Wild Magic Read Online Free PDF

world.
    Min dumped the chest unceremoniously on the seawall and wiped her brow. Behind her, a cavalcade of mummers was winding down the steep hill from the steading, their arms full of costumes and props and provisions for the voyage ahead.
    ‘You’re sailing today?’ Katla asked, appalled at how time had overtaken her.
    The knife-thrower nodded quickly. ‘Aye, we’ll catch the late tide, Tam says. He couldn’t be arsed to make an early start, lazy great halibut. Got us all running around while he sweet-talks your ma out of her best yellowbread.’
    At the very mention of this delicacy, Katla’s stomach rumbled loudly. Her mother’s yellowbread was known across all the islands, though she baked it rarely now that the cost of the flowers that gave up their stamens to the spice that gave it its distinctive taste and colour had become so expensive. The crocuses grew only in the foothills of the Golden Mountains on the southern continent, and this was one reason Gramma Rolfsen cited as clear evidence that the Eyrans had been driven out of their rightful homeland: for how otherwise would yellowbread have become a staple of the Northern Isles when all the southerners did with the flowers was to crush them for dyeing or use them in their rituals?
    Katla gave the knife-thrower a distracted smile, then started up the hill towards the hall. Breakfast first, she thought; then some serious plans to be made. She passed the tumblers, dressed not in their bright motley but in ordinary brown homespun, with casks of water and stallion’s-blood wine balanced precariously on their heads, then some more of Tam’s women stumbling down the path with a freshly dead cow which seemed to be refusing to cooperate with them. It would, Katla thought, watching them wrestle awkwardly with the stiff-legged carcass, have been far simpler to joint and carve the creature up at the hall and haul down a portion apiece, or to have butchered it down on the strand, close to the ship. The mummers were not always the most practical of folk, for all their skill and tricks. Towards the end of the procession she saw her twin brother Fent carrying a long, finely made box of polished oak. Katla’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
    ‘What’ve you got there, fox-boy?’ she said, stepping in front of him so that he was forced to halt. She knew the casket well enough: Uncle Margan had made it as a gift to her father by his brother-by-law, for keeping his sword in, ‘now that we are no longer at war and you will be providing for my sister by becoming a great landsman’. Bera liked to tell the story of how Aran’s face had fallen, thinking Margan had brought him a new sword, and how long it had taken for him to recover his manners sufficiently to thank him for the box alone.
    Fent looked surprised at first to see his twin up and about; then he turned shifty. He had not shaved in several days, Katla noticed with some surprise, for her brother was vain of his looks and never let a beard grow to cover them up. Now, however, a fine orange fluff had coated his chin and upper lip like some sort of exotic mould. ‘It’s for Tam,’ he mumbled, and tried to press past her.
    Katla stood her ground. ‘There’s only one sword in Rockfall good enough to find Tam’s favour,’ she said grimly, ‘and that’s my carnelian, which I have my own plans for.’ She nipped forward and neatly tipped the lid of the casket. Inside, on a bed of white linen, lay the Red Sword. Katla swore. ‘Who said you might take the finest blade I ever forged and give it away to a mummer?’
    Fent coloured, but his chin came up pugnaciously. He snapped the lid shut, barely missing her hastily withdrawn fingers. ‘Father said Tam Fox should have it as part payment for the voyage. It’s tainted now, anyway.’
    It was said that the blood of a seither would make the blade that had drawn it chancy and untrue, liable to turn on its owner.
    ‘Even so, no one asked me.’
    ‘You were dead to the