Paths of Alir by Melissa McPhail

Author:Melissa McPhail [McPhail, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Epic
ISBN: 9780990629115
Google: eQvpoAEACAAJ
Amazon: 0990629112
Publisher: Five Strands Publishing
Published: 2014-09-29T18:30:00+00:00

Thirty-Four

“We all have within us the potential to be gods.”

– The Fifth Vestal Björn van Gelderan

Ean spent the rest of the night with Dareios until the man himself sought sleep a couple of hours before dawn. Then the prince walked the palace halls in silence and darkness, embroiled in thoughts far darker still. He eventually found his way back to the courtyard.

The sand lay damp and silvery beneath a clearing sky just shy of daybreak. Ean slipped out of his shoes and walked to the middle of the court. He looked up at the stars and let the night’s lingering chill drain the emotion from his limbs. He stood there for a long time.

Eventually he wandered the court tracing lines in the damp, heavy sand with his bare feet. He didn’t recall when he began walking through the cortata. The Adept dance of swords merely came upon him as a natural course, the way a man will sometimes hum as he walks or works, hardly aware of the tune he casts into the day, yet kept company by the sound. So did the cortata comfort Ean as might an old friend, easing his thoughts—indeed, erasing all thought beyond the motion required in the dance, his entire mind focused on carving the cortata’s pattern through position and movement and line of limb.

Day broke upon the world. The sky brightened to rose-gold, and the clear morning brought a still, cool calm, one mirrored in Ean’s mind as he finished the cortata sequence for the fourth time and started anew. His feet followed channels through the sand now, each time passing in the same sweep or curve, carving the trough deeper. It pleased him to move with slow precision, to know he formed each angle of the pattern perfectly in every moment.

As his mind had begun to settle, Ean realized that he’d long depended on this dance to clear his head. Arion had worked the cortata thousands of times, perhaps in the tens of thousands, and had counted upon it not merely in battle but to vanish any thought that lingered against his will. No wonder the motions were so second-nature to Ean—he could’ve done it blindfolded and backwards.

As the sky lightened to blue, Ean became vaguely aware of people walking beneath the colonnades bordering his cloister—servants, adjutants, women draped in colorful, flowing silks—but none of them disturbed his concentration. He’d gained such focus that he could move through each position perfectly and still perceive the happenings in the world around him. He felt distant from his body, as if his mind had wandered into the far heavens and now extended all the way to the dome of the horizon in every direction.

When he finished his fifth pass through the sequence and lowered his arms, applause floated to him from the colonnade, and he turned to see three women in colorful saris clapping their hands, dark eyes smiling beneath the jewel-encrusted chaadars that covered their hair. He smiled and bowed, recognizing Dareios’s two sisters standing with another woman he didn’t know.

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.