The Blood Ladders Box Set, Books 1-3 by M.C.A. Hogarth

Author:M.C.A. Hogarth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M.C.A. Hogarth

In the morning, Almond slipped into the room and woke me with her nuzzle, damp nose to cheek. “Master,” she whispered. “The others are stirring.”

Ivy opened sleepy eyes and stiffened, then relaxed at the sight of the genet. I merely leaned to kiss between the two earnest lilac eyes and said, “Thank you, Almond. We’ll rise now.”

By the time one of the Vessel’s priests arrived to summon us to our breakfast, we were both presentable, though the look in Ivy’s eye when she met mine boded poorly for anyone who would take issue with the intimacy she plainly did not plan to hide. I thought it a lost cause myself. Having touched her, I felt as if some part of her remained in me still… I could sense her clearly from across the room, and half-felt we were breathing in tandem.

Concealing it was also plainly useless because somehow it was written all over my body. Guy had one look at me and grinned. “Good night, eh?”

“Very good,” I said, with what I hoped was some dignity.

Chester hid a smile behind a hand. Radburn sniffed—was he offended? I couldn’t tell.

Eyre merely clasped my shoulder and pointed me at the table. “Eat, my student. I sense this may be the last formal table we use between now and Vigil.”

The food was plain but I could taste the world in it: the sun coaxing the sap through the maples, the freshness of the soil nourishing the oats, the taste of the grass in the milk and the butter. I grew drunk on it, spilling my soul into everything around me, until I swayed and Last was forced to steady me and murmur, “Lord Locke. Do not lose yourself.”

Fortunately, no one else had noted my lapse, and I applied myself to eating the food rather than soaking through it into the world. My exertions the previous evening had given me a good appetite, at least.

When they were bringing our mounts around, I asked Last what it signified, my episode over the porridge. He said, quiet, “You have the prince-gifts.”

“I thought I was bound by the immortality enchantment, as all elves are.”

“You are. But a man powerful enough to inherit the royal gifts usually has some power past Dissipation. You may be coming into yours, now that you’ve been released from your human seeming.”

I pondered that, watching the Vessel and her knights as they brought their mounts from the stables and began packing them with the gifts offered by Saintly’s high priest. “I feel no different.”

“You may not, if the worldsense is drawing all the well has to give,” Last said. “But the worldsense can be a great power on its own. Do not dismiss it.”

I closed my eyes, sensing the weight of human presence defining the circumference of Saintly by the pressure it exerted on the soil... reached past it to feel the sore of the ancient battlefield toward which we journeyed. I tasted autumn in the slowing of the vital earth, and it had a bouquet like wine I could feel on my tongue, in my blood.

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