The Heir of Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

from deep sleep to instant, heart-pounding wakefulness. It was not an external sound but a voice, clear and certain in her mind. The voice spoke just one word, dropped like a stone into silence:
“Flee!”

3
Whispers in the Dark
    K alan was hiding from his fate in the broom cupboard on the lowest level of the Temple quarter. News of the Earl’s successful expedition had run through the keep and Kalan had wanted, suddenly and quite desperately, to be part of the camaraderie of the High Hall. He could not bear to sit down to his usual plain meal with the other novices and then return to an evening of dusting books in Brother Selmor’s study. His heart was hot with rebellion when he thought of the laughter and storytelling that would fill the High Hall—and that he was excluded simply because he had been born with the old powers. He had had to get away, to escape the everyday sameness of his peers; and although the cupboard, with its jumble of mops and brooms and buckets, was a poor alternative to the Feast of Returning, at least he could brood over his wrongs in peace.
    “It isn’t fair!” Kalan whispered, striking one fist hard against his leg. “Everyone else can go the feast, no matter how low their place, everyone except us!” He sat with his chin pulled up to his knees and stared hot-eyed into the darkness. It wasn’t as though he had ever wanted to be a priest. He came of the House of Blood, one of the great warrior Houses and Night’s long ally—and all of his familywithout exception, for generations beyond count, had been warriors. As a very young child he had wished for nothing more than to grow up and join their ranks.
    Kalan’s face darkened at the thought of his family. He had been the youngest of seven children, somewhat lost underfoot but well loved enough until the old power emerged during his seventh year. Kalan still remembered the cold, closed look on his father’s face, and his siblings’ hostility as they performed the ceremony that had declared him dead to his family, shutting him out from the mainstream life of the House of Blood. The quiet click of the door to his family home, closing behind him when the ritual ended, had been absolute in its finality.
    Even now, that memory hurt. It did not matter that Kalan knew this practice was common amongst the warrior Houses and that his family had not turned him out to starve. Word had been sent to the priest in his hold, and when the door swung shut behind him Kalan had found guards waiting to escort him to his new life. The realization that his siblings’ hostility sprang from fear that they, too, might carry the priestly taint did not help either. Seven years on, the unfairness still cut deep and a slow, hot anger, against it and them, smoldered in his heart. “Unfair,” he said again, as he had thought it so many times before. His jaw set and his fists clenched. “Unfair, unfair!”
    The word struck a chord in his memory: Sister Korriya, the temple’s senior priestess, looking down her aristocratic nose at him the first time he had dared to say that he thought his fate unfair. “Unfair?” she had rapped out. “Unfair? I daresay it is. And so is a great deal more in this life, as you’ll find before you are too much older. You had best accustom yourself, young man!”
    She was right, Kalan thought, but he still loathed the turn his life had taken. The House of Blood was the most extreme of the warrior orders, exiling all but a bare minimum of those with the old powers—usually to one of the priestly Houses. There were days when Kalan was gratefulthat the Temple of Night had been short of novices and so he was still part of the forbidden warrior world, even at a distance. But at times like this it made his lot seem that much harder.
    At first, his resentment had taken the form of pranks, or absconding from lessons and chores—and he had incurred his fair share of punishment from Sister Korriya, who had a sharp eye for novice misdeeds.