Birthright Read Free

nibbling on her lower lip.
    Unsure if it was just desire for the mage that flared through her veins or a combination of relief and desire, she pulled back after a moment. He let her go with a touch of reluctance, but didn’t try to cling. Well, not exactly; he left his hands resting on her waist. Licking her lips, Arasa hoped the light from the kitchen wasn’t bright enough to point out the flushing of her cheeks. “As I said…thank you.”
    “May I at least know the problem I solved for you?”
    Arasa cocked her head. “Are you trustworthy? Because otherwise, I’m not going to reveal any of my secrets. They’re my own business, after all.”
    Releasing her so he could dig into his satchel, he fished out the Truth Stone again. “I am not inclined to give away secrets for gossip or money. Which means I’m mostly trustworthy. Provided the secret isn’t something that would threaten to harm me, of course.” A display of the stone showed that his words were true; conditional, but true. Elrik slipped the piece of marble back into his bag. “So, are you going to tell me?”
    She did owe him for helping her solve the riddle. “I have a problem. I have to figure out who was born first, my twin sister or me, so that we can settle a family dispute. Our father said we had to come back with proof, otherwise he couldn’t assign our inheritance to the right daughter. She went off in one direction, and I went in another.”
    “How so?” Elrik asked, leaning back against the wall again.
    Arasa shrugged. “Her research led her into the laws of the Empire, mine into its customs and legends. I don’t know what she found, if anything, but I found a reference to a situation wherein the inheritor acquired the legacy by making a pilgrimage from ‘the Womb to the Heart,’ to quote the old text. I guessed ‘the Heart’ meant the Heart of the Empire, the capital city of Adanjé-nal, but the term Womb isn’t used in the Flame Sea to describe anything anymore. It might’ve been used back at the beginning, but the definition had been lost somewhere along the way. So I started traveling, hoping that I’d find a reference in records kept elsewhere…and that’s when I heard about a ‘Womb of Tarden,’ while I was traveling through the Kumré region, here, albeit in a town lower down the slopes of the Frost Wall than this…place.”
    “The edge of civilization?” the mage quipped, humor in his tone. “Yes, it would make sense for the Womb in question to be found in Ijesh, chief temple-city of the Empire, if it deals with a matter of Imperial custom and law. I’ve never been there, but I understand it’s a long way from here.”
    “About three hundred sixty selijm from here, yes. That’s over a month’s journey on foot, though it’s only three or so weeks on horseback. I’m very glad I won’t have to walk all the way from the temple of Tarden, which would be even farther away,” she admitted candidly, relief in her voice. “As it is, Ijesh is a day’s walk from Adanjé-nal. Even to make that much of a pilgrimage is going to be a literal pain in the foot. I honestly didn’t know how I’d be able to walk across the whole length of the Inner Desert, but I knew I had to try.”
    “You don’t look sedentary,” Elrik observed dryly. “How do you get around, if you don’t walk?”
    “To make a pilgrimage,” Arasa enlightened him, “one must walk barefoot and weaponless. That much of the instructions were clear. For all the Heart of the Empire is in hard-desert, there are still patches of softer soil…and that means sand-demons.”
    “ Weaponless? In sand-demon territory?” he scoffed. “Who came up with that stupid rule? Barefoot is idiotic enough!”
    “According to the legends, Djin-Taje-ul, Herself. Mother of Creation. Since it’s the only way I’ve found to resolve the issue, I’ll just have to figure a way around that part…so long as I do it barefoot and weaponlessly, of course,” she