Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

lick his wounds.”
    “You would put the ambitions of the Eastern Dark onto our protector,” Doh’Rah said. “And you would belittle the sacrifice the King of Ember made in striking out against him. The White Crest returned here on his orders, to protect the Valley and its people.”
    “Haven’t the Sages been looking for an advantage in their private war forever?” Kole asked, exasperated. “Hasn’t each of them, in his or her own way, drawn the peoples of the World and their Landkist into their conflict?”
    “For a time, perhaps,” Doh’Rah answered. “But the White Crest abandoned that pettiness.”
    “Or so he would have you think. He convinced our king of it as well.”
    “Why, then, would he send the Dark Kind to slay us, Embers included, if he meant to use us in his war?”
    “An Ember of the Lake has never fallen against them,” Kole said, and the words sounded horrid even to his ears. “Neither has an Ember of Hearth. Not since they first entered the Valley when I was a boy.” Images of all the soldiers—and everyone in between— who had been killed flashed before his eyes.
    “The Dark Kind serve no master in this World,” Doh’Rah said. “No master save the Eastern Dark, who has ever been our enemy.”
    “Perhaps they have been let in,” Kole said, but he knew he had lost them. Whatever interest he had piqued had soured. If he was honest with himself, he could not entirely blame them. In matters concerning the Sages, he had never been able to remain clear-headed. His thoughts were guided by rage, his words by revenge. In truth, it was revenge as aimless as the wind itself.
    Was he wrong? Was he truly projecting his anger, his loss, onto a figure that had sheltered them against his own kind?
    More of the gathered had begun filing out into the night, and Kole suspected that whatever good will he had garnered in the assault went with them.
    “You are not the first Landkist to think to challenge the Sages, Kole Reyna,” Ninyeva said in a room grown quiet enough to hear the waves of the lake lapping beneath the boards. “Nor are you the first to question the loyalty of the one who swore to our king to shelter us against the rest. The Dark Months have never been as perilous as they are now. Whatever answers are to be found at the peaks, I expect they will still be there to be found when the World Apart is no longer so close. For now, we cannot risk one of the few Embers we have.”
    Kole blinked, taken aback. He had expected her to rebuff his claims, to shout him down in defense of her Sage’s memory. He had expected her to turn her ire onto the scourge that had hunted them in the deserts of the north and quite possibly had returned to hunt them now.
    By the look on her face, Linn had expected the same.
    “You would give me leave to try for the peaks?” Kole asked, hating the quiver in his voice but unable to suppress it. Was it excitement, or fear?
    “I would give you leave to set your mind at ease, Kole,” Ninyeva said, “and in so doing, to do the same for your people. Questions are a powerful thing. In the past, it was easy to forget what it must be like growing up in the Valley but being of the desert.” Tu’Ren nodded gravely, staring into the dying coals. “And worse, how difficult it must be for your generation to grow up with no sign of the White Crest, with nothing but war and warriors for company. It is by necessity we live this way, but we cannot continue like this forever.”
    Ninyeva scanned the gathered crowd, her eyes finding each set among those who remained.
    “If the White Crest lives, he must be found,” she said. “If the Eastern Dark has returned, he must be found. Whatever path we take, I suspect, as I have long suspected, it is not to be found in the Valley. But these are pathways closed to us in the Dark Months. For now, we will endure, and we will hope another of those beasts does not come to our door with the eyes of a Sage, no matter which one.”
    Linn