The Faerie War Read Online Free PDF Page A

always with the same respect they afford their Leader Supreme.
    As Jamon steps away and heads for the door, I get my first good look at her. I’m startled to find she’s already watching me, almost as if she were waiting for me. Ice shoots through my veins, drenching me in goose bumps.
    I recognize her.
    I recognize the shape of her face and her slender form. I recognize the hundreds of braids in her hair. Not from now, but from my previous life. The life I don’t remember.
    I walk slowly toward her. I open my mouth to say something, but she holds her hand up to silence me. I can only stare. My encounter with her in my previous life was brief, and the edges of the image appear fuzzy in my mind. But I remember her exactly the way she is now. Fire in her black eyes. Tight, dark clothing. Hair separated into many thin braids, each with a silver ribbon running through it.
    When there is no one left in the hall but the two of us, she lowers her hand.
    “I remember you,” I say faintly.
    “And I you.”
    “I fought you, didn’t I? I . . . almost stabbed you with an arrow. But you disappeared.” I remember the slicing pain of her incisors when she bit my arm.
    She nods. “I was trying to kill someone. You stopped me. In doing so you brought destruction upon all of us.”
    My eyes widen and my mouth drops open. “Excuse me? You were trying to kill someone, but I’m the one who brought destruction upon everyone?”
    “The person I was trying to kill was Draven.”
    I didn’t think it possible, but my mouth drops open even further. “But . . . why would I stop you from killing Draven? And why was I anywhere near him?”
    She sighs, then indicates that I should sit down. Good idea, since my legs are starting to feel like they aren’t entirely attached to my body. “He wasn’t Draven back then,” she says. “He was just a boy who had no idea he had magic inside him. You were sent to his home by your Guild to protect him from me, and I was there because of the vision I’d seen. The vision in which he took on the power of the evil halfling Tharros and became evil himself. I decided to kill him before that could ever happen.”
    “But I stopped you,” I whisper, feeling my back begin to bow beneath the enormous weight of responsibility.
    “Yes. You were simply doing your job, and you did it well. I had to vanish or you would have killed me. When I returned a few days later to finish off what I’d started, I found protective spells around his home. There was no way I could get to him.”
    I lower my head into my hands. “So . . . it’s all my fault? The Destruction, everything? All because I saved his life when he should have died?”
    “Yes,” she says. “Or no. There are many answers to that question, depending on which part of his life you look at. You could blame his mother for wanting to have a baby. You could blame anyone who may have saved his life after you did. You could blame me for knowing from the beginning that I would fail.”
    I raise my head. “What do you mean?”
    She lowers her eyes. “In my vision, I saw myself attacking you first in the boy’s garden, hoping to get you out of the way before I went for him. But you defeated me. So in reality, when I arrived in the garden and saw you there, I waited for you to go into his room. Then I went straight for him, hoping I could kill him quickly with one snap of his neck before you could even get involved. But, once again, you defeated me and saved him.”
    “As if he wasn’t supposed to die,” I say quietly.
    She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ll never know. It doesn’t matter, though. The fact remains that he lived to take on Tharros’ power.”
    I close my eyes and slump lower in my chair. “Why did I have to be good at being a guardian? Why couldn’t I have messed up just that one assignment? Then none of these awful things would have happened.”
    “No one will ever know what might have been if I had managed to kill him,” she