The Shattered Vine Read Online Free PDF Page A

best of reasons, it seemed all too often to go wrong. With bad intentions . . .“Master Malech poked his nose beyond our walls because there was no other choice. Not because he believed the old ways were wrong.”
    “Standing with the Collegium would force them to support you in turn, yes?” Mahault was weighing the options, her face tight with concentration. “No more risk of apostasy . . . and maybe they could help us?”
    “If they chose to. But if I agreed . . .” Jerzy tried to imagine it, and failed. “It would not soothe fears, as they wish. Not now. It would merely inflame them, each group seeing only the other gaining advantage, building fear out of suspicion. That is what our enemy wants, what he has been doing all along. To undercut traditions, to set us against each other. If I take this offer, I do his work for him. A Vineart cannot be part of the greater world, may not form alliances. Sin Washer commanded it.”
    Jerzy’s words sounded hollow even as he spoke them; had he not already broken that Command, over and again? What had he done, here, if not forming an alliance, however informal?
    “Aren’t we already?” Kaïnam asked, returning to the conversation, picking up on what Jerzy had been thinking. “Look at us. Lord and Vineart. Trader and . . . solitaire, by heart if not training. If you added in a Washer and a farmer, we’d be every-folk represented at this table.”
    Exaggeration—a trader was not a guildsman, and a farmer could not represent the fisherfolk, but that did not make it false. Jerzy had formed alliances, had added his abilities to those of others, had used magic in ways forbidden. The fact that if he hadn’t, he would be dead now, and no one would know that there was danger until it was too late, did not mitigate those facts.
    The responsibility pressed against him, and Jerzy found himself instinctively reaching for the distant touch of the Guardian, the stone dragon who protected House Malech.
    He had told himself to stop reaching, to not depend on that support: on the seas, in distant lands, the connection had been so faint as to be useless. But now that they were here, docked on the shores of The Berengia . . .
    You are Vineart.
    The reassurance came through, clear and steady, tasting of dry stone and fresh rain. It was raining, back home.
    For the first time, the knowledge that the Guardian—as well as the Washers—considered him full Vineart was neither soothing nor disturbing, but merely another weight on his shoulders.
    “I’m not supposed to be making these decisions,” he said, hating himself for the too-familiar sound of uncertainty and fear in his voice. “I don’t know enough . . . I don’t know anything.”
    There was silence in the cabin, and then Ao, unexpectedly, slammed his hand down flat on the table, making it rock back and forth under the blow.
    “Rot,” he announced. “Twice-rotted. You think any of us know? You think Malech knew? I listen for my livelihood, Jer. I listen for survival. You know what I am hearing? I’m hearing that all the rules we ever knew have gone into the midden; everything’s not changing, it’s already
changed
. And us? Us four? We probably know more than anyone else what’s really going on.”
    Everyone except the enemy who drove all this.
    Jerzy felt the weight of the Guardian’s confirmation push at his spine, and the pressure literally shoved him out of his chair. Once up, there still wasn’t enough room to pace, the way he had back in his master’s study, so he strode to the far wall and stared at it, not seeing the maps and instruments stored there, but his own convoluted thoughts.
    The unknown Vineart, Ximen, had set all this in motion, attacking vineyards, using pawns to influence men of power, setting magic-born beasts to terrorize the common folk, undermine the ground the Lands Vin were built on.
    How was Jerzy to know what the proper counter to all that might be? If he agreed to the Washers’ terms, he