The Confliction (Book Three of the Dragoneers Saga) (Dragoneer Saga) Read Online Free PDF Page B

realm to fall under some feral horde of merciless metamorphosing alien hatchlings because of it.

Chapter 6
    Lemmy didn’t like the idea of leaving Aikira alone at the castle. Jenka knew that it was more because Lem didn’t think he and Jenka should be doing what they were doing than for fear of her safety. Jenka knew Lemmy wanted them to wait on Rikky and March to return from the keep, but he was determined to make contact with Zah just as quickly as possible. Jade carried them on an unstable flight through a sky thick with steady snowfall to a place near the temple. The sore green wyrm set them off and found a place to curl up and wait outside the druids’ valley. Fat flakes were falling all around them. Now Jenka and Lemmy were creeping through a sparse forest, in snow that was knee-deep, with their range of visibility reduced to an arm’s length.
    “Least we don’t have to worry about being seen,” Jenka commented. The cold was fierce, but it numbed his aching body. When Lemmy didn’t respond, Jenka turned to see why and was struck with the awkward, guilty feeling he used to get when trying to communicate with Lemmy the mute.
    Lemmy flushed with frustration, or maybe embarrassment, giving his elvish face an icy blue tint for a few heartbeats. Jenka forced a grin. “Just like old times,” he said as he started them on toward the temple.
    Over his shoulder Jenka said, with a hint of aggravation showing in his voice, “I guess having your help with the spell words is out.” After about five long strides he stopped and turned. “Can you cast spells without saying the words, Lem?”
    Lemmy laughed his strange wheezing, hacking laugh, but nodded in the affirmative.
    “When me and Zah were in the dungeons, she came to me, like a ghost or a spirit would,” Jenka explained. Great plumes of steamy breath rose as he leaned against a tree and thought about how to describe what Zah had done. “She’d been beaten by the guards on the tilt yard and was near dead, but she bothered to appear to me and spend time teaching me how to summon Jade with my mind and such. I want to try and reach her like that. That’s not an ethereal spell is it?”

    Lemmy was already tapping his chest and nodding that he knew the spell. He’d lived and studied with the druids for a few decades and would have still been among them had he not disagreed with Linux, and Lanxe, and the rest of the inner Order about some of the experiments they were performing. He was feeling foolish now for not seeing what Jenka had. If they could get close enough to the temple, then one of them could send their aura inside to visit Zahrellion while the other watched over them.
    “So you can do it?” Jenka was looking at him like a child on the Giver’s Day. Lemmy kept nodding that he could, and with a point of his finger, got them moving again. Before long, the snowfall lessened enough that they had to start using the woodsman’s stealth that came easily enough to both of them. Then Jenka stumbled over a warm, squishy mound that would have been exposed and steaming had it not been for the fresh layer of snowfall.
    Jenka couldn’t tell what it was, but he sensed Lemmy’s sudden revulsion. And the smell was terrible. A strange familiar aura radiated from the thing, and Jenka was suddenly alarmed because the last time he had sensed such a disgusting roil was when he’d been in the presence of Gravelbone during the battle for Mainsted.
    “Son of a—” Jenka gasped. “What in all the hells? Is it a young troll with horns?”
    A wet, partially formed body the size of a man was fidgeting in a mess of steaming bloody pus and slime. Whether Jenka had ruined the antlered troll emerging from the cocoon, or if it had been spoiled otherwise, it was clear that this thing wasn’t going to live long.

    Lemmy remembered seeing a skull once, on a farmer’s cart, well east of Delton. The man said he found it at the back of his field. It was a trollish skull with