Spirit of the Wood by Kristen Britain

Author:Kristen Britain [Britain, Kristen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: no data
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

THE DARKEST DARK

Tavin spent the remainder of the day collecting and chopping wood, repairing a paddock fence rail, reading, and keeping an eye on the still-sleeping lieutenant. Cautiously he lowered his shields but sensed no more from her than somnolence. He guessed the infection and fever had so exhausted her body and mind that even her nightmares had gone dormant.

As night fell, he checked on the horses one last time and brought more water from the spring into the cabin for drinking and the soothing of fevers. When he was done, he spread out his blankets between the bed and the fireplace and lay down. He hoped for an uneventful night.

It was not. At some point past midnight, he was awakened by a disturbance. It wasn’t the lieutenant’s emotional emanations leaking through his light shields that awakened him. Cool night air stirred across the cabin’s floor. The door creaked. It stood ajar.

“What? Lieutenant?” He sat up trying to jog his groggy head to wakefulness. When he peeled away his shields, his awareness of her was more distant than it ought to have been. The glow of the fire’s embers revealed the bed was empty.

“Damnation.” He stumbled out of the cabin. “Lieutenant?”

Moon and starlight mottled the cabin clearing. All was quiet, but her desire for vengeance filled his mind; her desire to kill those who had murdered her Sam. Clumsily he received her emotions and discharged them, and attempted to send calm, while urgently trying to see where she had gone.

Eventually he found her on the edge of the clearing about to step through the wards, her bare skin alabaster in the glow of the moon, her hair gone red-gold. The blade of her saber gleamed in her hand. He blinked as though it were a dream, for she seemed fey, a mystical fairy of old tales come to life as she stood on the edge of the forest knee-deep in ferns that nodded in nocturnal air currents, clumps of moss underfoot.

His fancy did not last long, however, for her sword slipped from her fingers and she crumpled to the ground. He ran to where she lay curled amid the ferns in a pool of moonlight and gathered her into his arms. Her skin was hot with fever.

“You should not be up and about,” he gently chided her.

“They killed him, they killed Sam.”

Crystalline tears beaded on her cheeks, but he felt only her iron will.

“Lieutenant,” he said, “you killed them, the Raiders. You killed them all.”

He hadn’t been a Green Rider when she led them to victory over the Darrow Raiders. He’d heard veiled comments about how that campaign had changed her, had changed them all. It seemed Queen Isen believed the Riders could do the job no one else seemed able to. He’d also heard that the final battle had not been a battle at all. The lieutenant had ordered the source of the Raiders’ drinking water poisoned, and those who did not succumb to the poison were slaughtered even as they lay sick on the ground.

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.