Spirit Binder by Meghan Ciana Doidge Read Free Book Online

it, and, despite the cold, she found she didn’t have any desire to return to the endless questions and concerns. Out here with her feet solidly planted on rock that even an earthquake would have a difficult time disturbing, she didn’t feel like an endless, bottomless, questing question. Here, she could breathe, could open her arms to the wind and let it, somehow, breeze through her beleaguered brain. Here, she could lower the shields she had to constantly enforce when surrounded by so many life forces.
    Theo drifted, almost as if she was actually levitating, though her feet hadn’t left her rocky perch. A whale — an orca — breached far off shore, and its pod rhythmically followed it to the surface to then dive once again. They were singing to each other, and Theo could almost understand their language. If she pushed and intruded, she might even be able to ride their minds as they traveled south along the coast. The freedom of such beckoned, but no matter how lost she was, she wasn’t a whale. She also wasn’t an interloper.
    According to the history of the Vanquished, a great island once sat just off the main coast, but when Spirit rose to reclaim the world, it became unanchored and drifted, or was driven, away, so now the sea stretched almost endlessly to the other side of the world. Below, across the inlet that became the mouth of a mighty river, a city had grown out of the ruins left behind by the Vanquished. This port was the largest city in the NorthWest, and the second largest within her mother’s kingdom of Cascadia.  
    She opened her mind further — searching though the city and even beyond, before she even recognized it herself — for the man of her dream, whose name might be Ren, though he hadn’t told her so. In fact, she hadn’t been able to feel him at all during the dream, as if he wasn’t even there. She’d only felt his companion, the dreamwalker, who’d been powerful enough to break through the castle’s wards and project Ren into her dream, when most dreamwalkers had a difficult time presenting even a solid image of themselves. Perhaps she’d lifted the name ‘Ren’ from the dreamwalker?
    But, if Ren actually existed, he didn’t do so within the range of her mind mage powers. He was either very well shielded, beyond her reach, or a figment of her imagination.
    ∞
    They were behind her, closer than they should have been, before she felt them.
    “Think she’s trying to off herself?” a man asked, and then turned his head to spit a mouthful of something; grass, or some sort of magic herb. She lifted the answer off his thoughts. He wasn’t talking to her.
    “Nah, why wander away from the castle to do yourself in?” a second man answered.
    “Maybe they watch her too close?”
    “If they did, would they let her be here?”
    Too late, she realized her rather obvious error in leaving the protection of the castle’s wards. What had been safe as a child, was perhaps no longer so. She wasn’t certain she’d been gone long enough for anyone to notice her absence. Even if they had noticed, the castle grounds were extensive.
    “It’s her then?”
    “That hair is hard to miss, what with it flying all around like some sort of beacon. Plus the tracker thing is pointing right at her.”
    Tracker thing?
    She turned away from the cliff edge, acutely aware it didn’t feel at all comforting to have it at her back.
    They weren’t as close as they’d felt in her mind. They stood on the edge of the forest, watching her. Hunters by their garb. Days beyond a good sleep, a bath, and hot food by their general dishevelment and gaunt faces. One of them held a rock that did seem to be glowing red in her direction. He also sported a scar in the shape of an X on his cheek, which marked him a traitor.
    They were without personal magic, or ‘Lackings’ as they were commonly called, and in possession of a very expensive, very rare magical object. She could tell this just by the pulse of power the