Prisoner of Fate Read Free

man, Raph, said between mouthfuls of his warm drink. ‘The Ranu never seem strong enough to break through our lines and we never seem strong enough to drive them back.’
    ‘The governments deliberately keep it that way,’ declared the stout, brunette woman beside Andrew.
    ‘Why would they do that?’ Andrew asked.
    ‘Politics,’ Raph muttered. ‘War keeps people from complaining about the government. Good for the economy too. And invention.’
    Meg listened to the dialogue while she ate, but she remained uninvolved despite Andrew’s efforts to coax her into the chatter and speculation, and as soon as she finished her light refreshment she retreated to her room. Gratefully alone, she sank into the blue fabric armchair beside the window and stared outside, deep in her thoughts.
    Whitewashed stone buildings with red-tiled roofs faced into the street across from her stay-house, the comfortable residences of middle-class Andrak citizens. She used the Sunrise stay-house when she visited the Andrak capital, Lightsword, because it was centrally located, but this would be the last time. Her search for her lost son, Treasure, was fruitless. She had exhausted every clue, every possibility of finding him, and though she realised a long time ago that she would never find him, she returned to the capital every summer to search in the hope that a miracle would restore Treasure to her.Remnants of the dream still plagued her. Years before, when she relinquished the power of the amber and its inevitably terrible consequences, she had expected that her prophetic dreams would stop and she would be normal, but they did not stop. She still dreamed of standing on a parapet with people facing an approaching storm, dreamed of travelling east into the sunrise, dreamed of many things that had not yet come to pass. She knew that some of her dreams were dreams of no consequence, but because so many others had taken shape in her life, though rarely as she expected, seeing her daughter, Emma, in a dream worried her. The shadows consuming her daughter were terrifying. She had to go home.
    She retrieved her crimson travel bag from the top of the cream wardrobe. From the bathroom, she collected her brush and the jar of hair dye, stopping to check that her bobbed hair was still black to the roots. Although fifteen years had passed since she’d escaped from the Central Andrak Peacekeeper authorities by flying over the Great Dylan Ranges in Luca’s dragon egg, and the search for the foreign red-haired murderess had gone cold many years ago, she retained her stolen identity as Rees Feond. She’d spent too many years of her life running and hiding, and all she wanted was for Emma to grow up without living in fear. She even patiently waited for three years after her arrival in the town of Marella, to avoid risking discovery by the authorities, before she began the frustratingly painstaking search for her son, Treasure.
    With a sigh, she grabbed her spare clothes, stuffed them into her bag, checked that she had all of her belongings and left the room. Downstairs she skirted the common room and the other guests, who were still talking over warm herbal teas, and entered the foyer, where a serious young man with near-seeinglenses sat at a desk waiting for people to give him purpose. Meg asked him for her bill, paid it and exited the stay-house.
    The few trees along the street were dropping their autumn foliage, bronze and brown and yellow leaves forming a thin stream in the gutters, the bare limbs embracing the sky. The clouds were perpetually low, a phenomenon that she’d never fully accepted since arriving in Andrak because the skies of her Western Shess homeland were nearly always blue and endless, broken only by storm clouds in the short, cold Shahk cycle. The season the Andraks called winter lasted too long for Meg and the adjoining spring and autumn seasons were not much warmer. She missed the long, hot sun-filled Fuar days when the grass burned