The Witch's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

the green sparkle of his sister’s eyes, held her with the intensity of his own gaze. “Her power is budding, so it would seem,” he said. “But we do not know which she will follow, mother or father.”
    “What do you mean?” Brielle asked, a bit frightened by her normally cheerful brother’s grim tone.
    “Has she the gift of long years, as do we?” Ardaz asked bluntly. “You do not know, nor do I. Perhaps Rhiannon will live through the centuries, and then twenty years will not seem so long. But perhaps …” He let the thought hang, knowing that he had lighted a thousand contemplations in his sister’s mind.
    And truly Brielle was dazed by the words. She hadn’t even given that notion much consideration, assuming that her daughter would live by her side through the dawn and wane of centuries to come. But Ardaz was right, Brielle had to admit; she had no way of knowing.
    “Let her go,” Ardaz said again. “The life is hers to live.”
    Brielle nodded but could not reply past the lump that had suddenly welled in her throat.
        Much later, but still before the approaching dawn had pinkened the eastern sky, Billy Shank and Bellerian slumped down on a mossy bed at the edge of the field. The two wizards trotted by them, shaking their heads in good-hearted sarcasm, and returned to their merrymaking.
    “Mortal men,” Istaahl muttered to Ardaz.
    “So now we might die happy,” Bellerian said to Billy. “To have looked upon these precious and rare sights.”
    “Now I understand Del’s love of this place,” Billy replied, referring to the friend he had lost twenty years before, thefriend who had loved Brielle and given the witch her daughter. “Truly it is a magical land.”
    “And rarer still is the gathering we joined this night,” Bellerian explained. “Suren there be magic in the air.”
    Billy regarded the five still at play on the field. The fair witch and her brother Ardaz, Istaahl from faraway Pallendara, and Arien Silverleaf, the Eldar of the elves, who had become Billy’s closest friend over the past twenty years. But most of all Billy found his eye lingering on Rhiannon, Brielle’s daughter, Del’s daughter, so innocent and beautiful.
    Looking down from the heavens, his lost friend would have been proud indeed.
    “Ardaz of Illuma, Istaahl of Pallendara, and Brielle of Avalon,” Bellerian continued, speaking the words solemnly, as if to remind himself of the gravity of the assembly.
    “And the Eldar of Illuma,” Billy added. “If King Benador had come, then all the leaders of the world would be here.”
    Bellerian nodded. “But the good young king of Calva and even yer own friend o’ the elves pale by the side of th’other three. Look at them, Billy Shank, and know yerself to be a blessed soul. The powers of all the world they be; any one o’ them could defeat an army, could lay ruin to all the world or shine the light of hope upon it. They check themselves, and a blessing that be, for the bounds o’ their powers’d steal yer breath away and never give it back.”
    Billy knew well enough the truth of Bellerian’s observations. He had seen Ardaz in battle once before, and if the Black Warlock had not appeared on the field to counter the magic of the Silver Mage, Ardaz would surely have destroyed the entire army of Pallendara all by himself.
    Bellerian shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe his own words. “The powers o’ the gods given to man,” he mumbled. “The three wizards of Ynis Aielle all come together.”
    Twenty years is a long time in the life of a mortal man, but if Bellerian, the knowledgeable Ranger Lord, had taken a moment to consider his words, he would have remembered that Ynis Aielle boasted of four wizards, not three.
    Too many, in the last two decades of peace, had allowed themselves to forget the lurking specter of Morgan Thalasi.
        
An organ?
Reinheiser balked, considering the massive pipes that climbed high into the chamber.
You dragged me