Heart Thief Read Free Page A

comforted and hurt. Hurt because this was the first fall her Mother and Mothersire would not see, but comforted by the brilliant colors of her favorite season. It was a blessing that autumn could lift her spirits.
    Another blessing, Ab and Menzie wouldn’t be allowed to attend the FirstFamilies Council meeting. Her relatives intended to wait for her. She longed to wash her hands of the Family and all its responsibilities, but that would bring a chaos of infighting amongst the others that would destroy it.
    So Ailim had bespelled the glider to return to the Residence as soon as she stepped from the vehicle. She’d face the consequences of that later.
    The vehicle stopped. G’Uncle Ab made no move to exit and help her disembark. Ailim scrambled out and said the Word that sent the conveyance away. She shouldn’t have enjoyed Ab and Menzie’s startled faces as they were whisked away, but she did.
    Ailim stood before the doors of the Guildhall and sent her mind out to brush against others for observers, but dusk shadowed an empty CityCenter. She relaxed a little, pulled a delicate handkerchief from the inner pocket of one wide robe sleeve, and wiped her damp palms.
    She set her shoulders and forced gray exhaustion from her mind. She had to consciously lift each foot to walk. Her feet wanted to drag, her eyes to shut. And she desperately wished to escape into the oblivion of sleep. All eightday she’d worked around the clock, fueling herself with StayAwake.
    The Family had decided she’d go to the FirstFamilies Council and request a loan—in her mind, to beg. The twenty-five Families who’d descended from the colonists who funded the journey from Earth were still the most powerful in fortune and Flair. They’d judge her. She, who had only been the head of the Family for little more than a month and who had not yet formally been accepted into the Council as D’SilverFir, would make her first appearance as a supplicant.
    She didn’t want to beg.
    She was going to do it anyway. Ask the Council for a long-term loan at an absurdly low interest rate. The whole business left a bitter taste in her mouth.
    To fail the Family would be to fail all her predecessors who had struggled to keep the Family together for four hundred years, and even before—to deny the colonists their great sacrifice in leaving their home planet. Ailim would not be the one who shirked her duty and allowed the Family to founder.
    She stared at the large brass embossed doors and muttered the opening Words. The doors did not swing apart. Odd. She blinked—perhaps she’d misremembered the code, but at least the doors should be keyed to her touch. Sighing, reaching out with her mind again to check if she was still unobserved, she pushed against one door with all her weight, making sure her robe didn’t touch the door coated with the day’s dust.
    Slowly the big door swung open and she entered the hushed silence of the Guildhall atrium. The quiet felt uncanny, as if all the myriad spells were stilled, and all the magical-technological machines were dead. She shivered and walked through the glass-domed antechamber and into the sky-lighted corridor, then turned left to the CouncilChamber and stopped.
    Someone else sat—lounged—on the carved celtawood bench outside the rich Earthoakwood doors. Across the wide hall from him, in a tipped back chair, a guardsman snored.
    At the sight of the handsome man on the bench, she summoned the last dregs of her energy to try and act like her normal self. How she wished she had his audacity, even though it was obvious that he, too, was a petitioner to see the FirstFamilies Council.
    His long legs stretched well into the hallway, clothed in fine furrabeast leather breeches and black boots. His flamboyant red shirt with its bloused sleeves and tiny intricate embroidery on the cuffs that showed his Family made a bold statement Ailim wished she could follow. She