Harbinger: Fate's Forsaken: Book One

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Book: Harbinger: Fate's Forsaken: Book One Read Free
Author: Shae Ford
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there wasn’t much difference between the width of his twiggy arms and the
nearest limbs.
    He’d hung his
rucksack where the foliage was the thickest. It was bursting full of small
game: rabbits, squirrels, and a few unfortunate geese. He wasn’t a steady hand
with the bow, but he’d been so intent on learning how to hunt that Roland,
Tinnark’s oldest hunter, had taken pity on him.
    He was an old
friend of Amos’s, and most believed he was a strange man. But nevertheless, he
saw something in Kael that all the others missed: potential. It was Roland who
taught him the art of trap making.
    Kael was good
with his hands, and Roland said his mind worked in a way few did. It only took
him a week to master the simple snare, and a few weeks more to understand the
more complicated ones. And Roland was so pleased that he’d taken him on as an
apprentice of sorts — teaching him everything he knew about the forest.
    Though the iron
sky did its best to hide it, Kael knew the sun was rising. Soon the carcasses
in his rucksack would begin to smell — warning everything within a mile
of his gruesome intentions. He wagered he had only a handful of minutes left to
wait, and he was thankful for it. He thought he might go mad if he had to sit
still any longer.
    Roland often
scolded him for being impatient. “The prey isn’t going to jump into your lap,
boy,” he would say, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “And it isn’t going
to stand politely by while you lock an arrow on it. The woods aren’t going to
give you a perfect shot — you’ve got to make one.”
    Kael knew this.
Somewhere, deep down, he knew there was a proper way to hunt. He just wished
the proper way wasn’t so rump-numbingly dull.
    When a few
moments passed and nothing exciting happened, his eyes wandered back to the Atlas . He turned the next page and ran
his hand across a map of the Kingdom. He traced the deadly points of the
mountains with the tip of his finger. Halfway up the tallest mountain was
Tinnark. It wasn’t originally marked on the map, but Roland put a tiny dot of ink
where he thought it was.
    Nestled in the
very center of the Unforgivable Mountains was a bowl of green land. It was
marked simply as The Valley , andKael found he envied the people who
lived there. Green was a rare color in Tinnark: if the ground wasn’t frosted
over, it was usually cracked and brown.
    A flick of
movement drew his eyes back to the grove. He glanced over the top of his book,
not really expecting to see anything. And then he froze.
    A young buck had
materialized out of the trees. Now he stood just a stone’s throw away, nibbling
on acorns, his neck arched and his nose nearly touching the ground. Spring must
have been good to him: his ribs were completely hidden beneath his meaty flank.
    Even as his
heart thrummed with excitement, Kael knew finding a deer was only half of it.
Perhaps anywhere else in the Kingdom, the deer were slow and stupid. But in the
mountains, they were as cunning as any man. Roland swore they were descendents
of shapechangers — the tribes in the Grandforest who could take the form
of beasts. He thought the mountains must have cursed them to live forever in
their animal forms.
    Kael wasn’t sure
he believed that, but he couldn’t argue with the fact that the deer were
blasted hard to catch — he’d once scared one off by just the thought of
sneezing. So even though he was yards away, he drew his arrow from its quiver a
fraction at a time.
    It was his last
one, his final shot at freedom. The other four had been dashed against rocks or
buried in the flow of savage rivers. He couldn’t hunt like the rest of his
peers, with their sure feet and explosive speed. He could run for miles without
having to stop for breath, but he couldn’t chase a deer and shoot an arrow at
the same time.
    So he’d had come
up with a way to lure the beasts in and face them when he was at his greatest
advantage. It was an elaborate trap: he chose this

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