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

toward the nearest of the Untamed Hills. Linn and Kole had never been known to share words over tea. They thought best beneath the trees and spoke freely in the clearings.
    “You may as well ask,” Kole said, earning a confused look from Nathen up ahead before Linn answered.
    “You really think it’s the White Crest doing this to us?” she asked, her tone making her own thoughts on the subject abundantly clear.
    “I don’t know what I think,” Kole said, as if he hadn’t done a good enough job proving that in the Long Hall. “But he is one of them, isn’t he? One of the Sages.”
    “Was, you mean.”
    Nathen put a bit of distance between him and the pair, partly to avoid the distraction and partly—Kole suspected –to avoid getting involved. The stars lit the branches overhead like a thousand tiny mirrors, but the light faded as the woods grew dense, the path choked with roots and loose stones. The animals of the Valley were silent in their nests and burrows.
    “He is gone, Kole,” Linn said in that hard way of hers. It was the way she said things when she wanted him to prove her wrong.
    “We don’t know that.”
    “We know that the Night Lords attacked him in the Valley passes thirty years ago,” she said. “We know the battle lasted three days—
    “And three nights,” Kole put in. “And their clash brought down the peaks and broke the River F’Rust, and the Rivermen who lived in the canyon were trapped in the Valley—those that survived, at least. Their bones litter the Deep Lands now, and the Steps still echo with the faint clashes of our Valley Sage and the Night Lords sent against him. I know the tale.”
    “It wasn’t so long ago to be called a tale, Kole. It happened in the lives of our parents. The White Crest fell and the Dark Kind entered the Valley. We’ve been fighting them ever since.”
    Kole said no more, and Linn grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around roughly. They were in a small clearing beset by filtered starlight. Though she was angry, she looked oddly beautiful.
    “Did you really sense something looking through that beast?” she asked, a hint of fear in her voice. “Kole. Did you see something?”
    Kole sighed.
    “Something saw me, Linn,” he said. He knew Nathen had stopped moving along the path up ahead, that he was listening with those hunter’s ears. “That was not your average Dark Kind. It had a master.”
    “The Dark Kind are a force of nature. Not in our world,” she said, noting his expression. “In theirs. Only one has the power to control them. If what you say is true, then Bali is right. The whispers are true, and the Eastern Dark has found us. He’s come back. The White Crest didn’t manage to kill him in the passes after all.”
    Kole did not look convinced, and that seemed to snap something in Linn. She grabbed him by the straps of his pack and nearly shook him.
    “What makes you say otherwise, Kole? Why are you constantly chasing the ghost of a Sage you’ve never seen? A Sage that died before we came into the world.”
    Kole looked away, dropping his voice so even Nathen could not hear.
    “I saw him the night she died,” he said, and Linn’s grip slackened. “I sensed him. He was there, Linn.” Kole’s brown eyes took on their amber glow as they met hers. “He could have helped her. I know it.”
    But he didn’t.
    “There were shadows with the same red eyes as that beast. They were in the peaks above the Deep Lands. Not Dark Kind, but something stronger.” Kole’s eyes widened as he remembered waking up in a cold sweat for the last time, before the fire had found him. Before he was Landkist. “If he was there, why didn’t he help her? Why did he let them …?”
    Linn shook her head and released him.
    “We’ve all lost, Kole,” she said, her eyes all sympathy. “But not all of the Sages are the same. There has ever been one the Emberfolk have counted an enemy. With the White Crest gone—gone, Kole—we can’t rely on