The Rival Read Free Page B

only things they had in common were their strange beginning, Gift's birth family, and the mental Link between them.
    And maybe their future.
    He shuddered despite the afternoon's heat.  The Vision still weighed heavily on him.  He had been a Visionary since he was a little boy  —  unheard of in the history of the Fey  —  and none of his Visions had scared him like this one.
    Except the one in which he saw his mother die.
    He swallowed.  A robin circled overhead, coming lower, and lower, its head cocking from side to side as it descended.  Despite being raised by the Fey, he had never gotten used to animals and birds speaking with human voices.  When that robin had called out Sebastian's name, Gift had jumped in alarm.  He had nearly tripped in his mad dash to his hiding place.
    He couldn't let her find him.  She would want explanations, and then she would drag him to their father to show the poor man that the boy he thought was his son was really a stone.
    Or maybe she wouldn't.  She loved Sebastian despite his faults.  She was his best friend and his protector. 
    She might see Gift as a threat.  She had never been to Shadowlands, the artificial home of the Fey.  She had never been around Fey, except for Solanda and a few others.  She thought like an Islander, not like a warrior, and that, he suspected, would hurt her when the time came.
    Although she had not been in his Vision.
    Which led him to believe that the Vision might be about him.
    The robin circled lower and finally landed on top of the stone fence.  If he tilted his head slightly, he could see the tips of her claws, her feathered breast, and the underside of her beak.  The beak had a strange white mark at the base, like a birthmark.
    The bird was Arianna, then, and she was directly above him.  If he so much as moved, she would see him.  His throat tickled with a sudden urge to cough.  His body wanted to give him away.  He wanted to talk to his sister for once, as half-breed to half-breed.  But now was not the time.
    He had to find Sebastian, and then he had to think of a way to protect them both.
    The Vision had been a simple one, and unusually clear. Visions were usually impressions, fleeting images, puzzles to be put together.  This one was an entire event, and he saw it two ways, which terrified him more.
    In the first, he was standing in front of a Fey he had never seen before.  They appeared to be in the Islander palace, in a large room.  The room had a lot of Fey guards.  Behind them, the walls were covered with spears.  A throne rested on a dais, but no one sat on the throne.  On the wall behind it was a crest: two swords crossed over a heart. 
    He had never been there before, but he recognized the crest.  It belonged to his father's family.
    The Fey was a man with the leathered skin of a fighter.  His eyes were dark and empty, his hands gnarled with age.  He had the look of Gift's long-dead grandfather.  He was staring at Gift, hands out, eyes bright, as if Gift were an oddity, almost a religious curiosity.
    Then Gift felt a sharp shattering pain in his back.  The Fey man yelled  —  his words blurring as his face blurred, as the room blurred, and then the Vision disappeared into darkness.
    The second Vision was somehow more disturbing, even though it felt impersonal.  He wasn't in his body.  He floated above it, as if he were looking through a spy hole, or were a spider on the ceiling.  His body stood below, taller than the strange Fey man.  His body was exactly the same age it was now; it belonged to a teenager, not a full-grown Fey.  The man and Gift's body stood close together.  Fey guards circled the room.  Two guarded the door. The Fey carried no weapons, but some of them looked like Foot Soldiers, with slender deadly knife-sharp fingers. 
    No one seemed to see him.
    The older Fey wasn't speaking.  He was examining Gift's body as if it were a precious and rare commodity.  The body  —  and Gift