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

after his thoughts, after the telling of the ritual of the kings, after all the ceremonies that the Speaker for Kings was required to conduct.
    It smelled of the man’s sweat, and the unmistakable odour of animal fat that had been burned, though not in the hut; it was burned fat that he had used on his body.
    It was a home from home: my wanderer’s cave, only slightly less spartan.
    “I’m aware that the hostels are rising again,” he said without preamble. “Tell me what the king’s children have experienced. And those other two idiots.”
    I told him everything I knew.
    When he had thought for a while, he told me about the hostels.
    “When I was training, during those eighteen years I learned that there are many rivers, such as Nantosuelta, that carve the land between men and the dead. We think of Nantosuelta as the greatest, but there is no great and no small: all the rivers are connected through what you’ve told me you call a ‘hollowing.’”
    I had told him a great deal about my life walking the Path around the world.
    “The ways under. Yes. I move through them all the time. The rivers flowing there are very strange, mostly very dangerous. But I’d never encountered tales of the hostels before coming to Alba.”
    He seemed surprised by that, frowning and thinking hard for a moment before continuing, “According to the Declamations of Wisdom, which we learn in the groves, every one of those rivers has five hostels, though they are dedicated in different and incomprehensible ways according to the people who live along their eastern banks. One part of the Declamation suggests that each hostel hides the heart of a broken king. Some of them are welcoming, some not. All of them are full of rooms, some full of traps, all of them potentially deadly. Most of the rooms are empty, or appear to be. Others open into one of the Seven Wildernesses.”
    “And the Dead have their own hostels. And the Unborn theirs. And they rise at the fords where these ghosts cross the river. Is that right?”
    “Yes. Ours are the Hostel of the Overwhelming Gift; the Hostel of the Red Shield Riders; the Hostel of the Bier of Spears; the Hostel of the Miscast Spear; and the Chariot Hostel of Balor.”
    “The Dead and the Unborn cross between worlds when there are no hostels present. So what does this rising mean?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “And which are the dangerous ones?”
    “Balor and Red Riders, certainly. And one of the others. But if I remember correctly: all hostels can be compromised. Something greater is happening than the raid of a few summers ago.”
    The raid of a few summers ago. The forces of the Otherworld had scoured Taurovinda and possessed it in its entirety: killed the king’s wife and youngest son; sent the king’s other son and daughter into hiding; destroyed the land, and occupied Taurovinda until forcibly removed by young Kymon and his father, with just a little help from an underworld bull … and a young-old traveller of the Path around the world.
    If that had been just a raid, what was brewing now?
    Cathabach’s concern and ignorance of potential events showed in his creased face. I noticed he was stroking one of the purple tattoos that adorned his body: it was the one over his throat, which showed two salmon leaping. The salmon: spirit of Wisdom.
    Cathabach—absent of wisdom at the moment—was unthinkingly summoning the spirit of an older memory.

Chapter Four
    Battle Arm and the Strong Shield
    Not for the first time, either here in Taurovinda or in the past, I found myself at the centre of events, both searching and diplomatic. Munda had led her grey colt quietly through the gates and retired to the women’s quarters, to wait in silent vigil until her father summoned her after I had spoken to him. Kymon was still somewhere by the river, exercising his right as the king’s son to prowl the evergroves (his ancestors were buried there, after all) and—when I took a quick look at him through the