Warautumn Read Online Free PDF Page B

again. I will keep watch
.
    Div stared at the beast keenly, wondering if the sudden increase in fatigue she had felt wash over her with its “words” was coincidence or something more purposeful, for she knew that the beasts were more than casually tuned to human emotions and desires—and could sometimes link their own emotions to minds they had shared. A second yawn ambushed her, then another. She finally gave up thinking and stretched out on what, by its size and shape, might have been Krynneth’s sleeping place.
    Strynn lay down beside her, close enough to touch hands but not to crowd. Thunder rumbled. The sky grew darker as night advanced. Rain fell harder but never reached them. Atsome point, the birkit inserted its firm, warm bulk between them. Still fighting it all the way, Div slept.
    She awoke to find herself still lying on sandy stone beneath an overhang of harder rock, with someone close beside her. Yet when she sat up and looked around, it was to find the rain gone and the sun shining in what was obviously a glorious morning.
    But … she had only meant to nap until dinner! Had she in fact slept through the night?
A glance at Strynn beside her made her start.
Her floor-mate wasn’t Strynn at all!
Rather, the face that blinked bleary eyes at her through a fringe of long black hair belonged to … 
Rann
.
    Chills raced over her—at which point something told her this was a dream, even as something else urged her not to fight it, that she was entitled to this much peace and joy, however ephemeral.
    Rann smiled sleepily at her, then rolled back over, turning bare shoulders to her—shoulders that she saw to her surprise were tanned where by rights they should be white as marble.
    Unable to confront such a novelty, yet strangely unconcerned, she rose and moved—walking was too ordinary to note in a dream—toward the light of day. It came, she discovered, from beyond a brow of rock not unlike that under which she and Strynn had sheltered, save that neither horses nor birkits were present. Filled with a joy she could not source, she drifted toward full daylight—and gasped.
    She looked out at a perfect bowl of blue: blue water beneath a sky of that same hue, save that it shone where the water glittered. A conical island of dark stone spangled with lush vegetation rose maybe two shots beyond the invisible shore, close to the center of the lake. Cliffs surrounded it, of the same stone, and much of a height. They were steep, too, nearly vertical, but ringed with terraces and shelves, and pocked with caves. None of which was to say that the area was bereft of life. Treescloaked the island and crowned the cliff tops, while patches of vegetation clung languidly among the rocks, as though they were leafy visitors from the Wild come to lie in open sunlight for a season. It was the most beautiful place Div had ever seen, and the most peaceful, the most serene, the most … restful. She was as happy as she had ever been.
    She had to tell Rann!
Breathless with joy, she turned and dashed back into the chamber. But it wasn’t Rann who rose from his bed to meet her, it was a hollow-eyed Strynn rising from where she had obviously been busy reviving the cooking fire; and this wasn’t the bright and wonderful place, it was the darksome cave in which they had sheltered from the storm. Div’s heart sank, even as she felt the remembered joy like an ember of warmth in her soul. The birkit was happy, too, she saw. Why it was almost smiling—as much as a birkit could—in its sleep and, barely audibly, purring. Strynn, however, looked more troubled and nervous than ever. “What?” she demanded, as she saw Div’s grin.
    The grin wilted. “I dreamed … a good dream—though I suppose that’s all it was. I’ll tell you later. What’s wrong? Besides the obvious, I mean.”
    Strynn shook her head; then, to Div’s surprise, stumbled forward and hugged her: not as a friend, but as a child would clutch its mother. “Oh,