Trickster's Choice Read Online Free PDF Page B

in her magic, and accepted the food. As Aly maneuvered a scrap of soggy bread through her swollen lips, the woman gently wiped dry blood from her face.

    “You’ll have a nice fighter’s scar on the brow, little girl,” she remarked. She spoke Common, the language used throughout their part of the world, with a rough accent that Aly couldn’t place. It was Tyran, maybe, but there something of Carthak in the way she treated her
r
’s. “And a broke nose—they’ll brand you as quarrelsome,” the woman continued, cleaning Aly’s many cuts. “No one will buy you for a bedwarmer now, unless they’re the ones that like women in pain.”

    “For them I’ll look like trouble. I’d be a dreadful bed warmer,” Aly told her with an attempt at a grin. The effort made her wince. She sighed and popped another piece of bread into her mouth, although it was hard to chew and breathe at the same time.

    The big woman rocked back on her heels. “You
planned
this? Be you a fool? A bed warmer gets fed, and clothed, and sleeps warm.”

    “With a good owner,” Aly replied. “Not with a bad one. My aunt Rispah used to be a flower seller in Corus. She told all manner of tales about masters and servants. I’ll wager it’s worse when you’re a slave with a choke collar.” She fingered the leather band around her neck. “I’d as soon not find out. Better to be ugly and troublesome.”

    The woman got back to work on washing the blood away. “So were you always mad, or did it come on you when you was took?”

    Aly smiled. “I’m told it runs in the family.”

    Think of this as a sort of divine present from me to you. It could almost be letters from home. I don’t want you thinking that all kinds of dreadful events are taking place in your absence. I hope you appreciate it. I wouldn’t do this for just anyone.
The man who spoke in Aly’s dream had a light, crisp, precise voice, the sort of voice of one who could annoy or entertain in equal measure. That voice didn’t mumble, or speak in dream nonsense. Aly was completely and utterly convinced that it was a god who spoke to her. Now she knew why her mother had once answered a question about how she knew when a god was a god: “Trust me, Aly, you know.” Aly knew.

    Darkness cleared from her dream vision to show her Pirate’s Swoop. It was the clearest thing she had ever seen in her sleep. She felt as if she had become a ghost who watched her mother. Alanna sat on a merlon atop the observation deck on their largest tower. Out on the Emerald Ocean, the sun was just kissing the horizon. Shadows already lay over the hills east of the Swoop.

    Alanna rested a mirror on her thigh: an old, worn mirror that Aly recognized. Thom had given it to their mother when he was small, when he’d thought her the kind of mother who liked mirrors with roses painted on the back. Ever since, Alanna had used the mirror to magically see the things she wanted to find. Aly felt a hand squeeze her heart seeing her mother still using Thom’s childish gift.

    Alanna picked up a spyglass and trained it on the southern coast, despite the poor light of the fading day. After watching through the glass for a time, she set it down and grasped the mirror. Violet fire, the color of Alanna’s magical Gift, bloomed around the glass. On the mirror’s surface Aly saw only gray clouds.

    Her mother cursed and raised the mirror as if to smash it against the stone of the merlon. Then, gently, she lowered it back onto her lap and returned to the spyglass.

    Footsteps. Ghost Aly turned to see her father walk right through her. He rested a big hand on the back of his wife’s neck and kissed her under the ear before he asked, “Nothing yet?”

    Alanna lowered the spyglass and shook her head. “I thought she’d come home in time to say goodbye,” she said, shaking her head. “I have to sail tomorrow, George, I can’t wait.”

    Aly looked down at the cove, where three ships flying the flag of the