The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) Read Free

dominate the general surroundings.
    Melkin glared at them for a moment, looking disgusted, then shared a quick look with the bronzed, muscled man next to him.  They seemed to agree on something.  Without a word, the Dra turned and knelt.  He tossed the body of the intruder up over a broad shoulder as if it was made of straw and slipped soundlessly out of the room.  It was a little surreal.  If Melkin hadn’t still been there, colder and more business-like than they’d ever seen him at the front of the classroom, the boys might have thought they’d dreamed it.
    “ All right,” he grated out, piercing eyes boring into them.  “I want you to think.  By some misguidance of the gods you’ll be thrust out into the world as adults in a couple years, so start flaming acting like it.  That man didn’t drop by to check out the view.  Why was he here? ” he snapped.
    The boys gawked.  Rodge moaned in the background, coming to.  It was the start of a very long night.
    Ari, lying sleepless on the floor hours later, still couldn’t quite believe it was all happening.  Melkin had brought them down to his office, interrogating them for hours, first individually, then together, then in pairs, then singly again—until it was obvious that despite his suspicions, even he was struggling to make anything reasonable out of the whole incident.
    Rodge had been dismissed first.  He was so unburdened with affluence that he had to scribe every spare moment just to scrape together tuition each semester.  He certainly didn’t have anything of value.  His parents were equally uninteresting.  Granted, they both worked in the Courts of Justice, but they were scribes, not even directly involved with Cases of Judgment.
    Loren, of course, was the most likely suspect to be a victim of crime, being of Landed blood and due to inherit Harthunters one day.  But the estate was almost a week’s ride away and he hadn’t brought anything of value to University with him.  As far as he knew, there were no enemies of the family, either.   His father, Lord Harthunter, was just and generous, as affable and well-liked as Loren.
    And that left Ari, who was inexplicably the last to be released by a Master almost frothing with frustration.  He would have thought he’d be the least likely to attract such unwholesome attention.  He had absolutely nothing to his name, did his best to avoid almost everyone but his roommates, and didn’t even have a family.  But Melkin wanted to hear his short, simple life story over and over, glaring at him the more keenly with every repetition.  There’d been a few years he barely remembered with the Illian nuns, then Lord Harthunter had run across him on a hunting trip in the southern Empire and adopted him, an orphan without a single bit of historical interest to his name, as a brother for Loren.
    What a bizarre coincidence, Ari thought as he lay staring into the dark and listening to Rodge snore.  That such an unwelcome probe into his personal life should afflict him just as he’d become so agonizingly aware of it himself.  Unbidden, Mistress Harthunter’s harping voice came echoing through his mind as it had a thousand times since that day over Midwin.
    “ It’s time he moved on, Herron.  Your One Great Deed has been more than satisfied, and we are spending money on him that should be going to other purposes.”
    “ He’s like our own son,” Lord Harthunter had protested in his warm, mild voice. “And a wonderful companion to Loren—”
    “ He’s a TROUBLEMAKER and drags Loren into it with him!  He is not the kind of companion the future master of Harthunters needs, a penniless parasite that will be forever attached to his coinpurse…”
    “ I think Loren’s actually more at fault for their trouble,” Ari had heard Lord Harthunter chuckling.  Their voices had faded out behind Ari as he strode quickly away, so shocked he could hardly breathe.  It had never occurred to him that he