Reawakening by Amy Rae Durreson Read Free Book Online Page A

higher.
    Barrett spent the next few days smiling foolishly, and Dit bounced in his saddle with a high grin. Ia rolled her eyes and muttered at the pair of them.
    “Why you’re complaining, I don’t know,” Tarn told her. “You don’t sleep in earshot.”
    “Don’t you mind?” She was staring at him thoughtfully.
    He shrugged. “A quick relief, it was, for both of us. Not love.”
    “Love,” she sneered. “Love’s just a lie sold to children to make them think that a life of drudgery is a privilege.”
    “And a lie’s what Sethan and Cayl have, is it?”
    She huffed. “Fine. There’s the odd exception. I just don’t see why you’re so unconcerned about it.”
    Laughing, he looked ahead. The land was turning drier with each day they rode, the plants thinning from vines and cypresses to dry grasses and the occasional wild olive. Soon, so soon, they would be in the desert, and he would feel Alagard’s indignant, exuberant energy rush through him again.
    “I’m waiting,” he told Ia, “for something bigger than a lie.”
     
     
    B UT ALTHOUGH they were at the edge of the desert now, Alagard did not come.
    The desert did not feel the same. Tarn thought at first it must be his human form, so he crept away from the caravan in the night, walking for an hour until he was well beyond anyone’s view. There, in the shadow of ragged red rocks, he transformed, sliding back into his true form for the first time in months.
    He waited for a furious dust devil to swoop down on him, but the desert stayed still and quiet. It felt cold, far colder than the night merited.
    The sense of love was gone.
    That wasn’t all. As he stood there, lifting his wings into the night winds, he realized the desert was quiet. Where were the small creatures, the lizards, the big-eared fox, and the little mice? They weren’t out and foraging, and all he could sense was a dim and quivering fear.
    He considered taking wing and searching out whatever had changed this place but decided against it. In this form, against the star-bright sky, he was unmissable. Better not alert every creature and spirit in the desert to his presence.
    Sobered, he turned human and made his way back to the camp. He had plenty of time before his watch, but when he crept back in between the wagons, he found someone waiting for him.
    “With me,” Cayl said. “Quietly.”
    Tarn followed the man back to the red-trimmed wagon. He could see a light, but the canvas walls were thick enough to hide any movement inside. He crawled in after Cayl to find Ia and Sethan waiting.
    The interior surprised him. He would have expected ostentatious luxury from Sethan, but it was plain. There was a simple bed, made up neatly, behind the driver’s seat. The rest of the space held a low wooden table and cushions. The wagon contained no crates of books to be traded, and no obvious place to store them.
    “You were right,” Cayl said to Ia. “He was out in the desert.”
    Sethan, in contrast to his setting, wore a thick embroidered robe, belted with a purple silk sash. His feet were swathed in fur-lined slippers, and he cradled a steaming cup of tea. His voice, however, was unusually sharp and direct. “And what did you find out there, spellsword?”
    “Nothing,” Tarn told him, wondering. He’d once had a command tent that looked like this, with maps scattered across the tables and grim, soft voices conferring over where to face down the Shadow once they drove it out of Eyr.
    “The question needed an honest answer,” Sethan snapped.
    “I answered it,” Tarn said and turned to speak to Cayl. “Where are the desert animals? Where is Alagard himself?”
    “The local elemental?” Ia asked. “He’s right, Sethan—we’ve usually had a visitation by now.”
    “How do you take a resident spirit out of his desert?” Cayl wondered. “Could something be keeping him away? Some attack elsewhere in the desert?”
    “Beloved, it should be,” Tarn said. “It was before. Now the