Destiny: Child Of Sky by Elizabeth Haydon Read Free Book Online

something.
    “They'll be within the protection of the keep."
    'It won't be all bad, Melly,“ Stephen said, tousling the little girl's golden curls, smiling at the sparkle that had returned to her black eyes. "There will be more children for you to play with."
    'Hurray!" she shouted, dancing in excitement through the thin snow on the balcony floor.
    Stephen nodded to the children's governess as she appeared at the balcony doors.
    "Just wait a few more days, Sunbeam. The winter carnival will be set up, with so many brightly colored banners and flags that you will think it is snowing rainbows.
    Now, run along. Rosella is waiting for you." He gave Gwydion's shoulder another squeeze and kissed his daughter as she ran by, then turned once more to contemplate the changing times.
YARIM PAAR, PROVINCE OF YARIM
    ''Unlike the capitals of Bethany, Bethe Corbair, Navarne, and the other provinces of Roland, the capital city of Yarim had not been built by Cymrians; it was far more ancient than that.
    Yarim Paar, the second word meaning camp in the language of the people indigenous to the continent, had been constructed in the midst of the great dustbowl that formed the majority of the province's central lands, hemmed in between the dry winds of the peaks of the northern Teeth to the east and the ice of the Hintervold to the north. Farther west, nearer to Canderre and Bethany, the lands grew more fertile, but the majority of the province was a dry land of scrub and red clay, baking in the cold sun.
    Yarim's neighbors, the hidden lands east of the Teeth, were fertile and forested; it was as if the mountains had reached into the sky itself and wrung precious rain from the thin clouds hovering around their peaks. The sea winds swept the continent from the west, carrying moisture as well, endowing the coastal realms of Gwynwood and Tyrian and the near inland provinces with robes of deep green forest and field. By the time those winds had made their way east to Yarim, however, there was little relief left to give; the clouds had expended the bulk of the rain on their more favored children. In especially dry years, Yarim grew little more than dust as a crop.
    At one time, a tributary of the Tar'afel River had run down from the glaciers of the frozen wasteland of the Hintervold, mixing with what the early dwellers had called the Erim Rus, or Blood River, a muddy red watercourse tainted by the mineral deposits that caked the face of the mountains. It was at the confluence of these two rare waterways that the village of Yarim Paar had had its birth.
    For all that the area had seemed a wasteland to the early inhabitants of the continent, nothing could be further from the truth. A king whose name had long been forgotten smugly referred to the lands of Yarim as the chamber pot of the iceworld and the eastern mountains. There was some unintentional wisdom in those words.
    Its spot on the continental divide had left Yarim rich in mineral deposits and, more important, salt beds. Beneath its unassuming exterior skin ran wide veins of manganese and iron ore against the eastern faces of the mountains, with a great underground sea of brine farther west. Finally, as if these earthly treasures were not enough for the area to be seen as richly blessed, the windy steppes were pocketed with vast opal deposits containing stones of myriad colors, like frozen rainbows extracted from the earth. One of the opal mining camps, Zbekaglou, bore the name, in the indigenous language, Rainbow's End, or where the skycolors touch the earth.
    So Yarim's eastern mountains gave the province great hoards of manganese and copper, iron ore and rysin, a blueish metal valued highly by the Nain; its wide western fields provided the greatly prized commodity of salt, which was pumped from the earth through shallow wells that vented into the underground ocean of brine and potash, then was spread out in wide stone beds to allow the sun to evaporate the water, leaving the precious