The City of Towers: The Dreaming Dark - Book I Read Free

said, handing over his blanket.
    Lei smiled and shook her head. Her hair was covered withmud, but it still seemed to gleam in the firelight, as if there was true copper mixed in with the red. Folding his blanket and placing it with the others, she produced the wooden rod she used as a focus for simple magic. With a few deft gestures, she wove a domestic cantrip into the wood. A wave of this makeshift wand drove mud and water from blankets and clothes, and scoured the dirt from her skin and hair. A dry blanket was hardly the most important thing in life, but without Lei’s magic their clothes would have rotted away months ago—and her ability to conjure food was all that stood between the soldiers and starvation.
    “We’re almost there,” Lei said, handing him a mug of water and a plate of cold gruel. It was about as pleasant as eating mud, but it had them alive. “If it wasn’t raining, you could see the towers from here.”
    “You’re really going to go through with this?”
    “Of course. You don’t understand our ways, Daine. I am an heir of the Mark of Making, and I have a responsibility to my house.”
    Dragonmarks. Daine swallowed a spoonful of gruel with a grimace. No one was born with a dragonmark, but members of a select few bloodlines carried the potential to manifest a mark and the magical power that came with it. It was Jode’s dragonmark that allowed him to heal injuries with a touch. Lei’s mark had a similar effect, but where Jode could knit flesh and bone, Lei repaired metal and wood. The powers of her dragonmark were the least of Lei’s talents, but the mark defined her place in the world. In an age ravaged by war, a weaponsmith could hold more power than a king, and the dragonmarked artificers of House Cannith were the greatest weaponsmiths of modern times. House Cannith blazed the trail that led to the invention of the stormship, the wand of eternal fire, and of course, the warforged. Dragonmarks were rare even within the families that carried them, and Cannith often formed matches between the dragonmarked in the hopes that children would inherit the powers of the parents. So it was with Lei and her betrothed. Hadran d’Cannith was a widower and almost twice Lei’s age, but his gold was good and his mark was strong.
    “Blood above love,” said Daine. “I’ve heard it before. All I’m interested in is the gold you promised us. It’s just … I’ve seen you covered in mud and blood. I have a harder time seeing you as lady of the manor.”
    “You think I like sleeping in ditches and watching my friends die?” said Lei as she handed a plate of gruel to the groggy Jode.
    “None of us
like
it. But it’s those who can do it without letting it kill them that make soldiers. You lived through things that killed hardened veterans. You’re one of us.”
    Lei shook her head. “My service in the guard was duty to my family. Just as my marriage is. Of the two, I’ll enjoy marriage far more.”
    “Ever been married before?”
    Lei opened her mouth to retort.
    “Please, Captain Daine, my lady Lei!” Jode interjected with a brilliant smile. “If we have only a day’s travel ahead of us, let us enjoy one another’s company while we still can, yes?”
    Lei and Daine mumbled apologies and returned to the gruel.

    Though the sun was still buried behind the clouds, it was just past dawn when they broke camp and headed back toward the Old Road, the path that connected the great cities of Breland. They’d chosen to sleep in a clearing well away from the road so Pierce could watch for enemies. But a tangle of the King’s Woods lay between the travelers and the road, and it was there that trouble struck.
    From behind a tree stepped a man out—a rangy, pock-faced Brelander wearing the patched leather tunic of a Brelish soldier. Perhaps he was a deserter or a retiree with nowhere to go, but Daine thought it just as likely the man had torn his ill-fitting armor from the corpse of its true owner. A