Traitor Read Online Free PDF Page B

forgotten about that.
    At the time, it hadn’t mattered. There had been other things I was way more worried about—like rescuing Sile and keeping my friends safe. Now, as I watched him examine the bone-carved pendant carefully, I started to get anxious. I was beginning to wonder how much I had been overlooking. All this time, everyone had been telling me to focus on my training, not to let myself get distracted, and to put all my other worries out of my mind. Had keeping my eyes fixed on that one goal made me blind to the hand of fate moving around me?
    I was starting to think so.
    “Sile,” I started to speak. My tone must have caught him off guard, because he dropped my necklace back against my chest and stared at me with concern. “I found a scimitar at my father’s house. It had the mark of a stag on the hilt. Someone told me it was the royal crest of the gray elves.”
    He pressed his lips together uncomfortably, glancing down to my belt where I had the scimitar clipped against my hip. “I know. I gave it to your brother for safekeeping. I’m glad to see he kept his word.”
    Closing my hand around the newly refurbished hilt, I drew the blade from its sheath so he could see how it had been restored. “I saw it in a dream, too. I’ve seen a lot in my dreams. Horrible things; things everyone else says can’t possibly be true.”
    Sile took the scimitar from my hands and held it up to the light. The expression on his face was distant, maybe even a little sad. It was as though he was remembering something—something that had happened a long time ago. “The first time I saw this blade, the person who gave it to me asked me to destroy it,” he said in a quiet, somber voice. “I couldn’t do it. Even then, it just felt wrong.”
    “Was it my father?” I guessed.
    He didn’t answer right away. He just ran his thumb over the stag head engraved upon the pommel. “Until that moment, I wouldn’t have refused him any favor he asked of me. Your father and I were like brothers. We both served in the infantry as common foot soldiers. We went through training together. We were both newly married with young wives waiting for us at home, and neither of us had an extra dime to spare. We weren’t fighting for glory or because we even believed in the king’s campaigns. We fought to put food on the table. It was our struggles that brought us together.”
    I watched Sile carefully as he turned the blade over, inspecting the runic marks engraved down the length. When our eyes met at last, he handed the scimitar back to me. “Your father was a different man back then. Much different than the one you know now. He was a lot like you, actually. I always admired his bravery—brave to the point of stupidity. Surrender just wasn’t in his vocabulary.”
    I remembered Sile saying something to me like that before. Still, it was hard to imagine that he and my father had been close friends. It was even harder to imagine my father being brave or even friendly. I’d never seen that side of him. The Ulric I had known growing up was cruel, intolerant, and harsh. He hated me. He’d beaten me more times than I dared to count, and had basically abandoned me once I started my training to become a dragonrider.
    Needless to say, I wasn’t in a hurry to start feeling sorry for him.
    “Then it is true,” I replied, “what I’m seeing in my dreams; the gray elf warrior and the death of the king. It all happened, didn’t it?”
    Sile wouldn’t meet my gaze again. “It’s not time to talk about that yet.”
    I started to get frustrated. He was clamming up, right when I was about to get some good answers. “What about my father, then? He stole the god stone from Luntharda, didn’t he?”
    That one answer would have been enough to satisfy me. But Sile wouldn’t give me anything. He just put his hand on my shoulder, like he was trying to reassure me. “Have some patience, Jaevid. I know it doesn’t seem fair. But you, of all people,