The Return of Nightfall by Mickey Zucker Reichert Read Free Book Online Page A

surrendering another of his deep dark secrets. So he accepted the assignment Brandon gave him, pausing only to leave word of his whereabouts with King Edward before settling in with Byroth.
    The power of Brandon’s words clearly had a daunting effect on Byroth as well. As the room plunged into a darkness the windowless room only enhanced, he rolled and pitched on his pallet, sleepless.
    Hunkered near the door, Nightfall understood the boy’s restlessness. He fiddled with the stone in his pocket, one of Brandon’s spell-breakers. It took the Magebane months to place his natal ability into an inanimate object, during which time he could not use his talent for anything else; and each stone just worked once. Since Brandon had not preplanned this particular hunt, he had made only two since his last outing and had given one to each of his companions. “Are you all right?”
    Byroth’s voice floated out of the pitch. “Just scared, I guess. I . . . don’t want . . . to suffer like that again. You understand?”
    “I understand.” Nightfall sought movement, a shadow amidst the darkness, a wariness awakened by something he could not quite sense. “I understand. No one wants to suffer.” Preferring quiet, he added, “Try to sleep. You need as much as you can get.”
    Byroth stopped talking, but he continued to flop around on the pallet. “Maybe if you sang to me?”
    Nightfall rolled his eyes and shook his head, both movements the boy could not discern. His prostitute mother had never softened the night with lullabies, and the bawdy bar songs he knew did not seem appropriate. “I don’t sing.”
    “Oh.” Byroth slumped into a new position on the ticking. “Would you mind if I did it, then?”
    Nightfall shrugged, still trying to make out objects through the gloom. He wanted it dark enough that any sorcerer who got past Brandon would not notice him, but he would need his own vision well adjusted. “Go ahead, if you think it’ll help.”
    “Thanks.” Byroth’s thin, reedy voice floated into the cold, night air. “Hush, my darling, my sweetest babe—”
    Nightfall ignored the boy, thinking of his encounter with Byroth’s parents. They had seemed so broken, so utterly devastated by the near-loss of their son; they both clearly loved him fiercely. Nightfall had not lamented his own empty upbringing for many years: the mother who had alternately beaten and cried for him, the men who came and went, the father who could have been any one or none of them. The bond between man and daughter is sacred; but the son, the son, is his true reflection. Nightfall was once the true reflection of the men to whom his mother had sold her body, including the one who had battered her to death. Now, he had found a way beyond the poet philosopher’s claim. How much better have Byroth and his father fared?
    It was a question that needed no answer. Nightfall found himself trapped in recollection, the world fading into a dark void around him. His watchfulness withered, replaced by a mental world where word and sound came only from within. Nothing, nothing on this fair earth is precisely as it seems. The placid plow horse, the deadly mosquito growing on a crystal pond. In the world of the dreamer, nonsense can become a statement of vivid brilliance. Nothing is what is seems.
    Suddenly, Nightfall understood. He closed his hand over the stone Brandon had given him. His fingers tightened with awkward slowness, seeking the laxity of sleep. He felt his head sagging, heavy as lead; and the welcoming darkness erased the significance from all but his dreamworld thoughts. But those focused him well enough. A wholly mental pursuit, he called on his talent to overcome the heavy inertia magical fatigue forced upon him, driving down his weight to a sliver of normal. Lighter than feathers, his fingers obeyed him. He drew out the stone, which now seemed more like a boulder, and hurled it toward the boy. It cut a glowing scarlet arc through the air.
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