The Raven's Shadow Read Free Page A

rounded on Ytha with his fists balled, fury and embarrassment battling for control of his expression. Her magic rose up, prickling over her skin, setting her fingertips tingling, but with a visible effort he reined in his passions. In a tightly controlled voice, he said, ‘Speaker.’
    She inclined her head curtly. ‘My chief.’
    They eyed each other a moment longer, then Ytha turned on her heel and left.

2
THE BINDING

    Savin jolted awake with his heart racing. For a second or two he was gripped by nameless dread, held down by the weight of the furs covering him, then his wits cleared and he remembered where he was. There were no circling foes, no dread fate looming over him, just grey daylight leaking around the drapes of his chamber in Renngald’s castle and a faint musty odour on the air, like the smell of damp feathers.
    Sitting up, he raked his tangled hair back from his face. He hadn’t suffered night terrors since his childhood, not since he’d learned to block out his dreams and make sleep a blank and restful place. He’d forgotten what it was like to be jerked out of his rest with every muscle poised for flight. It was . . . almost refreshing.
    His lips curved into a smile. The Leahn whelp who’d sent him that gout of throat-clenching panic was doubtless not enjoying it as much.
    Savin could sense him at the back of his thoughts. Seen through the imperfect lens of the daemon’s shadow the boy was a ball of emotion, feverishly hot and lit with desperation and sickly flashes of fear. He’d got himself into trouble, that much was plain, and was having some difficulty extracting himself from it. Interesting. As Savin watched, the emotions grew in intensity, whorled and splotched like paint on the canvas of some demented artist. The whelp still hadn’t learned to mask his colours.
    ‘Honestly, Alderan, is this the best your teachers can do?’ Savin murmured, and reached out.
    It was too far to touch the colours, of course, even for him: the gulf between minds was so deep at this distance that he couldn’t even see the bright mess of the Leahn’s talent in the void. Nonetheless he could feel it, a faint tugging at his own gift as subtle as the pull of a plant’s leaves towards the light. Not much, but it was enough to discern a direction: south. Given the extreme northerly latitude of the White Sea, ‘south’ covered most of the known world, but still, it was a start.
    Holding on to his awareness of Gair’s location, Savin pushed back the covers and climbed out of bed. The perspiration on his skin chilled quickly in the cool air, but a thought restored the ward that insulated him from changes in temperature and with it his comfort. A further twitch of his will pushed back the heavy drapes at the windows. It did little to improve the light: outside, the day had barely begun and a dense sea mist of the kind the Nordmen called haar rubbed up against the bubbled, uneven glass like a large grey cat trying to cozen its way inside.
    Savin clicked his tongue and flung a few ice-white glims into the air. By all the Kingdoms, he couldn’t wait to be done with this place and its fogs and slithers, its unimaginative, superstitious people. It was all so dull, dull, dull – in every sense of the word.
    From his neatly ordered shelves he took a map and unrolled it on the table, weighting the ends with a couple of books and the velvet-shrouded sight-glass. A proper map, not one of the Nordmen’s charts annotated with currents and soundings in minute detail but with so little concerning the land’s geography that anywhere more than about a league inland might as well be labelled ‘Here be monsters’. He scanned southwards over the carefully drawn mountains and rivers of the Empire, past the Maling Islands in the Inner Sea, until his gaze came to rest at last on the Glass Hills and the city straddling the River Zhiman at their base.
    El Maqqam?
    Savin frowned. Alderan’s apprentice blundering about in the desert