The Fall of Neskaya Read Online Free PDF

laran powers awaken at puberty. Often, the stronger the sickness, the more powerful the laran .”
    “Th-this means I really do have it?” Coryn blurted out. Eagerness quivered along his nerves. “Laran?”
    “That may well be, chiyu . It is what we are here to discover. Tell me, what happens when you look into your starstone? Take it out and show me.”
    Coryn unwrapped the stone, his eyes resting on the flickering blue light in its heart. He had the curious sensation of falling into it, going deeper and deeper. After only a few moments, the sense of giddy whirling which was now sickeningly familiar came over him. His stomach clenched and he broke out in a cold sweat.
    “Enough! Look away now!”
    Coryn’s fingers shook as he tucked the starstone back into its silken pouch. Haltingly, he answered Rumail’s questions about the symptoms which, he admitted, had been growing steadily worse over the last season.
    “Is it very bad, this threshold sickness?”
    “It could become so if it is not treated,” Dom Rumail said. “Yet I have seen young people enter the Tower with far worse cases than yours and grow to the fullness of their talents.”
    “What—what must I do?”
    “For the moment, simply lie down and relax as best you can. Leave the rest to me.”
    When Coryn lowered himself to the padded bench, the dizziness intensified. Closing his eyes as he was bid, he felt the touch of a fingertip between his brows. The world steadied. Shortly after, he felt warmth in the pit of his stomach, creeping up his spine. His arms and legs felt heavy and then light. He seemed to be floating on a gauzy, sunlit cloud. His muscles melted as if he had been soaking in a hot spring, like the one Eddard had found on Cloudcap Mountain. Thoughts drifted pleasantly through his mind, as insubstantial as ghosts. No wonder Margarida had enjoyed it, for she was given to daydreaming fancies.
    Once or twice, Coryn became aware of the sound of Rumail’s voice, although he could not make out any words. From time to time, also, it seemed as if the inside of his skull had turned into his bedchamber and there was someone else moving about in it. Man or woman, he could not tell beneath the cloak of misty gray. He felt only a dreamy indifference and no sense of intrusion.
    The visitor drifted across the room, picked up the comb of carved shell from its place on the shelf, pulled a strand of coppery hair from its teeth and placed the hair in an unseen pocket. Then it stooped to open the chest at the foot of Coryn’s bed.
    Coryn watched, now from the vantage of his head upon his own pillow, as the visitor took out every piece of clothing, one by one—his holiday tunic of Dry Towns linex, his best winter cloak of tightly-woven blue wool trimmed with cloud-leopard fur, vest and pants in supple crimson-dyed leather which had once belonged to Eddard and no longer fit him, a dagger with the tip broken off, a box of soapwood scratched with his initials and filled with childish trinkets—poor quality river-opals in a bag stitched by Tessa for his sixth birthday, a stick horse and rider, a handkerchief embroidered with cherries which had once been his dead mother’s.
    The visitor carefully folded and replaced all the items except for the dagger and the handkerchief.
    What did this person want with him, with the things that it had taken, the hair and the dagger and the handkerchief? Coryn could only watch in horrified fascination as the visitor spread the handkerchief on his chest, over his heart, and placed the coiled hair in the center.
    The figure reached up to its hooded head and, with a sharp jerk, drew out one of its own hairs. This it twisted together with Coryn’s hair and wrapped in the handkerchief.
    This wasn’t right, couldn’t be right! Coryn struggled to move, to turn his head, to shout aloud. Dom Rumail, help me! But his voice and body remained locked, as if encased in a block of ice.
    The faceless visitor picked up the dagger and held it