Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife Read Free Page B

hunting you, for you alone can stop him.”
    The dream dissolved into gray mist.
     
    ###
     
    Calliande awoke to the sound of a deep, rich voice singing the twenty-third Psalm.
    For a moment she lay motionless, blinking the tears of frustration from her eyes. Sometimes she came so close to recovering her memory, like glimpsing a distant landscape through swirling fog. She felt that if she pushed a little harder, took another step, she could break through and learn the truth. 
    But the mists always closed around her memories.
    Calliande bit her lip, her hands curled into fists.
    Still, at least she was no longer helpless. The powers of a Magistria were hers to command. If she encountered another foe like Vlazar or Talvinius or Alamur, she could defeat them.
    She would never again be as helpless as she had been when the orcs had dragged her naked to that dark elven altar.
    Her hand strayed to the empty soulstone, secured its pouch alongside her blanket. 
    Then she stood, stretched, and looked around their camp.
    A few wisps of smoke still rose from their fire. The four mules Sir Joram Agramore had given her stood a few yards away, watching her with sullen indifference. Rays of dawn sunlight leaked through the trees, their branches green with new leaves.
    Brother Caius of the order of mendicants stood facing the sunrise, clad in his brown robes and singing the twenty-third Psalm in Latin.
    He was of the dwarven kindred, with gray, stone-colored skin and blue eyes like disks of polished crystal. Most of the hair had receded from the top of his head, and white streaks marked his black beard. He looked like a statue hewn from granite, albeit a statue that happened to be wearing a friar’s robe and singing the twenty-third Psalm.
    As he did every morning. Calliande was not prone to oversleeping, but even if she had been, she could have relied upon Brother Caius’s morning devotions to wake her.
    “Ah,” said Caius, once he had finished. “Magistria Calliande. I hope you slept well?” 
    “I did,” said Calliande, squatting by the fire. She stirred the coals to life and retrieved some bread and sausage from the mules. She wore only trousers and a loose shirt, her feet barefoot against the grass, but found that the morning chill did not trouble her. 
    It was better than waking up alone in the cold darkness below a dead castle.
    “We should reach the River Moradel today, I think,” said Caius as Calliande prepared breakfast. “I fear the countryside will grow ever wilder once we reach the western side of the river.”
    Calliande nodded. “Are not the Three Kingdoms of your kindred west of here?”
    “Aye,” said Caius, “but a long distance away. And in the Deeps. Pagan orc tribes and petty dark elven lords and worse things rule the surface of the Wilderland. I fear we shall soon encounter them.”
    “We are not far from Ridmark,” said Calliande. “I’m sure of it.”
    She carried two objects with her constantly. One was Shadowbearer’s empty soulstone. The other was the dagger of a common man-at-arms of the Northerland. Ridmark had given her the dagger before Qazarl’s final assault upon Dun Licinia, and she had used it to save her life from Alamur. That had given the dagger a link to Ridmark, a way she could track him using magic. 
    With the dagger, she could follow him to the ends of the earth.
    “Another day,” she said. “Maybe today. Then we will catch up to him.”
    Caius nodded, and she passed him a biscuit and some sausage. “And have you given any thought as to what you will say when we find him?” 
    Calliande shrugged. “I’ll greet him, to start. Tell him that we have come to help him.”
    “He may not,” said Caius, “want our help.”
    Calliande said nothing. 
    Ridmark had promised to help find the secret of her memory, and she in turn had promised to help him discover the truth of the return of the Frostborn. Yet he had left Dun Licinia without her. She guessed at his thoughts easily