Path Unchosen (Daughter Of Ravenswood Book 1) by Kim Cleary

Author:Kim Cleary [Cleary, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Raven's Lair Publishing
Published: 2013-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

I plummeted through the air. I snatched at twigs but they snapped off in my hands. Evie clung to me like a tightly wrapped shawl, her arms gripped around my shoulders, her face pressed into my back. We landed with a crunch on an embankment covered in frosty bracken and bilberry canes.

I gasped for a breath that wouldn’t come. Finally air sucked into my lungs. I lay still, encased in the thick ground cover that broke my fall and softened the landing. For a few moments, odors of earth and wood overpowered all my other senses.

I stretched each of my limbs carefully. Nothing felt broken, so I clambered to my feet. Evie drifted nearby, her eyes wide. Ancient gray trunks pushed silently into the sky all around us. Silvery branches reached out to one another, and frost-covered ferns drooped to the roots and undergrowth below. I could have been standing in a faded black-and-white photograph.

A deep chill spread throughout my abdomen. I pulled up a handful of the tiny white wood anemone that blanketed the forest floor.

“This is the oak forest,” I spoke slowly. “I’m not in the gray world.”

I forced myself to breathe normally again. If this was the oak forest, we couldn’t be that far from Ravenswood. No paths stood out between the trees. Moonlight cast eerie shadows between the tree trunks, and glittered off the ice and frost. The hair lifted on my neck. Was someone else here? Something else?

I spun around. Evie spun with me, but we were alone, surrounded by tree after tree.

I looked for night birds and saw none. Up above, Aymon flew in circles, but the branches almost met. There was no way he would be able to land. I had to find my way back to the house myself.

At the edge of my vision, a dark shape flitted from one tree to another, a shadow without a being that created it. My chest tightened. Something was here with us, lurking in the woods.

Evie darted her eyes to the tree. “What is it?”

“Our imaginations, most likely.” I gripped her hand and wove my way through the trees in the direction I hoped Ravenswood lay. I didn’t want to scare her any more than she already was. I needed a distraction. “Why do you think couldn’t I command Victoria? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Could she be a sorcerer like Gareth Purcell?”

“Then how has anyone kept her spirit locked into the small space upstairs?” My pulse roared in my ears. “It must have been an even stronger sorcerer.”

Evie’s gulp seemed to echo around the trees. “When I lived at the manor, Master William practiced magic. He had a laboratory downstairs.”

“What sort of magic?”

“He performed all over the country. No other magician did the same tricks.”

He probably wasn’t a necromancer then. Unless he did magic shows to distract himself from other magic he could have done. I understood anyone hiding from it. But even so, from what Evie had said before, Victoria had roamed the house more freely when she was there as a nursery maid.

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.