The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

stomach was quite unhappy with all the wine I’d sucked down. Felt a bit drunk still too. But all of that would pass as the bitter cold of Rime sunk into my bones.
    Strange thing occurred to me about five days into my journey. I’d crossed into Rime two days ago. And my arms were still bare. I didn’t yet have a need for the wools I’d brought along, which was odd, because this far into the frozen province, I usually wished fur covered my balls. But the weather thus far had been a rather mild affair. Nice, gentle breezes of tepid air, and better yet — no snow. Or rain. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time it had rained. It’d been a while, hadn’t it?
    Mizridahl was in the midst of summer, but just as the South remains sticky and at least genial when winter calls, the North keeps its bluster and gelid cold when summer arrives. But I wasn’t going to complain. The warmth had melted much of the snow, which allowed me and Pormillia to arrive inside Edenvaile seven days after we’d left the Hole. Workers were rebuilding the front walls of the kingdom, which the conjurers had unkindly uprooted and collapsed during their brief stay here.
    Vayle could have gone elsewhere, but entry into the sporadic villages and kingdoms of the North flows largely through the mouth of the White Mountains, which Edenvaile nestled against. She’d also likely want to restock before heading deeper into Northern territory.
    I gave the stable boy Pormillia’s reins and morbidly threw in a joke that I hoped he’d have a better future than the old stable boy. He didn’t understand, but smiled anyway.
    It was around high noon, which limited the number of places my commander could have been to around one, give or take zero. I trudged through the dirty puddles of melted snow that cratered the commons, and aimed my nose for a building on which the skull of a wood-carved bear protruded from high above the door. It was in a state of a perpetual winking, a paw with long claws holding tight to a mug.
    It took a shove and a knee and a push to open the bloody door. The bottom rail screeched across the floorboards, its wood fat and swollen from the abnormal warmth of a Northern summer.
    The Roar and Pour, as this tavern was known, greeted me with open tables, empty chairs and unexpected silence. It’s not a common sight to find an empty watering hole in the North; the spice of mead and bitterness of ale is the only way these poor bastards make it through the onslaught of snow and ice.
    But you know what’s even less common? Seeing the king of the North sitting at a round table, entertaining guests. It’s the kind of thing that usually goes on in the privacy of a keep, where gold chalices and luxurious tablecloths sate a lord and lady’s hunger for the grandiose.
    Patrick Verdan sat at the head of the table, and all around him were older men with white beards and gray beards and stringy hair and wrinkly faces and pruned lips. A single woman with hair the color of ice turned to look at me.
    Patrick Verdan whispered something to his guests, then excused himself from the table. He approached me in the skin of a man wholly uncomfortable with himself. He tugged at his tight-fitting tunic, readjusted his cloak lined with snowy fur and looked to be squatting away the clinging fabric of his trousers from his balls. The shade of night dressed him, with golden buttons and threads glistening down his tunic and trousers and sleeves.
    “Two Rots in three days,” he said. “Having a family reunion in the North?”
    “A brief one,” I said. “Where’s she at?”
    He brushed away encroaching fur from his pitted face. “Walk with me. I sent a messenger to the Hole a couple days ago, but it’s better you’re here in person.”
    Patrick opened the door and walked out. I took one last look at his guests. I’d seen two of them before, months ago. When the conjurers were inside these walls… when the might of the North stormed into the fields and cut