A Blade of Black Steel by Alex Marshall

Author:Alex Marshall
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction / Action & Adventure, Fiction / Fantasy / Historical, Fiction / Fantasy / Epic
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2016-05-24T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

8

The sun fled from Best, the Bright Watcher hiding in the wiregrass to the west and pulling down the cloak of her sister Silvereye to cover her trail. Many years ago, when a young Father Turisa and the old poison oracle had first convened in the Honor Circle, they had wrestled on the ground for hours, hissing back and forth as though they were mating frost vipers, and when they had finally separated the oracle announced through split lips that the sun was in fact but an aspect of the Deceiver, and the moon a manifestation of the Fallen Mother… but Best couldn’t stop herself from thinking of them by their ancestral names. It had been easier when only Silvereye was associated with the Allmother, but the new poison oracle had proved more receptive to Father Turisa’s wisdom than her predecessor had been, and so a dozen more ancestors in as many years had revealed themselves to be but different incarnations of the Fallen Mother. This led to much confusion if one didn’t slip into the old titles when discussing a hunt, a song, or most anything at all, up to and including the weather.

And what weather it was, Best sweating through her thinnest skins despite the looming winter solstice, and it only got warmer the farther south they went. She marched on through the muggy, thickening dark, Brother Rýt trailing a distance behind her. They moved across the Samothan borderlands toward the point where the Bright Watcher had burrowed into the earth—Best’s wicked kinfolk had bewitched the sun to burn up the Frozen Savannahs, and so if they followed the sun they would find her family. Thus spoke the poison oracle, and Father Turisa had not gainsaid the wisdom; Diadem also lay west of Flintland, so all roads pursued the sun.

As the barleywine-dark fringe of Silvereye’s star-studded cloak slipped around the rim of the world, Best stopped, waiting. This was how she and Brother Rýt had traveled all the way across the Frozen Savannahs and down through the Raptor Wood, she walking and he seeming to limp on both legs, until she got so far ahead that she had to stop or risk the boy losing her trail. He could not hunt any better than he could walk, and did not appear to be much of a warrior, either, and would not have lasted long by himself… which must be why the Fallen Mother had braided their paths together. Leading this daft pup around reminded her a touch of rearing Sullen, back when the boy was four or five.

As she waited for the monk, she thought back to the Flywalk over the Agharthan Gorge, in particular the picture stone the Horned Wolves had erected on their side of the bridge over the summer. The engraved face of the limestone marker showed the outline of a four-armed monster harried by hunters, corpses splayed beneath the fiend’s feet. That her ignoble brother had long ago disgraced the clan twice over had appalled Best, yes, but it had not stunned her the way Sullen and her father had.

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