The Sorcerer's Concubine (The Telepath and the Sorcerer Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

insubstantial.
    “I guess you weigh a little less than a flesh and blood woman. Maybe. It’s not a bad thing, though. Wouldn’t want to lose you in a strong wind.” He swung up behind her. He took the reins, his arms close around her. His body was warm against her back. Often she was disturbed by the warmth of men, but on a night like this, it wasn’t so unwelcome. She couldn’t get cold the way real people did, but cold weather still didn’t feel good, especially wet cold like this. She could feel the damp in her wooden bones.
    He took a white stone from his pocket and tapped it twice. It brightened like a lantern, and he held it up to cast the way ahead, but barely. They moved slowly down the streets, pelted by rain. Her hooded cloak protected her, but he also kept his head tipped forward over hers. She was deeply conscious of how his body pressed around her, the muscles of his thighs, the size of him. Fanarlem girls were all made the same, five feet tall, so their parts could be easily changed without worrying over size. Besides that, they became clumsier the larger their bodies were made. Grau was perhaps six feet, not unusually tall, but she had never been this close to a man—as close as an embrace. Very different from perching reluctantly on a man’s knee.
    She wasn’t sure how long they traveled down the liquid shadows of those wet streets. She was so aware of him near her and so uncertain of what might come next, time seemed a tricky concept. They went far enough to leave the seedy district of the House of Perfumed Ribbons well behind them, now traveling on a tree-lined avenue near the river where wealthy merchants must live in the elegant stone houses. The river wove its way across the land to the port of Atlantis in the south, all the way to the Miralem lands in the north. Sometimes people called it the River of Money.
    He stopped in front of a small but cozy-looking inn, two stories with a balcony and a tiled roof, where candles glowed in windows. A boy walked out from the stables into the rain to take the horse. He looked at Velsa.
    “Success, huh?” he asked.
    “I’d say so,” Grau replied.
    Grau removed her box and some papers from his bag. Then he lifted her down and showed her to the steps, fishing out a key as he climbed. 
    The room was small but they had it to themselves. There was a single large bed on a low frame. Seeing it twisted her insides. Also, a lounging bench with cushions, a writing desk, a fireplace. Grau put her box on the bed, took off his coat and hung it on a peg. He offered a hand to take her cloak.
    “You aren’t wet, are you?” he asked.
    “No, sir.”
    “Please, call me Grau,” he said.
    “All right…”
    He shivered, ruffling his black hair, which was soaking wet as he didn’t have a hood. “I’ll get the fire going. Have a seat.”
    She watched him move the logs around and stuff some paper beneath them. He put his hand close to the logs, blew out a quick jet of breath, and a flame sprouted.
    Magic. Just small magic, but magic all the same. She had never seen anyone work sorcery right before her eyes.
    Once he was satisfied that the fire would burn steadily, he sat beside her with her box on his lap. “Where did you get these?” he asked.
    Fates, how she was shaking! “Once a year…” She could hardly get her voice to go above a whisper. “…when the city is hot in the dead of summer and the mosquitos are out, so no one is coming to the House, we go to the mountains for a week. I always pick up interesting things I see, to remind me what it’s like out in the forest.”
    “I would love to look at them closer.”
    “Of—of course.”
    He opened the box and at first, he just looked at all the contents long and hard without touching anything. Then, slowly, he held his hand over the box, as if he was sensing something inside. He picked up one of the rocks and turned it over. “A fossil,” he said, noticing the imprint of a shell inside the rock. “You