The Innocent mage by Miller Karen

Author:Miller, Karen [Miller, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-04-10T21:10:29+00:00

After a year without visions, Prophecy was back.

She'd dreamed last night of evil eyes, waiting, and a wind of fury blowing every tree in the Black Woods bare.

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Of stars bleeding scarlet as they fell from the sky, and the sound of women weeping.

The stubborn silence had continued for so long since her last vision she'd begun to doubt all that had at first felt so clear and certain. If Asher were truly the Innocent Mage, why had Prophecy abandoned her, Jervale's Heir, leaving her ignorant and blind? Where was calamity? What had happened to the Final Days? Had she been wrong after all?

Wait, Veira had counselled her. After six hundred and forty-four years, what is one more? Prophecy unfolds itself according to its own desires, child. Not ours. You were not wrong. Asher is the one, and his time will come. Wait.

So she'd waited. Waited and waited and waited, filling her days with work and her nights with schooling Asher as best she could, without revealing anything, in whatever arts and knowledge she thought might help him in the hidden days to come. And after a little while had got well used to waiting. To laughing. To his company. So that waiting had stopped feeling like waiting ... and instead began to feel like happiness.

Now at long last the waiting was over, and all she could do was long for the silence and nights empty of dreams. For after the dream that had woken her screaming into the dark, there burned in her mind a new knowledge. An understanding that here now were the Final Days, counting down to chaos. That the last year had been a kind of gestation, and bloody childbirth waited hungrily, its time almost come. The knowledge sat on her shoulder like a midnight crow, cawing and chittering its fears and foretellings into the dark secret places of her mind where there was no hiding, no kind forgetting, no respite from care.

And to think she'd hoped that maybe, just maybe, the Final Days had somehow passed them by ...

But she forbade her rediscovered weariness and fear to show in her face as she crunched garlic-roasted nuts and

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waited for Matt to return with another mug of ale. Still stuck fast in the raucous crowd he turned his head to smile at her, shoulders shrugging an apology. She smiled back, but it was an effort. Then Humperdy's music changed from gleeful laughter to a sweet, slow lament and a bracelet of fingers closed tight about her wrist.

'This be my favourite,' Asher announced, his breath

tickling her ear, stirring the wayward curls that escaped the

confinement of her practical plait. 'Dance with me, Dathne.'

She hadn't seen him come in. Before she could protest,

demur, distract or simply slap him down he'd dragged her

into the swaying, close-packed press of bodies on the

Goose's tiny excuse for a dance floor. His arms were loosely

on her, gathering her close. The smell of him was all around

her, clean and male and vaguely redolent of horse, and it

was wrong, so wrong, he wasn't for her, couldn't be for her,

there was no-one for her.

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