Heritage: Book One of the Gairden Chronicles Read Free

Crotaria’s three realms to see him. They deserved a fitting way to remember the day they had traveled an absurd number of miles to see a man wave around a sword and sit in a big chair.
    With a flourish Aidan threw back his cape and began his long march up the center road toward Sunfall. Occasionally he pointed at mounds of snow, kindled, and prayed in the Language. The snow rose upward in a dazzling coil that sprayed out in every direction, and the crowds lining the street burst into applause and cries of delight.
    Aidan’s skin warmed again. Suddenly a torrent of snow arced over his head and froze in place, glittering like a rainbow caught in ice. Up ahead, snow on either side of the road leaped high into the air and collided, freezing to form another arch. Another arch appeared, and then another and another, crowning the road with ribs of ice. Aidan looked over at Tyrnen to see the old man’s eyes sparkling as his lips and fingers waggled.
    The prince broke out in a grin, his first genuine smile of the day. A challenge, old man?
    Aidan drew in more light and directed it all across the snow shoveled to either side of the street. Clumps of snow spun together to form miniature snowmen who scrambled up Tyrnen’s arches and capered about, spinning and bowing and leaping and tumbling. He turned to Tyrnen and gave him a bored look.
    “Showoff,” Tyrnen mouthed, then flicked a hand. The ribs popped one by one, raining flecks of ice over the onlookers. Aidan’s snowmen fared less well. With their platforms destroyed they twirled through the air magnificently—he wouldn’t let Tyrnen have the last word—until they plopped to the street, splattering to piles of slush.
    As if on cue, Aidan and Tyrnen turned to opposite sides of the road and bowed. Aidan couldn’t hear them, but the renewed enthusiasm of the crowd as they surged against the lines of Wardsmen and strained to touch him made him smile.
    Word of the duo’s antics appeared to have spread to the throngs bordering the shallow mountain trail leading up to Sunfall. At every turn, people watched with pleading eyes and waved their hands in gestures that only the magically un-gifted believed had anything to do with conjuring up the fantastic. Aidan obliged them, juggling balls of fire that zoomed in and out of tendrils of snow that Tyrnen spun with a finger.
    Aidan was in the middle of a particularly deep and graceful bow when he felt a tug on his sleeve. Looking up, he saw Tyrnen pointing. He had been so busy bowing and showboating that he only just realized they had reached the southern courtyard. The doors to Sunfall stood open ahead, revealing a great hall filled with columns and banners. The fun part of the great day was over. Grudgingly, his feet suddenly weighing as much as a Darinian blacksmith’s anvil—or, indeed, most Darinian blacksmiths—he marched over a scorched patch of stone toward the maw of the palace, opting to meet fate with his head held low.
    As he crossed the threshold, one pair of eyes seemed to settle more heavily on Aidan than all the rest. He stopped and turned back, fixing on the wall to one side. A young woman of about his age, dark hair spilling over her shoulders, stood calmly amid the tumult, moving only when others jostled her. She watched him with her almond eyes, and when he finally noticed her, she gave him a lopsided smile. She was Sallnerian, he realized, perhaps the only southerner who had dared make the journey north to witness his ceremony. And she was the most beautiful woman Aidan had ever seen in his life.
    He stared, transfixed. She noticed him noticing and smiled, and his heart once again took off at a gallop. Then Tyrnen pulled him inside the palace and the doors boomed closed behind them, cutting the woman off from view.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 2
    Choice and Destiny
     
     
     
     
     

    A IDAN STARED THROUGH THE doors at the spot where he’d seen the Sallnerian girl until he felt a tap on his shoulder.