The D'Karon Apprentice Read Online Free PDF Page A

she
appeared today, and finally asleep atop a pile of gold eggs nestled
beneath her.
    “What was, what is, and what will be,” Ivy
said proudly. “What do you think?”
    Myn stepped inside, finding she barely had to
duck to get through the large doorway, and looked over the mural.
Almost immediately she became more interested in the loft directly
above it, craning her neck to peek at the dusty cloth sacks piled
there. She sniffed at one and licked it.
    “Oh no you don’t,” Ivy said with a giggle.
She climbed onto Myn’s back and scrambled up her neck to reach the
loft, hopping off to push the dragon’s head away. “Yes they are
potatoes, and yes they are for you, but not now . You already
had some.”
    “They did fine work, didn’t they?” came a
voice from the door.
    Myranda turned quickly to the source, a thin,
tall man, his hair nearly white and a beard to match. He wore a
fur-lined coat of rough but sturdy tailoring. There was something
about his stance that suggested, despite his slight build, he was
tough as oak, and something about his eyes that suggested he’d seen
far more than anyone would ever wish to see.
    “Father,” Myranda said happily, hugging
him.
    “My little girl,” he said, squeezing her
tightly.
    Myranda held him for a long time. Each time
she saw him, the gratitude and relief in having reunited with him
washed over her as if for the first time. She hoped it always
would. She had spent far too much of her life wondering if her
father was still alive to ever take him for granted again.
    Her father was only in his late forties, but
to look at him, you might think him to be twenty years older. A
short but remarkable military career, followed by a tour in the
legendary Elites, and then more than a decade in the dungeon
beneath Castle Verril had taken its toll. Nevertheless, his mind
was as sharp now as it had ever been, and once his feet touched the
ruined soil of his former home, his drive to resurrect the place
had been relentless. In all of the Northern Alliance, none wished
to see Kenvard live again more than Greydon Celeste. It was a
blessing, in that the city badly needed him, but a curse in that it
as often as not kept him and Myranda from one another.
    “I didn’t expect you back so soon. The men
nearly didn’t finish.”
    “I thought you were focusing on clearing the
road to the palace,” Myranda said.
    “That is the focus, but with the workers
we’ve got and the state it’s in, it’ll be months before that
happens. Before it can be a city again, it should be a home again.
And any good soldier takes the time to care for his steed.” He
turned to Myn, who had stepped up and was now making her presence
known with an ominous rumble in her throat. “No matter how large
that steed might be.”
    Myn settled down comfortably and rested her
chin on the ground, subtly sliding it forward until Myranda and her
father had to step apart to allow it between them.
    “Curious creature,” he said. There was a
rigidity to his posture and expression.
    It was clear he had not yet become
comfortable being so near a dragon. Myn angled her head slightly
toward Myranda and slid open an eye to look over Greydon, causing
him to tense a bit further. When she released a sigh that was near
enough to a hiss, Greydon reflexively took another step back. The
look of satisfaction on Myn’s face made it clear what she was up
to.
    “This is my father, Myn. If you can learn to
tolerate Deacon, you can learn to tolerate him.”
    It took a trained eye to read the expressions
of a dragon, but once one had the knack, one could read volumes
into their feelings by a twist of a lip or a shift of a brow. At
the moment, Myn may as well have been muttering under her breath
about how crowded her little circle had gotten and how much better
she’d liked it when it was just herself and Myranda. She relented,
though, curling her head aside to yawn and then tucking it under
her wing for a nap.
    Greydon cast a wary eye