The Eternal Flame Read Online Free PDF

don’t ye?” taunted her captor. “Well, looks like yer mistaken, elf-girl! Now take off yer bow and quiver, real slow and careful. I’d hate to have to carry ye back with yer body full o’ arrows.”
    The thought flashed through Brionna’s mind that she could, perhaps, get off one shot before she died—maybe in the throat of this arrogant human. But she fought back the desire, since that rash move would probably mean her friends’ deaths as well. Reluctantly, she pulled off her bow and cast it aside, then did the same with her quiver of arrows.
    “Good elf. Now if ye jest do as Morrigon says, ye might even live another day er two.” The man chortled at his joke. “Now turn around,” he commanded. “And start followin’ me. We have a lovely welcome for ye back at the village.”
    When Brionna turned to face him, she caught her breath. What surprised her wasn’t that he was so elderly, with scraggly white hair sprouting from his chin as well as the sides of his head above his ears. Nor that he looked so frail, as thin as a twisted old tree.
    No, what surprised her was his right eye, so bloodshot that it looked pink. Unnaturally pink.

4 • The Strength of Wings
    Slowly, Scree rose to his feet. He grimaced from the painful gash in his side, and also from the sight of this village surrounded by the lava-belching volcanoes of Fireroot. It was the village of the Bram Kaie eaglefolk, whose leader Scree had just killed—before discovering that the leader had also been his only son.
    Tall and grim, Scree stood before the villagers crowding around him. They were young and old, male and female, slim and stout. Some, like Scree, stood in human form; others bore talons and great wings whose feathers shone with the reddish glow of the clouds above. And the crowd continued to swell. Eaglefolk were climbing down from their fortified nests, hurrying down the obsidian-paved streets, climbing the bejeweled statues of soaring eagles and poles bearing silken flags—all to view the warrior who had so boldly challenged their leader. And won.
    A sulfurous wind blew over the fire-blackened ridge, dusting the villagers with black ash and bits of pumice. But they didn’t seem to notice. They pressed closer together, jostling each other, craning their necks and ruffling their wings, all the while keeping some distance from Scree. Then, as one, they fell silent, waiting for him to speak.
    He scowled, rubbing his hands on his bloodstained leggings. Despite the gash in his side, he straightened up to his full height. The rust-red light of the Volcano Lands tinted his bare, muscular chest.
    “I am Scree,” he declared. “And I am your new leader.”
    Hushed whispers, exclamations, and hurried conversations bubbled up around him like molten lava. Wings opened and closed again anxiously, while talons scraped against the ground. Scree waited before speaking again, knowing that his bid to lead the clan was no less risky than the battle he’d just survived. Some of these villagers were bound to resist him, an outsider, trying to lead them at all—let alone in an entirely different direction from the raiding and pillaging of their past.
    Yet that was his goal. Nothing less. That was the only way he could possibly help Tamwyn, Elli, and Brionna—as well as Avalon. For he knew that the fate of their world now rested on what happened in two distant places: somewhere in the stars, if Tamwyn had actually managed to stay alive; and on the Plains of Isenwy, where a great battle would soon be fought. And if Scree had his way, there would be eaglefolk from this clan at Isenwy.
    He scanned the villagers surrounding him, as they slowly quieted again. Yet even as he looked at their faces, he thought about some other faces—ones he knew that he would never see again. There was Tamwyn, the brother he had finally found, only to lose once more. There was Brionna, whose strange elfish ways attracted him so strongly, even as he seemed bent on pushing her