Ghost in the Throne (Ghost Exile #7) by Jonathan Moeller Read Free Book Online

and Annarah had a secret between them. The Knight of Wind and Air had spent decades scheming, all of it apparently to save Caina’s life. The Huntress was still out there somewhere, and if Callatas knew that the Staff and Seal were in the village of Drynemet, he would turn the Kaltari Highlands to a smoking wasteland. 
    And Caina Amalas was at the center of it all. 
    He slipped into the room and closed the door in silence. Caina had not moved since he had left, her breathing still slow and regular. Kylon watched her for a moment. Her decisions had changed the fate of nations and started and ended wars. She had thrown down powerful sorcerers and corrupt lords. She had even killed the Moroaica, the author of so much misery across the centuries. 
    Yet, to look at her now, it all seemed so unlikely. She looked like a pretty young woman, her black hair stark against her pale neck, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling with the draw of her breath. He felt a sudden urge to seize her hands and to feel the pulse in her wrist, to make sure that it was still there. 
    It was impossible that she was still alive, but she was. Thanks to the manipulations of Samnirdamnus. 
    Kylon didn’t know why, but he was grateful for the help.
    If anyone wanted to come for her, they were going to have to go through him and the valikon first. 
    As he undid his baldric and propped the sword next to the bed, a thought occurred to him. 
    Nasser and Annarah might have a secret between them.
    Did that mean Morgant had a secret of his own as well?

Chapter 3: Soon To Burn
     
    Claudia’s ankles hurt. 
    She did not feel well. The muscles of her back ached, and her belly strained against her gown. Any day now her child would come, and she felt tired all the time. The Istarish sun blazed overhead like a furnace, and while her headscarf kept it off her head and face, the streets radiated heat like a baker’s oven in the morning. Claudia Aberon Dorius was tired, a little nauseous, and sore.
    Yet her ankles still bothered her the most of all. It was an odd thing, but there it was. After the baby came, she hoped her ankles would stop hurting, or at least hurt less. 
    It was hard to think of anything else. She knew that Istarinmul was about to burn in the fire of a civil war. The destruction of the Inferno had been the final straw. The Grand Wazir, idiot that he was, decided to blame the southern emirs, and the southern nobles had responded by marching north with an army. 
    If that was not enough, her husband’s life was in danger. Cassander Nilas, the Umbarian Order’s ambassador to the Padishah, disappeared after a disturbance at the docks of the Alqaarin harbor, but the Order’s embassy remained in the city, holed up in their fortified mansion in the Alqaarin Quarter. The agents of the Umbarian Order would not hesitate to kill Martin Dorius if the opportunity presented itself. Every time her husband left, Claudia did not know if she would see him again, if some Silent Hunter might take him from her. 
    The Order wouldn’t kill Claudia, though, if they got the chance. They would take her captive, use her to force Martin’s cooperation with their schemes. It was one of the Order’s favorite tactics, and the pregnant wife of an Imperial Lord Ambassador would make a fine lever to insure Martin’s compliance. If she gave birth while in captivity, all the better. The Umbarians might send one of the child’s fingers or toes to Martin to make their point. 
    And if all that were not bad enough, the threat of Callatas’s Apotheosis lay over everything like a storm cloud about to burst. Claudia didn’t know what Callatas intended, but she saw it in the starving wraithblood addicts that swarmed through the streets of the dockside districts, their eyes like blue flames licking the bottom of a pan, their hands shaking as they begged for wraithblood. Perhaps Caina had figured it out by now. Though Caina, too, had disappeared, vanishing from the city