The First Stone by Mark Anthony Read Free Book Online Page A

from hers. “And you know why? Because you left us.”
    “I had my reasons,” she said, her voice cool. “Did you not read the letter I left for you at Gravenfist Keep?”
    Travis let out a bitter laugh. He had read it all right, over and over, and each time it made less sense than the last. “It doesn’t matter why you did it. You went, and you took something away that we can never get back, not even now that you’ve brought Nim here. That was the choice you made, and I don’t know what you’re doing in London, or how you even got to Earth, but you can’t just walk through that door like nothing ever happened. You don’t have that right. You gave it away the night you left us without even bothering to say good-bye.”
    As he spoke, his voice had risen, and her body had grown rigid, her eyes sparking. She was
T’gol
; she could reach up and snap his neck with her bare hands before he could blink. In fact, she looked as if she wanted to do it right then. Beltan started to reach for her, but she shut her eyes and turned away, crossing her arms over her stomach.
    “I know,” she said. And again, the words soft and broken, “I know.”
    Travis wanted to harden his heart, to refuse to hear the sorrow, the regret, the anguish in her voice. Only wasn’t that what he had given up so much to fight against? Those whose hearts were made of cold iron rather than weak, mortal flesh?
    The anger drained from him like the dishwater in the sink, leaving him empty and shaking. He felt Beltan’s strong arms wrap around him, and he leaned his head on the blond man’s shoulder.
    “Maybe you’d better tell us why you’ve come,” Beltan said, the words gruff, and Vani nodded.

6.
    Ten minutes later, they sat around the kitchen table, drinking mugs of coffee Beltan had brewed. Nim was in the living room now, lying on her stomach on the floor, drawing with a pencil and some paper Beltan had found in the desk. Before heading into the kitchen, Travis had paused for a moment, watching her. The pencil seemed far too large for her fingers, but she moved it across the paper with deliberate motions, sticking out her tongue as she concentrated.
    “She seems older than three winters,” Beltan said. “She looks like five, and speaks as if she is older than that.”
    Vani wrapped her hands around her mug. “She’s always been that way. She was born after only seven moons, as if she was anxious to be out and learning about the world.” She smiled, and the expression smoothed away some of the lines from her face. “She was only six moons old when she first spoke, and then not simply a single world. I will never forget it. I was cradling her in my arms, and she said, ‘Set me down, Mother.’ I did, and she walked over to a pebble and picked it up. I’ve never seen a child speak or walk so early.”
    “I heard her,” Travis said. “When she was still in your womb, Vani. It was in Imbrifale, after you and Beltan had passed through the Void, when I spoke the rune of fire to warm you. To warm her. I heard her voice in my mind. It was so small, I thought I was just imagining it, but . . .”
    “You weren’t imagining. What did she say to you?”
    Wonder filled Travis, just as it had then. “She said, ‘Hello, Father.’ ”
    Beltan’s eyes shone, and he gripped Travis’s hand.
    There was so much Travis wanted to know, so many questions to ask—where they had been, what they had done—but before he could speak, Vani reached inside her leathers, drew out a small object, and set it on the table. It was a tetrahedron fashioned of perfect black stone.
    “The gate artifact,” Beltan said, leaning over but not touching the onyx tetrahedron. “So that’s how you reached Earth.”
    “My people have had it in their keeping these last three years,” Vani said. “I gave it to them when they came to Gravenfist Keep.”
    “Before you left,” Travis said. The words sounded harsher than he intended, but he didn’t care.
    “Yes,”