Traitor of Redwinter by Ed McDonald

Author:Ed McDonald [McDonald, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

* * *

I sat on my bed with my knees tucked up to my chin, wrapped in a winter cloak that had seen better days. It was cold down there. Cold, dark, and the right kind of place to be alone with my thoughts. Except I wasn’t alone. I never knew if I was alone or not those days.

‘You’re troubled.’

The Queen of Feathers. Somehow I’d known that she’d find me that night. That she’d come to me and give me her maddening, cryptic, less-help-than-nothing advice. She had a faint bluish glow to her in the darkness, wisps of vapor coiling from her shoulders and the train of her dress like steam. Her face was narrow, her eyes deep set. Her hair fell like a violent waterfall over a fox-fur collar. She was not always the same. Not in appearance, at least.

‘The times are troubling,’ I said.

‘They always are. It is time you tested what you have learned from the book.’

‘Why do you do this to me?’ I asked resignedly. ‘You appear, you disappear, you give advice, you get mad at me. You help, you berate me. I don’t understand the point of you.’

‘Haven’t you just described everyone in your life?’ the Queen of Feathers said with a smile. ‘People are people. They come, they go. The ones who have any value are seldom constant in that regard.’

‘It’s all just philosophy and riddles,’ I said angrily. I pressed my forehead against my knees. I had been reading the book. And something had clicked that night. It was a memory of what I had seen on Robilar’s hilltop. The symbols had floated around Alianna, and I’d forgotten them quickly—just a little of Robilar’s memory, some ninety years ago. But then that night I’d been poring over the page the book had wished to show me and it had fallen into place. The symbols I’d seen in that dreamscape hadn’t been accurate, Robilar had remembered them incorrectly because they were missing certain threads. Robilar had no grave-sight; she saw only the physical manifestation of the power, she didn’t see the strands of souls woven together like rope that formed the interweaving links.

I had begun to understand now. The missing parts, the parts that had been blocking me from grasping what the book was trying to show me. Only half of the diagrams existed in our world, the rest of them were spun from gossamer threads of spirit.

The new knowledge ran around the inside of my skull like a mouse trapped in a bowl, because I understood the incantation I had been reading. It wasn’t just curiosity anymore. By taking in the knowledge, by understanding what was written there, I had made it a part of me.

The spell was called Soul Reaper. It was brutal, and it was awful. I wished that I didn’t know.

‘Can you take it away?’ I asked quietly.

‘Take what away?’

‘The book,’ I said. ‘I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want to learn anything more from it. What it teaches—it’s an abomination.

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