Treachery of Kings Read Online Free PDF Page B

together. Inseparable, I understand.”
    Letitia looked up at Finn. In the near end of the day, her eyes seemed enormous pools of liquid night. And in those pools, he saw a reflection of himself, animage blurred by a tear, which Letitia quickly wiped away.
    “I'm not being rational, am I,” she said, turning from him then. “I'm making up pretty endings in my head.”
    “Somewhat, yes. But there's nothing greatly wrong with that.”
    “It is, yes. If it holds no truth at all. Oh, Finn…”
    He held her, then, and in a moment she simply turned and walked quickly across the street and opened the latch with her key. She appeared for an instant, before the dim lantern in the hall, and then she was gone. A moment later, Julia squeezed through the portal and followed Letitia inside. There, but a few steps from the door of his house, Finn felt as if he'd never been so utterly, completely alone

 

EIGHT
     
    W ITH DARKNESS CAME THE USUAL SOUNDS of night, the boots of a pair of guardsmen on Greenberry Street up the hill, the rattle of a blade against a studded belt. A shout from a fisherman, working on his nets, perhaps, on the river below.
    And, at the end of Garpenny Street, a drift of wispy figures, disembodied souls, phantoms in ragged disarray. One might run out of ale in Ulster-East, Finn reflected, or sacks of wheat meal, but there was never any shortage of the dear departed in town. Foul deeds, pestilence—and, of course, the war—took care of that. The pale and spectral lights of Coldtown were a grim reminder that death was truly an alternate way of life.
    Someone down the street, likely the Wheelcrafter's wife, had left food out for the Coldies that night. For though the dead no longer fed in the ordinary way, they ever hungered for the savor, the essence, the joyous scents of suppers past.
    Letitia might have remembered to leave them something herself, especially on SpringFair, had the day not lingered so long and ended on such an unpleasant note.
    A WARM EVENING WIND MADE ITS WAY DOWN the hill, past Wesser and Doob and Winkerdown Square,on into Garpenny Street. The sign above Finn's head began to creak, and he knew he ought to grease the thing and give the carven lizard a coat of green and gold. Such thoughts had occurred a dozen times before, and somehow the work was never done.
    Truly, it was a task worth his time, for it was the symbol of his trade, and folk judged a craftsman by what they saw
outside
his shop, not what was done within.
    It was not a fair appraisal, of course, for many of the signs on the street that pictured swords, pies, ale and mead and spells, did not reflect the quality of goods and services offered inside.
    Take Bickershank the Booter, for one. A man would do better to walk unshod on broken glass, than to trust his feet to the torturous wares of Master Bickershank. Once, Finn had caught a glimpse of the fellow's own bare feet, and he had never passed the shop again
    He paused, then, cocked his head and listened, certain he had heard a sound that didn't belong to the ordinary noises of the night. A shuffle and a scrape, a rattle and a shake, something such as that.
    Still, after a moment, when it didn't come again, he decided he was simply out of sorts from the misadventures of the day.
    And what would be so strange about that? Who wouldn't feel adrift after what I've been through
?
    And, worse still, the fear, the awful trepidation, the lurch in his belly, the knowledge that tomorrow would be a hundred times worse than today.
    As much as Finn loathed Aghen Aghenfleck, he found it hard to work up righteous anger at the Prince. In the face of such unthinking folly, such total unreason, it was like getting mad at a solid stone wall. You could kick it, curse it till you were blue in the face, and the damned thing still didn't know you were there.
    Millions of men had died, and death would claim untold numbers more in the brutal, senseless war between Fyxedia and Heldessia Land that had