere.
    I was just finishing the food when I heard my name bellowed from across the room. My hand automatically dropped to my sword (now resting across my knees) before I realised there was no need. The bellow was one of pleasure, not anger, and the voice belonged to Addie Leks, a woman I had inadvertently helped on my very first trip to the Spit. I’d been twenty-three then, and Addie about the same age. I was hunting a man, a renegade sylv, who had a price on his head—a substantial bounty that I coveted—and she’d been that man’s lover. In those days she was an attractive and much abused woman wanting to escape a relationship that contained nothing but pain and violence, and I’d been only too glad to relieve her of the cause. (That part had been easy; it was getting the bastard back to the Keeper Isles to collect the reward that had given me problems. He knew he was going to die if he reached The Hub, and he’d done his level best not to arrive, preferably by killing me along the way. I’d finally handed him over, minus several fingers I’d severed during one of his many escape attempts, but it was the hardest deliveries I’d ever made.)
    Addie wasn’t quite as attractive now. She worked in the kitchen of the fish-and-swillie place and she’d grown fat. Her skin had reddened and coarsened. She flopped down in the seat opposite me and launched into a new tale of marital woe; it seemed that although she’d grown older, she hadn’t grown any wiser in her choice of men. With surprise, I realised that she was hinting that I help her out of her present relationship as well. I’m not too sure what she had in mind, because I didn’t give her a chance to tell me. I changed the subject and asked her about Niamor instead.
    She said very much the same things that Tunn had, adding, ‘Nice fellow, Niamor. Always good for a laugh and a bit of fun. No more morals that a bitch cur on heat, of course, but he doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings. Kind-hearted, is Niamor, as long as it doesn’t cause him any trouble.’ It was a view of the Quillerman that agreed with my first impression of him.
    ‘You should remember him,’ she added. ‘He was around that last time you was here. Shacked up with that sylvtalent woman. You must remember her: she was exiled from the Keeper Isles for misuse of power—some said she’d used her talent illegally to help her nonsylv lover become rich. What was her name again?’
    ‘Oh. Samiat. Yes, I remember now. What happened to her?’
    ‘The Keepers forgave her. Took her back into the fold when they thought she’d learned her lesson.’
    That figured. The Keepers were always loath to lose one of their own.
    Addie sighed. ‘I thought she and Niamor made a lovely pair. So refined, the both of them. Yet when the time came, she left him without a backward glance…’ She sighed again, caught up in fantasy even though Niamor was the most unlikely candidate for a hero. He was about as romantic as Blaze Halfbreed… ‘He was broken-hearted, I could tell. Hasn’t looked at anyone, not serious like, since. Reckon that’s why he can’t settle on just one—’
    I just stopped myself from snorting.
    She leaned towards me conspiratorially, resting her elbows on the table. The fat of her forearms