Of Sand and Snow (The Wings of War Book 5) by Bryce O'Connor

Author:Bryce O'Connor [O'Connor, Bryce]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2019-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

XXV

“Being taken for a fool is, in-and-of-itself, nothing less than a distinct advantage in any circle. Let them think you the village idiot. People are so much quicker to make mistakes in your presence when they underestimate the function of your faculties… “

— private journal of Vyres Eh’ben, Karthian šef

Adrion felt his heart sink ominously, and his left arm—whose shoulder Lazura’s hand had so casually been resting upon—suddenly began to prickle as the woman’s grip spasmed and dug into his skin.

“What did you just say?” Lazura hissed down the dais stairs, her voice dangerously low. For once—and despite his own trepidation—Adrion couldn’t blame her fury.

The pair standing below them, looking with uncertainty from Lazura to him and back again, had not come bearing good news.

Geal Hareth and Evangalyn Thesus were dirty, sweaty, and clearly exhausted. The Cyroan šef had passed through Miropa’s eastern gate not a half-hour before, and Adrion—on Lazura’s orders, of course—had summoned them to the marble audience chamber of his home at once. It was concerning enough that they’d reached the city more than a week later than Ysera Ma’het had said to anticipate their arrival.

It was far more alarming that the pair arrived at the head of less than half the reinforcements Cyro had promised to deliver.

“Yres Ma’het is missing,” Geal Hareth repeated slowly, the accent of the Southern Cities thick across his words. “Likely dead. It was his intention to traverse the Crags, after we reached them, with the expectation of cutting several days off of the journey. Evangalyn and I—” he indicated the old Southern woman at his side, who hadn’t even been allowed a chair to sit in “—attempted to dissuade him, but there was no doing so. He led five thousand of our number into the mountains.”

“And never came back down…” Lazura finished for the man, and Adrion felt the prickling intensify to the point of pain throughout his arm.

Hareth nodded, eyes narrowed at the Northerner, taking in her paper-thin silks with something between distaste and lust. He and Thesus were the newest to join their gathering, and Adrion hadn’t had time to give them the subtle warnings he’d woven into the meetings they’d had with the other šef.

He had a bad feeling as to how this audience would end…

“You sent men into the mountains, I assume?” Adrion asked, hoping to defuse a little of the tension. Hareth blinked, and the man’s pale eyes fell to him from beneath bangs of wild red hair, his expression becoming inscrutable. Adrion didn’t mind. He was accustomed to being assessed at a glance, given his missing left leg, but he was confident by now that the Citier would have heard enough about his “reputation” to keep a civil tongue with him, at the very least.

“We did,” the šef answered promptly. “When we found no indication that Yres had marched ahead of us, we deployed a dozen scouts into the ranges. We waited more than five days for word from them.”

“And?” Lazura demanded in an impatient hiss, earning herself Hareth’s attention once again.

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.