The House of Sacrifice by Anna Smith-Spark

Author:Anna Smith-Spark
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2019-06-04T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-One

Landra Relast, the vengeance demon, who will destroy all who serve him

The White Isles, the island kingdom of the Altrersyr the descendants of Amrath and Eltheia, the dragon kin, the demon born. Her home

There was the headland. There, the grey rocks, a tiny smudge on the horizon, grey against the grey of the sky. Only her eyes deceiving her, and she stared, her eyes watering with the effort, and it was real, the cliffs of Fealene Isle the most northern of the White Isles, bare winter woods at their heights, and there, to the west, surely, that must be Morn with the smaller islets behind it, ‘the sow and the piglets’, small islands off Fealene Isle’s coast. Ah, Eltheia, you are merciful, to let me see my homeland again. And yet, Landra thought, all I can bring here is death. Thus am I punished for everything I have done and failed to do.

They had followed the ragged coast of Illyr, the blank coast of the Wastes, around the long spits of land that the sailors called the Blades, all of it almost as new and unknown to the sailors as to Landra, ‘the fourth time,’ they said, ‘the fourth time we’ve made this journey,’ ‘my father,’ one of them said, ‘he refuses to believe I have sailed to Illyr, says I’m joking with him.’ The tracks of the water, even the stars, were new to them. Making a new road across the water: it was true, as the fishermen had said, that the sea creatures came up to the ship out of curiosity, fish in vast numbers visible as patches of darkness beneath the surface, dolphins and whales nosing up in the ship’s wake. For the first few days, many seals seemed to follow the ship.

Landra slept on the deck, wrapped in her cloak, the spray soaking into the cloth around her head, making her scalp itch. In the day she stood and watched the coastline spooling out. Saw Marith’s death in her mind over and over. Smiled at it and grieved at it. Wondered what would be happening in the great expanse of his empire. How long the news would take to spread. It could take years, she thought, for the certainty of his death to reach the far ends of his empire. Men could go on for long months, for years, thinking themselves his subjects, praising him and worshipping him. An impossibility and a certainty, that a war leader will one day be brought down by war. In the White Isles, even now, people would be sitting talking in smug satisfaction of their mastery over the world as a certain unarguable thing. She thought then of course of Ethalden, the silver tower falling, breaking – how many of them are left alive there, she wondered sometimes. Did all that live there die? Did any of them escape? The innkeep’s son, the boy in the harbourside inn’s stables, the man who had sold her the blanket. Are they

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.