The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

leaned close, eyes slitted with temper. ‘Your job is to do what I tell you and see that all runs as it should. What we’re about here is worth a hundred Ballodairs, and our lives besides, and hating me for saying so doesn’t change it. So you’d best make up that flitterbug mind of yours once and for all whether you can stomach the task or not. I can’t do my part without a second pair of hands I can trust. If they’re not to be yours then I need to tell Veira so she can find me another.’
    Stricken silent, Matt looked down. Around him the room heaved with laughter and eating and generous drinking. His friends, for the most part, folk he’d known half his life and longer. Simple, hardworking Olken, blissfully ignorant of the secrets he’d kept for nearly ten years. Good people who were set to suffer and die if he and Dathne and the others of the Circle failed. His stomach rolled over, thinking on it, and the room disappeared in a blur of anguish.
    Cool strong fingers on his wrist brought him back.
    ‘Jervale’s Prophecy is fulfilled, my friend,’ said Dat.
    The sharp edges were gone from her voice: she sounded tired and not like herself. ‘The Innocent Mage is coi
    . and we stand at the beginning of the end of everything know you hoped the Final Days would pass you by, that folk called after us would be the ones to face the fire, that hope’s dead and buried now. Digging it up and crying fresh tears on it won’t change the truth. Like it or not. Matt, you and I are the ones born to the days Jerva foretold.’
    ‘How long have you known?’ ‘Long enough.’
    ‘And you’re sure?’ he whispered. ‘There’s no doubt? No chance you might be mistaken?’
    She shook her head. ‘Visions don’t lie.’ ‘They might.’
    ‘That’s fear talking. Strangle it before it leads us all to disaster.’
    Matt winced as his guts cramped. ‘You may be Jervale’s Heir, Dathne, but that doesn’t make you perfect. You could be wrong!’
    ‘I could be, but I’m not. I was three days short of my tenth birthday the first time I dreamed Asher’s face. The next afternoon I was told some cousin I’d never met had died overnight and it was my duty to take his place as Jervale’s Heir. And then I was told what that meant. I haven’t had an easy night’s sleep since.’
    There was pain in her, fiercely denied. Matt wanted to reach out, to touch her, comfort her, but he didn’t dare. Something deep and dark and implacably cold inside her stopped him. He felt his heart break. ‘Dathne …’
    Her chin came up, and in her eyes glittered a scornful self-derision. She mocked her own pain, even as she mocked his pain for her. ‘Since that first time I’ve dreamed Asher… oh, more times than I dare think of. Him, and other things,’
    ‘What things?’
    ‘Things,’ she said, and shivered. ‘They’re not important now.’
    ‘I say they are. I want to know.’
    Hollow-eyed and direly foreboding, she stared at him. ‘No, Matt. You truly don’t.’
    He had to persuade her. She shouldn’t have to bear this burden alone. ‘Tell me. Please. I’ve got broad shoulders, Dathne. I can help. Even the best of us make mistakes when we’re tired. Sad. Besieged.’
    ‘Not me. I’m never wrong, Matt. Not about this. Call my dreams visions, call them warnings, call them echoes of Prophecy. It’s all just words, whipped to nothingness on the wind. I am Jervale’s Heir and I know. Asher is the Innocent Mage. The Final Days are coming. And I am the last living of Jervale’s descendants, born to guide our ignorant fisherman to victory … or fail, and doom our world to death and despair.’
    His chest was so tight he could hardly breathe. ‘And me? What am I?’
    She looked away, frowning. ‘My compass. My anchor. My candle in the dark.’
    Warmed and angered at once, he lowered his voice. ‘Then if I’m all those things, why did you never tell me any of this when we met? Barl save us all, Dathne, I could’ve done more, I