The Lord-Protector's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

dimness was her own image—black hair, broad forehead, green eyes, straight nose, shoulders too broad for a woman her size. At least, she had fair clear skin.
    Even as she watched, her reflection faded, and the silvery black gave way to swirling silvery white mists. Then, an image appeared in the center of the mists—that of a man, except no man she had ever seen. He had skin as white as the infrequent snows that fell on Tempre, eyes of brilliant and piercing violet, and short-cut jet-black hair.
    He looked up from the Table at Mykella as though she were the lowest of the palace drudges. He spoke, if words in her mind were speech. She understood not a single word or phrase, yet she felt that she should, as though he were speaking words she knew in an unfamiliar cadence and with an accent she did not recognize. He paused, and a cruel smile crossed his narrow lips. She did understand the last words he uttered before the swirling mists replaced his image.
    â€¦useless except as cattle to build lifeforce.
    Cattle? He was calling her a cow? Mykella seethed, and the Table mists swirled more violently.
    The Table could allow people to talk across distances? Why had no one mentioned that? There was nothing of that in the archives. But then, the archives did not mention anything about the Table except for its existence. Could it be that no one knew? If they did, wouldn’t her father have known? And where was the strange-looking man? Certainly not within the sunken ruins of Elcien. Could he be in far Alustre, so far to the east that even with the eternal ancient roads of Corus few traders made that journey and fewer still returned?
    Alustre? What was Alustre like?
    The swirling mists subsided into a moving border around a circular image—that of a city of white buildings, viewed from a height. Mykella swallowed, and the scene vanished. After a moment, so did the mists.
    The strange man—could he have been an Alector? Hadn’t they all perished in the Cataclysm? Mykella didn’t know what to think. Still…she had thought of Alustre and something had appeared. Could she view people?
    She concentrated her thoughts on her father. The mirror surface turned into a swirl of mists, revealing in the center Lord Feranyt lying on the wide bed of the Lord-Protector, looking upward, his eyes open. Beside him, asleep, lay Eranya, his dark-haired mistress. After the death of Mykella’s mother, her father had refused to marry again, claiming that to do so would merely cause more problems. Mykella had never questioned that, but seeing Eranya beside her father, she wondered what kind of problems he had meant. As she thought about that, Mykella felt strange looking at her father, clearly visible in the darkness.
    Quickly, she turned her thoughts to Jeraxylt. Her brother was in his own chamber, but he was far from asleep, nor was he alone. Flushing in the darkness, and yet somehow both irritated and disgusted, Mykella quickly thought about their summer villa in the hills to the northeast of Tempre.
    The mists swirled, and then an image of white columns appeared, barely visible in the dark above the low walls that enclosed the front garden.
    Next she tried calling up an image of the Great Piers, and those appeared in the mirrorlike surface of the Table, dark, but clearer than they would have appeared to her eyes had she actually been standing on the eternastone surface and looking west at the short river wharves and the dark water beyond.
    After that, she tried to call up the barracks of the Southern Guards, located a vingt east of the palace. The large square structure appeared before her. In turn, she tried calling up images of other places in Tempre—the market square, the public gardens, and the front of Lord Joramyl’s mansion, to the southeast of the Southern Guards, situated on a low rise. All appeared clearer in the mirrored surface of the Table than they would have to her eyes—yet they were clearly