The Dark Ferryman Read Online Free PDF

the elbow.
    “As welcome as that looks and sounds, I fear that if we don’t move, we’re in danger of being inundated.” He steered her off the hillside back to the track that she and Barton had originally taken up, even as the font grew in size and intensity, becoming a waterfall springing from the side of the escarpment and tumbling down into the forsaken riverbed. Barton leaned over to dash his head in the water’s spray with a whoop of joy.
    “Do you think,” Lara said softly, as they sat by the evening fire, “that you will mind the boy getting all the credit for freeing the river and saving the village?”
    “Not a bit.” Rivergrace leaned forward as the Warrior Queen tweaked her ear gently. “They’ll probably remember my name when it floods.”
    “Not a doubt of that.”
    “I heeded what you said to me, but I couldn’t help it. The water called. It had to be freed, for its own nature as well as for their sakes.”
    “What’s done is done. You would do well to remember my words in the future, though. We have been through a lot of heartache over this, Grace, and you’d be a fool to toss away our experience.” Lara rubbed her hands together, bringing Grace’s gaze to them, to the missing finger on her left hand, wondering if it ached in the cold the late fall night brought to them. Lariel did not often go ungloved in public, but this was not public, this was the queen leading a war troop on a scouting sortie, and when she did not have gauntlets on, she went bare-handed like any other trooper.
    Rivergrace looked back to the ground, remembering the finger Lara had taken off to work deep earth magic, for the blood and flesh sacrifice to lead them on another quest, much different from this one. They had won through that. She didn’t know if what they did now in pursuit of Abayan Diort would bring victory or defeat, or even if it could be ended in their lifetime. He came from a line of Galdarkan who’d been created to guard Mage Kings and fallen, and what ruled his mind generations later, none of them knew. Lariel had set a destiny in motion. It would be like trying to wade across the great sea, knowing that it stretched much farther than the eye could see or even imagine, and that you might fail before you accomplished reaching the other side.
    And for the hundredth time since he’d left, she wondered how Sevryn fared.

Chapter Two
    DARAVAN DROVE HARD into the night, taking the horses as fast as they could go over even ground, leading them over treacherous stony impasses where they could not safely ride. Following him was like racing after a storm cloud, wrapped in ash gray as he was, as elusive as Daravan appeared to be in the threads of darkness around them. His horse moved under him as though not needing bridle or stirrup to guide him, spurred only by the will of the man he bore. He reminded Sevryn of Gilgarran, the only man on Kerith who’d taken notice of him as a half-breed living by his wits on backwater streets and decided he was of merit, not only because of his Vaelinar blood but because of who he’d become. Sevryn carried the Vaelinar magic in his veins although he did not have their remarkable eyes. Impossible to have the Talent without the multicolored eyes, the eyes that could see into the elements of the world around them . . . but he had it. Everyone until Gilgarran had overlooked him and Daravan, often called the lord of storms, was very like his old mentor. Daravan would weigh you with his eyes, gray and silver as he was himself, the gaze not piercing, so you’d never guess that he’d taken your measure within a pinch of your soul. Then, like Gilgarran, he’d keep the secret of what he’d learned buried deep within himself until he needed to draw it out.
    For all of that, Sevryn wondered how and why it was that Daravan had plucked him out of Lariel’s troop. When they dismounted to lead the horses through a thinning copse of trees, he asked. “What luck drew you to me?”
    He