The Raven's Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

inches above the floor. With her round rosy cheeks and curly hair unconstrained by a wimple, she looked like a farm girl on a gate. Apart from the severe black habit, of course.
    ‘I’d like to know what you saw,’ Gair said. ‘I don’t remember much of it very clearly.’
    She folded her hands in her lap, looking vaguely uncomfortable. ‘When the Cultists appeared from the main street, you threw some kind of protection over the sisters. You drove the mob back with fire and with something else I could not see.’
    ‘It’s called the Song—’ he began, but she held up her hand.
    ‘It’s called mortal sin, my son, and that is all I care to know about it.’ Taking a deep breath, she collected herself. ‘You fought until your foes became too many, then you surrounded yourself with flames. Something made you fall from your horse, because the fire went out and there you were on the cobbles in a dead faint. We thought you had been struck on the head by a stone, though later we could find no injury apart from the one in your side. Then the girl came, with warriors.’ Shuddering, the Superior blessed herself. ‘In the confusion of their attack, we slung you over your horse and fled, I’m afraid. She found us shortly after and led us all here.’
    It was barely more than he already knew, but it was better than nothing.
    ‘Who do I need to thank for taking care of this?’ He touched the bandage around his ribs.
    ‘Sister Resa. She appears to have taken you under her wing.’
    ‘Please tell her I’m grateful.’ He would tell her himself when he saw her, but for now he was too battered and weary to go looking for her. ‘And to you, too, Superior.’
    ‘We should thank you , Gair,’ she said. ‘You have put yourself in harm’s way for us more than once in recent days and because of it, we all still have our lives. As a daughter of the Church I must deplore your methods, but as a fellow soul under the Goddess I can find little to criticise.’ She rose to leave, brushing chaff from the skirts of her habit. A small smile softened her face. ‘It appears even mortal sin can have practical applications.’
    Then she walked away to rejoin the other nuns.
    Leaning back, Gair let the wall support him. He needed sleep, lots of it, but he also needed to know why he had lost control of the Song again. No one had struck him. He’d taken no new hurts at all beyond a few bruises, most of which he must have collected from the cobbles in the fall. Nothing to explain why his grasp on his gift had slipped, why the Song had turned on him the way it hadn’t since the iron room. Something inside him was broken.
    Carefully, he probed the shield in his mind that scabbed over the worst of the reiving’s scars. Like the dull ache of an old wound, he had become so accustomed to it that he barely gave it any thought, but as he tried to examine it, his focus kept slipping away. After a few attempts, he gave up and let the shield be. It wasn’t as if he even knew what he was doing.
    Alderan might have been able to explain some of it. Though he’d been no Healer, the old man had worked the Song for almost three times as long as Gair himself had drawn breath and his interests had been eclectic enough that he’d known a surprising amount about many, many things. Except Alderan wasn’t there. Alderan was gone.
    Two days had passed without sign of Baer. Two days of bald, wind-scoured ridges where dead trees thrust skywards like fingers raised in admonition, and of precipitous, pine-choked valleys whose frost-hardened floors the sun never reached. Two days through mists and stumbles, with hunger gnawing at their bellies, through backtracks and deadfalls and stinging hail, and every evening the bitter shadow of Tir Malroth reached out and gathered them up. Two days had never felt so long.
    A bright bead of blood glistened on the pad of Teia’s thumb where she’d stuck herself with the needle. She couldn’t sew with mittens on and without