The Lord-Protector's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

floor whose flat and mirrored surface was level with her waist—or perhaps slightly higher, she had to admit, if only to herself. She was the shortest of the Lord-Protector’s offspring, even if she did happen to be the eldest. But she was a daughter, who would be married off to some heir or another, most probably the Landarch-heir of Deforya, a cold and dark land, she’d heard, scoured by chill winds sweeping down from the Aerlal Plateau. She had seen the Plateau once, from more than thirty vingts away, while accompanying her father on an inspection trip to the upper reaches of the River Vedra. Yet even from that distance, the Plateau’s sheer stone sides had towered into the clouds that enshrouded its seldom-glimpsed top.
    Her thoughts of the Plateau and Deforya dropped away as she realized that there was another source of illumination in the chamber besides the dim glow of the ancient light-torches. From the Table itself oozed a faint purplish hue.
    Mykella blinked.
    The massive stone block returned to the lifeless darkness she’d always seen before on the infrequent occasions when she had accompanied her father and her brother, Jeraxylt, to see the Table.
    â€œBecause it is part of our heritage,” had invariably been what her father had said when she had asked the purpose of beholding a block of stone that had done nothing but squat in the dimness for generations.
    Jeraxylt had been more forthright. “I’m going to be the one who masters the Table. That’s what you have to do if you want to be a real Lord-Protector.” Needless to say, Jeraxylt hadn’t said those words anywhere near their father, not when no Lord-Protector in generations had been able to fathom the Table.
    Mykella doubted that anyone had done so since the Cataclysm, even the great Mykel, but she wasn’t about to say so. Before the Cataclysm, the Alectors and even the great Mykel had been reputed to be able to travel from Table to Table. Another wishful folktale, thought Mykella. No one could travel instantly from one place to another. Yet all of Corus had been ruled from the vanished cities of Elcien and Ludar, and there were the eternal and indestructible highways, and the Great Piers, and the green towers.
    She shook her head. So much had been lost. Could the Tables once truly have transported Alectors? How was that possible?
    Yet…once more, the Table glowed purple, and she stared at it. But when she did, the glow vanished. She looked away, and then back. There was no glow…or was there?
    She studied the Table once more, but her eyes saw only dark stone. Yet she could feel or sense purple. Abruptly, she realized that the purplish light was strangely like the soarer’s words, perceived inside her head in some fashion, rather than through her eyes.
    She shivered, then drew herself up, concentrating on the Table. What did it mean? How could sensing a purple light that wasn’t there be a talent? And why had the soarer appeared to Mykella, and not to her father or to Jeraxylt? And what was threatening her land? Or her world? And what exactly did the Table have to do with it all? The questions raised by the appearance of the soarer and her simple sentence seemed endless.
    Slowly, Mykella walked around the Table, looking at it intently, yet also trying to feel or sense what might be there, all too conscious that she was in the lowest level of the palace in the middle of the night—and alone.
    At the western end of the Table, she could feel something , but it was as though what she sensed lay within the stone of the Table. She stopped, turned, and extended her fingers, too short and stubby for a Lord-Protector’s daughter, to touch the stone. Was it warmer? She walked to the wall and touched it, then nodded.
    After a moment, she moved back to the Table, where she peered at the mirrorlike black surface, trying to feel or sense more of what might lie beneath. For a moment, all she saw in the