The Dragon Hammer (Wulf's Saga Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

opening. The gate was heavy, but well oiled. Ulla left the key in the lock. Saeunn would get it on her way back if all went well.
    The girls pushed the gate open. It still squeaked enough as it swung on its hinges to worry them both.
    Saeunn went first, and then Ulla tried to follow her through the gate opening, but banged into the bar on the side of the gate.
    “Curse it,” she whispered. “That’s going to leave a bruise. I’ll have to come up with some reason I got it. Thayer will definitely notice when she’s dressing me tomorrow.” Thayer was Ulla’s personal maid. She was a bear woman, a Tier, a talking beast. You did not want to get on her bad side. “Well, we’d better start moving.”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you think anyone heard us?” Ulla asked in a whisper. “Can you listen?”
    Saeunn’s hearing was much better than Ulla’s. They both knew it.
    The girls stood still for a moment while Saeunn listened. She heard the usual castle noises—settling stones, mice scampering—but there were no footsteps. She did hear someone stumbling around in the castle beyond the entrance of the corridor, but then a toilet door in the castle creaked open and shut. Nothing to worry them down here.
    “I think we’re all right,” Saeunn said.
    Ulla squeezed Saeunn’s hand, then leaned forward and bussed her cheek with her lips. “I love you, little sister. I would be lost without you,” she whispered. “No matter what happens to me, you know that’s true.”
    Ulla drew back, leaving the lingering scent of her perfume. It was exquisite, like everything else about Ulla. But what impressed Saeunn most was that none of her perfection seemed to have gone to her head. In fact, the von Dunstig children were certainly overindulged, but none of them were really spoiled. She’d met lots of other children of nobility elsewhere who were.
    “Ready to go, big sister?” Saeunn whispered back.
    Ulla smothered a giggle. “Oh, yes,” she said.
    Saeunn had not been lying to her star—even if that were possible. She was happy here in Shenandoah.
    When she’d come, she’d expected to have to endure the place. She’d figured that Shenandoah was going to be a layover, a diplomatic stop she had to take for a few years. Her father wanted to explore an alliance between the elves of Amberstone and the Mark of Shenandoah.
    The arrangement had been made with Duke Otto to foster Saeunn for ten years, which, she knew, would seem like a long time to a human but was practically a blink of an eye to a Child of Starlight.
    People died. Elves did not.
    Oh, elves might be killed by accident or in battle, and there were rare diseases that could kill them. But if she avoided any of these calamities, Saeunn would go on living for century after century.
    Right now, though, she was very young for an elf. She was sixty-two years old. A teenager.
    Although she’d been alive for decades, a lot of Saeunn’s early life, especially the very first few years, had been spent in the star-trance. She’d lived within the thoughts of her star, and sang her star’s part in the great song the stars sang to the dragons. Stars were not just friends to the elves. They weren’t just family.
    The stars were elves and the elves were stars. Like one of the saga singers had put it:

    Light that splatters into matter,
    and to living bodies scatters.
    Souls of elves are starlight spatter,
    stars that come to Earth to dwell.
    Elves are stars and stars are elves.

    The souls of elves were made of starlight, and each elf shared that soul with a particular star in the night sky. Saeunn was her star made into a person upon the Earth.
    She did not understand exactly how this worked, or why it should be. She’d asked her mother once, but her mother had smiled and replied, “Ask me again in a hundred years. Then you might be ready to understand the answer.”
    Saeunn might be over sixty years old, but because of the nature of elves, she had the mind, the personality, of a