Dust and Light by Carol Berg

Author:Carol Berg [Berg, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-21T04:00:00+00:00

PART III

THE WAKING STORM

CHAPTER 21

“Scarce a shadow.” Bastien stuck his head through the door of my prison studio. “I thought now you knew, you might manage it every time. Vanishing could be a most useful skill.”

“It would,” I said, examining the portrait of my latest subject, my third of the day.

The bony, gray-skinned young woman lay peaceably on the bier. It was difficult to resist pulling up my shirt to ensure no one had slashed open my gut. The portrait explained the truth of her . . . her emaciated hand laid over a belly swollen with child. Someone had cut the babe out of her. Murder? Necessity? My magic couldn’t tell us—nor whether the child lived.

The coroner took the drawing from my hand. “Requiring a corpse at hand whenever you wanted to vanish could be an inconvenience, though.”

“Whatever makes it happen, it’s not sketching the dead.” I dragged the sheet over the woman’s lifeless features. “In the Tower cellar, I was using only my bent for history. Today, I’ve called on each bent alone and both together.”

“I’ve one more interesting subject for you; then we’d best figure out how to burgle the temple.” Bastien didn’t wait for my agreement before the door slammed shut behind him.

We had decided to learn what we could of my vanishings and the child murderer in these few days before Prince Perryn visited the Registry. We both knew my chances of returning from a venture into the Tower portrait gallery were tenuous at best. Perhaps I could learn to vanish from in front of a captor—and not return to the same place.

I hobbled over to the window, chewing the dates Constance had left in the laver. Rain again today. Spring had arrived and Caton was awash in mud. A full-loaded deadcart had bogged down in the east gate, blocking the road all morning. Constance was screeching at her laborers to empty it. My windows displayed a distant sliver of hillside free of snow. Unfortunately it wasn’t green, either. Mud meant no planting.

Juli detested rain. “Snow is perfection,” she’d once said. “It hides ugliness. Rain just turns the world to muck.”

How I would love to tell Juli of the Danae. My little sister’s dark eyes had ever gleamed huge in the candlelight as our grandmother spun tales of naked dancers in the moonlight, of blue-flame bog lights ready to lure the unwary traveler to his death, of the beautiful young man enamored of a Dané, dissolving as he followed her to her lair in the Western sea, nevermore to walk the earth. Were the guardians of the earth real? Every time I considered what I’d seen, my breath caught in wonder. Perhaps Juli’s sharp mind could help me learn what all this meant.

What have they done with you, serena? I should have been able to protect you. Instead I sent you into the lion’s mouth.

The scrap of parchment sent to save us from the fire lay on the plank alongside my drawings of the morning. I had examined it at first light—before we’d begun this futile experiment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.