Godspeaker by Tessa Crowley

Author:Tessa Crowley [Crowley, Tessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780692710807
Published: 2016-05-24T22:00:00+00:00

Not only did I not sleep that night, I seemed to stop sleeping entirely.

I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. Apparently the number of people I could watch be ripped to shreds before I started losing sleep was somewhere between two and four.

Everything we didn’t say about what happened could have filled up the palace library a thousand times over. I could see the conflict on their faces. Soya wanted to interrogate me, Perenor wanted to leave it alone.

“I thought of something,” he said one morning, as we were setting up camp after a long day’s trek. The dryness of the ground was slowly turning to forest-dappled plains by then, and Soya’s trips to find firewood were getting longer, dryer brush getting harder to find.

I looked sideways at him. I was exhausted, and felt like I could barely see him.

“You said you wanted me to teach you defensive Craft,” Perenor said. “Assuming you’re as quick a study as you say you are, I think I might be able to.”

He sat down next to me and started to rummage through his pack.

“Normally, using Craft is borderline impossible without a channeler,” he said, “but then I remembered that I—”

“W-w-wait, stop.” Craft parlance was always lost on me. “Channeler?”

“Like my staff,” Perenor said. “Something, usually a weapon, carved with runes so Craft can be channeled through it more easily.”

“Oh.” I supposed there was quite a lot of theory that I was missing.

Perenor kept rummaging through his pack. “Anyway, a real runed weapon would take months to make and would cost more gold to buy than we have on hand at present. And besides, if I gave you a real runed weapon, you’d probably blow yourself up.”

“Thanks,” I said flatly.

“But then I remembered that – ah!”

He found what he was looking for at the very bottom of his bag. When he pulled it out, I didn’t know what it was at first – some sort of piece of leather. When he stretched it out, I recognized it as—

“A g-g-glove?”

“A runed glove,” he corrected. “It’s my old training glove. Much safer than a weapon, still lets you channel Craft.

He offered it to me. It was long and thick black leather, meant to reach the elbow. Runes were stitched into the underside with silver thread, along where the palm and wrist were and extending down the arm.

“Wh-wh-what makes this s-s-safer?”

“Well, for one, it’s not a weapon,” he answered. I experimentally tugged the glove on. The fingers were a bit short, and the fit a bit loose, but the leather was well worn and comfortable and it flexed easily. “And the runes are fewer, meaning that the scope and power of the Craft it can channel is reduced.”

“S-s-so you can t-train me with this,” I said, looking up at him.

“Well, not properly,” Perenor answered. “Not comprehensively. But I think I might be able to teach you the absolute basics.”

“I sh-sh-shouldn’t think I’d n-n-need to b-be a scholar in it,” I said. I extended my newly gloved hand out toward the half-assembled fire.

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.