Aster Wood and the Blackburn Son by J B Cantwell Read Free Book Online Page A

down at me. “But now with you here, we got a chance. You and I can go back together, rescue the others. Then we can figure out what to do next, how to get rid of that sickening cloud. Where’s your friend? The girl?”
    My insides suddenly cramped, and I thought I might be sick. I wrapped my arms around my stomach as if I had just been punched.
    “She’s…gone,” I said. “Almara, too.  
    Kiron sucked in his breath.
    “So you did find the old one,” he said.  
    I nodded.  
    “She was his daughter,” I said. “We traveled together for a while. But once we found Almara, and he was mad, it was too much for her to take.”
    “Almara was mad?” he asked, surprised.
    “Yes, but there’s more,” I said. “On my way here, I passed by an army. At least a thousand men maybe twenty jumps from here.” I gestured to the link, his link, still hanging around my neck. “They’ve got the children imprisoned.”
    “Children?” he asked.  
    The sound of Rhainn being struck by Dormir rang out in my memory, and I nodded.
    “The army, they’ve destroyed the villages on Aeso. They killed the adults and captured the children. Now they’re slaves. We have to go back and get them out.”
    I started panting as I recounted the story to him, and soon I was fighting back hysteria. I wanted to run back to Rhainn right this minute, to lead the charge of every man in Stonemore to flatten that horrible army.
    He put a hand on my shoulder.
    “Calm down,” he said. “You can’t help nobody like that.” He sat back onto the rocks in the dry part of the stream bed. He looked as if he had run for hours. “We can’t just storm in there. We’ll have to get the others out of Stonemore first.”
    I nodded.
    “Okay, let’s go,” I said.  
    He raised one hand, stopping me, and tilted his head back, exhausted.  
    “Just a minute, boy. You still haven’t told me everything. What happened to Almara?”
    “The Corentin, he got to them both. We made it to the Fire Mountains, but Almara sacrificed himself to save us. And then she—Jade—fell to the darkness.” I stared at the water, running crystal clear and clean over smooth, black rocks, and felt miserable. “The Corentin had been controlling him for centuries,” I said. I dropped my bag to the ground and dug out the Book of Leveling. “We—I—took this from the mountain before it collapsed.” I handed it to him.
    “What is this?” he asked.
    “It’s called the Book of Leveling. It tells how to balance the planets in the Fold, to take the Corentin’s power away.”  
    He ruffled through the pages of the book and then looked up, perplexed.  
    “It’s blank,” he said.  
    “Oh, yeah,” I said. Then I took the palm of my hand and rubbed it over the page he was opened to. Instantly, words and calculations appeared on the parchment.  
    Kiron stared.
    “My boy,” he said, “you have been busy.”  
    And for the first time, he smiled.  

    We sat on the ground, our backs up against two trees, and watched the fire crackle in the small pit we had dug. I had told him about the army preparing to launch its attack on Stonemore, but it wasn’t enough to get him up and moving yet. So, trying hard to be patient, I had joined him by the fire.
    “What will we do next?” I asked, my socked feet hot from their closeness to the flames.
    “Well, they ain’t in a rush. Not with Stonemore the way it is,” he said. “They can take their time.”
    “You think they know? About the curse?” I asked.
    “ Someone knows,” he said. “Though I doubt everybody does. That’s not the kind of power you just go flashin’ around, especially to an army of bloodthirsty men. Seems to me, though, that this Coyle is behind the whole thing.” He stared blankly into the fire, as if this were the first time he had rested in months.  
    “He’s just setting them up,” I said, tossing a rock into the embers. They sizzled at the disruption.  
    “The calm before the slaughter,”