Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2 Read Free

light on where they had ended up. He had quietly and respectfully explained that he had not one clue where they were in the swamp nor the distance to the end. As a ‘rare items acquirer for the wealthy’, Ezekiel’s explorations had taken him to various parts of the empire, but never had he wandered into these lands.
    Neither Sara nor Captain Simon had bothered asking why he’d overlooked this part of the empire. They had only to look around at the miasma of heat and wet to see why. This place was like living in someone’s armpit. In addition, Sara hadn’t seen any sign of intelligent life living in the swamp, neither human nor even kith , and the stench of the place was worse than her underclothes after a fortnight on the march.  She had to wonder what in the seven hells a swamp was doing smack-dab in the middle of what was supposed to be the most bountiful farmland in the empire.
    However it came to be here, Sara thought with a weary wipe of her brow, The temperatures are going to make me weep for a mug of cold water from home.
    Sara remembered asking a builder about how the swamp had come to be here. He was a mercenary assigned the sole tasks of maintaining the long-abandoned war machines and the roads their mercenary core traveled on and so if anyone would have known the answer, he would have. His face had been a curtain of sweat as he quietly said, “Magic. Magic is all it is. This civil war is less than a decade old and the mages are changing the very fabric of the landscape. Mark my words, Algardis will never be the same. Never look the same after this is done.”
    Sara had wondered what he had meant then. But when she had questioned further, he had just wandered off muttering about mold on the spokes of his carriage wheels and rust lining his cannon casings. Sara would be the first to admit she didn’t know much about taking care of machinery, but she knew weapons and a dank swamp didn’t belong anywhere near the empire’s most fertile fields.
    “These lands are supposed to be filled with fields of golden wheat and brown barley for as far as the eye can see,” she muttered distastefully as she eyed a frog-like creature that gazed right back at her with two of its three eyes; the last one tracked on an insect she couldn’t see.
    As Ezekiel had nodded in understanding and given the captain his somewhat-sincere apologies that he couldn’t help, after all, he was stuck here— too—and if the captain was lost, so were they all, he kept a tight grip on Sara’s left wrist. Because she wasn’t thinking of pleasantries or even giving the man who had brought them here a sympathetic look. No, Sara knew and Ezekiel knew, that she was very likely to bring up her clenched fist in a swift left hook, being ambidextrous had its benefits after all, and clock the captain straight into his nose. She hoped her fist broke the captain’s fine, patrician nose too. It would serve him right.
    Sara couldn’t abide incompetents any more than she could evil-doers. This captain, in her mind’s eye, was a lot of one and a slight bit of the other. A person had to have a little bit of evil in them to blithely make the decision to leave his mercenaries in the path of an assault like sitting ducks while he took cover. Sara’s left wrist had ached, not from Ezekiel’s grip, but from the tremor that ran through her muscles as she fought the urge to jerk free and assault her captain. It would do them no good here. She had known that. She hadn’t liked it, but she had known.
    Under the captain’s assessing gaze, she had watched as he had figured out that she would deck him if he had stayed a minute more. To his credit, Captain Barthis Simon had turned away quietly, not questioning the defiant rage in her orange eyes that undoubtedly made them glow like the coals of a banked fire. He didn’t turn away because he was afraid; he, too, was one of the fabled battle mages. He had turned away because he was smart, and Sara Fairchild was