Fey 02 - Changeling Read Free

from the King.  
    Most likely, he was an advance man for the King's party.   The King had gotten wiser in the years since Rugar's daughter, Jewel, moved into the palace.
    The Danite stopped at the edge of the marsh and peered around.   The landscape was barren except for the trees, scattered in groups of three and four, across the water.   His arrival spooked the birds, and dozens of them took off, the sound of their wings loud in the morning air.
    Perfect.
    From his quiver Rugar took an arrow, and placed it across his bow.   Slowly he raised the bow, and got the Danite in his sights.   But Rugar did not pull the arrow back.   Instead he watched, aiming, practicing for the crucial moment.
    His movements disturbed not a leaf on the tree.
    As he had planned.
    All of his training as the Black King's son, all of his work as a leading Visionary, all of his years as a military leader had given Rugar a precision that many of his people did not have.   Even though he had not had a real Vision in almost five years, he still could invent tiny Shadowlands, and create invisible targets in the air with a startling accuracy.   He learned to use that talent when he was practicing his archery.   In the last year, it had gotten so that he only missed what he was aiming at when his concentration was destroyed.
    Nothing would break his concentration today.
    The Danite clucked at his horse and together they rode across the marsh, disturbing birds as they went.   Rugar tracked them until he could no longer see them through the small holes he had made in his leaf cover.   Then he put the arrow in its quiver, and leaned the bow in its place against the tree trunk.
    He was appalled that it had come to this.   A lone assassin in a tree.   If his daughter had listened to him years before, the Fey would rule Blue Isle now.
    Instead, she had taken one of his losses as a failure and negotiated a peace with the Islanders.   A peace in which she sacrificed herself in marriage to their prince.   She had thought that such a thing would unify the Fey and the Islanders.   It had stopped the war, but it had not brought unity.   Rugar had heard reports that the Fey who lived outside the Shadowlands, in Burden's encampment, often ran in fear of Islanders with poison.
      Poison.   The Fey would have owned this Isle within hours of their invasion if not for the Islanders' poison.   They used it as holy water in their rituals and had accidentally discovered that it killed Fey in a particularly nasty manner.   The Spell Warders, who designed all the spells for the Fey, had stayed with Rugar in the Shadowlands, and were trying to find a way to counteract the poison.   They had been close, years ago, when their leader Caseo was murdered.   His death had stalled them, and now, for all their work, they were no closer.
    Only the Warders could design spells.   Warders had the ability to do a bit of all Fey magic.   But no Fey had all of the powers of the tribe.   Fey were divided into the healing magicks, like the Domestics, Shamans, and Healers, and the warrior magicks, like the Foot Soldiers, Doppelgängers, and Visionaries.   Only a few Fey crossed between both camps — Shape-shifters, Beast Riders and Enchanters, for example — but even they chose the military or the household when their magick talents arrived in adolescence.
    He wished the Fey had more powers.   If they ever found the secret to the poison, the Fey would rule the Isle.
    The sound of hoofbeats again drew his attention.   This time, there was more than one horse.   He pulled the bow onto his lap again, and held his breath.   More time had gone by than he expected.   It had been decades since he had sat alone in a tree, and never had he done so without a force around him.   As a boy, before his magic came, he had served as lookout for his father's army.   Today, everything rested on him.
    Four riders appeared in the distance, riding two abreast.   These riders wore