The War with the Mein Read Online Free PDF

beside the point. What mattered was that the Akarans were the benevolent masters of a magnificent realm. They had been for twenty-two generations, and would be for much longer if Aliver had any say in the future. That was why he took martial matters so seriously.
    The walk to the Marah training hall took only a few minutes, most of it downhill. The bulk of the palace, the town below it, the island, and the sea around it stretched out before Aliver. The receding scale of it was difficult to reckon with. The near buildings were hulking structures of clean Acacian architecture. Roads wound down in the switchback fashion the hillside’s natural steepness required. Beyond the gates, figures on the visible bend of the main road were slow-moving pinpricks, like deer ticks crawling across a man’s arm. The spires of the lower town were little more than sewing needles pointing upward, so tiny they could be squished between the thumb and forefinger. It was hard to imagine that all of it had begun with a simple fortress built by Edifus, a defensive structure perched high so that the nervous monarch could scan the seas around him in fear that his newly conquered subjects might yet unite against him.
    Flushed from the brisk walk, Aliver entered the large pillar-supported space. It was lit by oil lamps hung on the wall or from three-legged stands and by skylights cut in the ceiling that cast slanting beams down on the gray-white stone of the place. The scent of the burning oil was almost sweet, stronger than the smoky flavor given off by the stoves used to keep the chill at bay. He greeted his instructors, nodded at other youths entering with him, boys mostly, although a handful of girls attended also. They received military training on an even footing with their male counterparts. Indeed, women made up almost a quarter of the Acacian armed forces. For this Marah training, however, they were all children of aristocrats bound for high posts as officers and government officials. Many of them were from the Agnate, the privileged group that could verify an ancestral link to Edifus’s family tree.
    The prince knew that previous Akaran rulers had formed tight bonds with their young peers. His grandfather Gridulan was said to have been constantly in the company of thirteen male companions, dining and sleeping, ruling and wedding in a close tangle. Though his peers were deferential to him, Aliver found no such feeling of group connection. He tried to spurn the absence of it and value his independence of mind and position, but he feared something was lacking in his character, something he seemed powerless to correct.
    Aliver smiled when he saw Melio Sharratt, a young man his own age, enter. Melio was the nearest thing the prince had to a friend. They had been born only a few weeks apart, and from their first classes together, the kind intelligence in the boy’s eyes drew Aliver to him. For a while, when they were both ten, they spent days at a time hiding out in the palace labyrinth, playing a game wherein one of them became a storyteller and the other the main character in what invariably became a tale of warfare and adventure, of mythic beasts slain and evil vanquished. Aliver felt comfortable with Melio in a way he did not with others. Still, despite his fondness for the lad, the prince never fully dropped his aloofness with him, or anyone else. If anything, it had grown as adolescence shifted and altered their bodies and emotions. So the smile that once would have been friendly changed into an expression harder to define.
    “Hello, Prince,” Melio said. “I hope the day finds you well.”
    “It does,” Aliver said, looking past him as if something at the far end of the training grounds interested him.
    Melio combed the longish bangs of black hair back from his forehead with his fingers and good-naturedly copied Aliver’s examination of the other students as they arrived. “Have you been practicing your Fifth Form? I saw that Biteran