Kate Elliott - Crown of Stars 01 by King's Dragon

Author:King's Dragon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-12-22T12:39:08+00:00

X

THE SIN OF PRIDE

FIRES burn, thick smoke rancid with the scent of human fear. He stops, licks the air. In the tangled smell of charred wood, dead men, burning thatch, and dust kicked high by the trampling of many feet, he finds the familiar dry musky scent of his own kind—though it is not marked with the peculiar piquancy of his own litter, his own tribe, his home shore.

Beyond, the sea surges below a distant headland, soughing up more softly along the strand where the clean wooden boats lie beached. They smell of seawater and barnacles and the good strong scent of oak flavored with ash and willow.

Shouting and crashing come from the wood beyond. He darts back into a thicket. Some of the soft ones, the humans, are running; their terror and pain are sweet on his tongue, tasted from the air. But he lets them pass. Two are children, carried by a strong mother whose tears smell like the salt of the sea. He senses a new weakness in himself, brought on by his contact with Halane, Son of Henri. He thinks of OldMother, who is already beginning the slow trek up the fjall where she will take her place with the WiseMothers. She speaks of the soft mothers with scorn because they cannot bear litters with the strength and numbers of the RockChildren. But Halane had a mother such as this. He lets them run by untouched before he crawls out from the thicket and starts his descent toward his cousins.

Will these cousins greet him with peace in their hearts ? Or will they set their dogs on him?

He shrugs off these doubts. OldMother’s scent is strong on him. She promised him much before her joints began to stiffen and she passed the knife of decision to the new YoungMother. Even if these warriors are not true cousins, they will not harm one who bears this sign of favor. Nor will any dogs, of any pack, eat one who has been marked by the scent of an OldMother.

Still, though, he carries his new weakness with him as he descends through the forest. The weakness rests within him, but he also conceives of the wooden circle which hangs at his chest as the physical sign of that weakness, a tangible reminder. Other humans flee past, but he avoids them. This new weakness has taught him a lesson: The soft ones are not true people, of course, but they are a kind of people. People can talk. It is the lesson the WiseMothers teach. It is what they whispered to him when he was a half-grown pup and dared venture up the mountainside to the sacred place tended by the SwiftDaughters to see whether the WiseMothers would speak to him or else kill him for his presumption.

“The knife and the tongue are equally strong weapons.”

The WiseMothers had spoken twice, and he had always remembered.

“Face your weakness and it can become your strength.”

He steps out of the wood and into a landscape torn by wind and sea spray.

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.