The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) Read Free

thoughts, but now bad memories assailed him at every turn.  After Darilan’s death, he had felt like a sleepwalker, and had seriously considered lying down in the snow and letting it pile over him like a blanket.  Closing his eyes and just letting go.  It would have solved his problems and set free the Guardian trapped inside him, an easy exit for everyone.
    But Arik never let him.  The wolf had hunted for him, herded him, and was always there to stick a cold nose down the back of his coat or lick him somewhere uncomfortable, like the inside of his ear.  He had found it hard to stay desolate when he was busy grinding snow into an obnoxious waggy beast.  And now he felt all right.  Cold, tired, but not sad.
    As long as he did not think about it.
    He closed his eyes and concentrated on the Guardian.  Its presence was coiled down in the depths of his mind, just in range of conscious thought, silent but watchful—his reluctant passenger, a Dark spirit locked into his flesh and stitched to his soul by the mages of the Risen Phoenix Empire.  Sometimes it rode him, taking control when his consciousness lapsed, but usually it just watched.  He had spoken with it once in Thynbell, while it struggled to mend him from the damage inflicted by the necromancer Morshoc.
    Or rather, spoken with them .  Five figures, each a former Guardian vessel, the last of them his father.  They had tried to teach him, tried to warn him, but he remembered little of what they had said, for he had been pursued through that dream by Imperial magic and a malicious shard of the Ravager—the Guardian’s predatory counterpart—in the person of Morshoc.
    And once he had awoken, there had been little time for thought.  Seduced, shackled, ambushed, rescued and ultimately forced to fight his best friend and worst enemy while the Dark figures looked on in silence, he had made the only choices that seemed right.
    The Guardian had not spoken to him since.
    In its defense, he was not sure that it could.  It had sent him impressions before but nothing like speech.  At least it was awake now, if not talkative; in the Mist Forest he had barely been able to sense it.  Still, he would have appreciated some direction from the entity he was trying to free.
    “Maybe they’ll let us in anyway,” he muttered, looking down to the guard-post.  He patted the pouch at his belt, the few coins in it clinking.  Like most of his gear—scarf, boots, hat, gloves, coat and pack—it was stolen from Wyndish homes they had passed on their way east, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that it was all essentially discards.  Wynds, it seemed, left their individual houses in winter and gathered in clan-halls, leaving behind cold hearths and holey clothes and the occasional forgotten coin.  Breaking in was easy; finding anything useful was not.
    Though Cob felt bad about the burglary, he did not want to freeze.  And he had always closed up the houses afterward.
    The wolf nudged his leg and looked expectant, and he sighed.  “Not gonna shift?”  In response, the wolf bent down to chew ice from between his furry toes.  “Yeah, I know it’s cold,” Cob said, used to the one-sided conversations, “but I’m not a city sort.  I mean, I know you’re not either, but y’still better-traveled than me…”
    The wolf’s ears stayed perked, but he seemed more interested in the taste of his toes.  Cob blew out another sigh and said, “Fine.  I s’pose I gotta learn how to deal with people eventually.  But I dunno if they’ll let you in like this.  Light, you’re a wolf.”
    With a huff of amusement, the wolf left off chewing and bounded a circle around him, then started down the slope.
    Cob shook his head and followed after, the scarf hiding his smile.  The thin snow crunched under his boots, half-ice and half-thawed by the lowland sunshine.  It was a decent day for mid-early winter, the sky bright and the air less knife-like than up by Thynbell, but