Destiny's Rift (Broken Well Trilogy) by Sam Bowring

Author:Sam Bowring
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780733626654
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2010-07-01T06:00:00+00:00

Duskwood

Duskwood

Duskwood

Lalenda walked through skeletal trees, bare and dead for a long time now. There wasn’t even leaf litter on the hard, barren ground. Broken trunks lay askew at various angles, some piled atop others to create brittle hills of collapsed wood. Others stood densely, grasping one another with spidery, claw-like branches. Dry lichen coated many surfaces, sending up musty grey clouds when disturbed. Grey upon grey upon grey.

She heard a twig snap, and turned. From amongst branches stared a pair of grey eyes, dry themselves, dry as the wretched face they inhabited.

Grimra swirled protectively in front of her, hissing.

She awoke.

‘Be all right, flutterbug?’ came Grimra’s voice, ghosting over the bed towards her. ‘Startling in her sleep she be?’

‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘Dreaming?’

‘Yes. You were there too.’

‘Aha. Explains why Lalenda be frightened then. Grimra be very, very scary, ho ho!’

Lalenda smiled at him – or at least, where she thought he might be.

It had been some time since any prophecy had come to her. She’d taken to wondering if her usefulness in that regard had ended. Perhaps the major prophecy she’d been born to have had been predicting for Battu where and when the blue-haired boy would be born. If that were the case, she would not have minded. Prophecy was not controllable and hadn’t exactly made her life happy. Except that without it, she wouldn’t have Losara.

Perhaps she was lucky to be a prophet after all.

‘Duskwood,’ she murmured.

‘What’s this?’ said Grimra. ‘Why speak this name?’

‘I had a vision of us in Duskwood.’

Grimra gave a low growl. ‘Nothing good be there. No rabbits to chase, no birds to snaffle. Only resting for those without rest.’

Lalenda swung her legs out of bed. Through an opening high in Losara’s chambers she could see the light of early morning. She reached for the water jug and splashed her face, careless of the drops she got on the bedding.

For all its proximity to the castle, she did not know much about Duskwood. It ran out from the mountain on which Skygrip was shaped, from the bottom of the sheer cliff on the southwards side. It was rumoured to be a place for the undead, and that thing in her vision had most certainly been undead. But Losara had told her that Battu had been charged by the Dark Gods to clean the land of such creatures, sending their souls back to the Great Well. Battu had done a half-hearted job, and left spirit creatures called the Trapped intact along the border. Was it possible he had been lax with others as well? With Battu, anything was possible.

Still, what she knew of the place did not answer the important question – why would she go there?

Maybe because a prophecy said she would.

That, in her experience, was not the way prophecy worked. Visions showed things that would come to pass; they did not cause things to come to pass. If no strange reason arose to make her go to such a place, her prophecy would be proven false.

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