The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex Read Online Free PDF Page A

had she meant by “the blood-bone-brother”?
    I asked Kymon in a whisper what he understood by that expression. He scratched his hairless chin as he stared at me, thoughtful. “I suppose,” he said, “the shadow is the shadow of a man who is still alive.”
    “Yes. I believe you’re right.”
    Thesokorus! Jason’s eldest son, a young man displaced in time, who had taken the name Orgetorix, “King of Killers” (sometimes: “King among Killers”) and who had tried to kill his own father under the menacing influence of his mother, Medea. The ghost of Thesokorus! Was the flesh-and-blood son himself in the land? If so, it could only mean that he was searching for his father, Jason.
    There was more than a storm of heavenly proportions gathering around these westernmost lands of the Cornovidi. Something darker was about to break loose.
    I consoled Munda by promising that I would speak to Urtha in her behalf, and accept the burden of any reprisal. The girl seemed astonished at the offer and I reminded her that I was an outsider in the fortress, a man who walked a different path to her and to her kin, and that Urtha was deeply in my debt for saving his life on numerous occasions.
    Kymon snorted disparagingly. “On one occasion! Don’t brag. One occasion only. I’ve heard my father talk of your time with him.”
    “One occasion still lends itself to a favour, to a kingly favour. Don’t you agree?”
    He shrugged, nodding grudgingly.
    “What’s the matter with you, lad? Why are you behaving as if you’ve been wolf-bitten?”
    His look was sharp, angry. The wolf-bite had struck him in his pride. His words were as sharp as his look. “My name is Kymon. I’m the king’s son! You should remember that! The manner of your question is not appropriate.”
    “Yes, you are. You are indeed the king’s son. And I’m the king’s friend.”
    “No friend of a king is closer than a king’s son. The manner of your question is not appropriate.”
    His glare was furious. He was hiding more than just a childish need to be addressed as a man. I was curious. I would have taken a quick look into that aura of ferocity, to see the demons that harassed him, but I wanted to grow along with this fretting, fierce-tempered youth. One day he would lead the Cornovidi; and one day, when he was older than me, he would probably have need to call on me: Merlin; Antiokus; the man of a hundred names; the unchanging man in his life, and a greater friend to him than his closest foster brother.
    If my long experience was anything to go by, he would soon find that to be the son of a king would make him no friend of his father!
    “I’ve asked you a simple question,” I said quietly. “What is the matter between us?”
    He gave me the “hound’s eye”: narrowed, menacing. “I don’t trust you. That is the matter between us. That is all of it. My father ages; you don’t. My sister turns to you when she should be turning to my father. I find that a strange turn of events. In short, I repeat: I don’t trust you. You are compromising us.”
    Munda stared at me. Her brother’s words had shocked her into a colder state of mind. She watched me cautiously. How easily a brother could influence a sister!
    I was not compromising anyone, but I was not certain of my place in these young adventurers’ hearts. I took the only option available, short of using charm and thus truly betraying my relationship with them, and answered, “You have always known I come from a different time, a different world. How is it that you had the wits to understand that as children, yet now, as youths, you deny your own memory?”
    “I have heard the older men speak about you,” the proud boy declaimed. “You could do wonderful things for our family and our clan. Yet you refuse to use the ten charms because it weakens you. You put yourself above the needs of others.”
    It was true. He was absolutely right.
    I had never denied the fact that I harboured my skills