Valley of Embers (The Landkist Saga Book 1) by Steven Kelliher Read Free Book Online Page A

know?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Was it the Night Lord?”
    “Tu’Ren says it wasn’t a Night Lord—not a true one, at any rate.”
    Iyana just looked at him.
    “It’s just a feeling, Iyana,” he said, standing and stretching. “And dreams.”
    “Your dreams are as vivid as Ninyeva’s sometimes,” Iyana sounded concerned.
    “Don’t let it worry you.”
    “It worries you.”
    Kole was silent.
    “Some hold Jenk Ganmeer up as the future hero of our people,” Iyana said. “There are whispers that he will lead us out of the Valley and back into the deserts to reclaim our lands.”
    Kole looked at her, his expression unreadable.
    “But those who count know that it’s you, Kole. Why do you think Ninyeva is allowing you to go where no other has since—
    “Since my mother,” Kole finished, and Iyana fell silent.
    Kole thought to tell her he was sorry, or that he knew she was. Instead, he said nothing.
    “Thank you for the drink.”
    He left, feeling those green eyes on his back long after he’d rounded the bend.

    Linn had not gone north after all. Instead, she took a circuitous route through Eastlake. Her watch did not begin for a few hours and she would not be missed as sorely as one of the Keepers.
    Sunrise in the Dark Months was always slow in coming. It painted the stones in the road pink and orange, like coals left on the edge of a fire. The sun would barely rise above the lake, its path more horizontal than vertical as it skirted the edge of the horizon before disappearing a few hours hence, leaving them stranded in darkness once again.
    She turned west, taking a path through the squat homes that ran parallel to the shore. From her vantage, she could see the salt water calm as mirrored glass all the way to the jagged spine of obsidian that broke its surface in the center. Though Last Lake was in the south of the Valley, she felt that she could hit one of the Sage’s peaks in the north with a well-placed shaft on a clear day. Looking south, over the obsidian spires, she could make out only the faintest outlines of the ridges that separated the lake from the mother ocean that ringed it, the salt tunnels breathing like dragons beneath the surface of water and rock.
    Westlake sat on a hill, which was sheltered by a shelf of gray stone that might have been the child of some ancient peak now fallen down. The weak sun rarely marked the roads clearly up here, so lanterns lit her way.
    Linn always focused on her surroundings when her mind was troubled. She saw everything except for what she did not want to see. Sometimes she wished she knew her mind as well as she knew the details of each branch in the woods before the wall. She wondered if Kole knew it better. She did not have to wonder if Iyana did.
    Though she was not sentimental, Linn’s mind wandered this morning. She remembered her moonlit hunt with Kole. She remembered their first faux hunts as children, and then a little older, when they had changed from pretend to real and ended with killing. They had discovered more after that first hunt, lying in the moss by the river after washing. But it seemed those days were behind them.
    They were memories so pure as to be agonizing, and her fondness for them scared her so much that she had hidden them away. She wondered if they both had, and if it was best that way. Still, they cared for each other deeper than knowing.
    It was a sad thing that killing had first brought her and Kole together, and it was killing that bound them together now. It was killing out of necessity, but she envied those in the Valley that found ways to avoid it. She passed them on the streets and they thanked her for it with their looks and glances—thanked her for taking the bloody burden. A part of her hated them for it, but it was a small part. It was the part of her that railed silently against the world, and the part she had buried beneath the same hill as her parents.
    The truth was that she and Kole knew each other better in those